If you are setting up your Support Groups for the first time, and you have many of them, you may prefer to upload your Support Group list from a spreadsheet using the Upload Files function.
If you are on our Corporate or Enterprise Plan, you also have the option of using our API to add and manage your Support Groups.
Log in to the client administration portal
At the client portal log in screen, enter your email address and password to log in.
Set the instance
If your organisation has multiple licenses of CIOPulse, and you are authorised to manage more than one of them, you will be able to switch between these instances.
Choose the instance you wish to work on now using the drop-down list and click the 'Set instance' button.
Select 'Support Groups'
It is usually best to set up your Contacts first (your Support Leads) before adding your Support Groups.
CIOPulse uses the term 'Support Group' to mean a Team or Department that provides customer support. A Team is a Support Group that belongs to a Department.
To create, edit or delete Support Groups, click on 'Support Groups'.
This will take you to a list of your Support Groups.
Our API can be used to automatically keep Support Groups (and Contacts) in sync with the information in your customer support system. Support Groups that have been created by API are highlighted in red in the Support Groups list. If you edit or delete these Support Groups, the information in CIOPulse may become out of sync with your customer support system.
Adding/Editing a Support Group
On the 'Edit Support Group' screen you can edit the following information:
- Support Group Name. The unique name of the Team or Department, e.g. "Service Desk". No two Support Groups can have the same name.
- Support Lead - the leader of the Support Group. This is the person that will receive Service Recovery Alerts (by email and SMS), the Weekly Promoters Report (sent automatically each week), and the Survey Responses Report for this Support Group (emailed on the 1st of each month and on-request).
- Support Group Code. This is a unique code assigned by you to each Support Group. Your customer support software will need to supply this unique code in the survey URL (as the
&rgid=parameter value) so that CIOPulse can associate customer feedback with this particular Support Group. The Support Group Code must not contain spaces or any special characters (only a-z, A-Z, 0-9, hyphen and underscore). No two Support Groups can have the same Support Group Code. - Department. This field provides you with the ability to create a Team-Department hierarchy. Leave this field blank to indicate that this Support Group is a Department. Or choose a Department from the drop-down list to indicate that this Support Group is a Team which belongs to this Department. CIOPulse will calculate and report Net Promoter Scores for both Teams and Departments. This functionality is described in more detail below. This field will not be shown if this Support Group is already the Department for one or more Teams.
- Also Alerts. Specify up to six Contacts who will receive unhappy customer alerts (by email and SMS) in addition to the Support Lead.
- CCS Only? 'Yes' indicates that this Support Group will only be used for Compliments, Complaints and Suggestions. For more information, see Using the 'CCS Only? Flag below. This field will not be shown if transactional surveys have already been received for this Support Group.
- Active? This flag determines whether this Support Groups appears on the drop-down list of Departments (see 4 above), and whether this Support Group appears on the monthly Customer Satisfaction report (see Using the 'Active?' Flag below). New Support Groups are always set to Active and so this field will only appear when editing an existing Support Group.
Some of our customers create Contacts whose email addresses are the email addresses of Slack channels. They then use these Contacts as Also Alerts. In that way, CIOPulse automatically sends customer feedback to Slack.
Because Support Group Codes are used in your survey URL, Support Group Codes may only contain URL-friendly characters: a-z, A-Z, 0-9, hyphen and underscore. No spaces, ampersands, colons etc
The 'CCS Only?' field should only be set to 'Yes' when the sole purpose of this Support Group is to collect Compliments, Complaints & Suggestions and will never receive transactional surveys. It is really important that you set 'CCS Only?' to 'No' when you also expect to receive transactional surveys for this Support Group.
The 'Department' field will not be displayed if this Support Group has been set as the Department of one or more Teams. This prevents you from creating an invalid hierarchy.
The 'CCS Only?' flag will not be displayed if this Support Group has already started receiving transactional surveys.
As soon as a Support Group has been created, you're ready to start receiving transactional surveys for the Support Group.
Using the 'Department' field
CIOPulse calculates Net Promoter Scores at three organisational levels - Team, Department and Business Unit, e.g. Service Desk (Team), Service Delivery (Department), IT (Business Unit).
The 'Department' field is used to group Teams into Departments.
For example, imagine if you wanted to create this hierarchy:
To do this, you would create four Support Groups:
- Service Delivery
- Infrastructure
- Service Desk
- Desktop Support
You would then set the 'Department' field of the Service Desk and Desktop Support Support Groups to 'Service Delivery'.
And you would leave the 'Department' field blank for the Service Delivery and Infrastructure Support Groups.
By doing this, CIOPulse will treat Service Desk and Desktop Support as Teams, and Service Delivery and Infrastructure as Departments.
CIOPulse allows surveys to be completed for both Teams and Departments. Typically though, Departments do not exist in your customer support software and surveys are not completed for them.
The 'Department' field of a Support Group can be edited at any time, e.g., to move a Team from one Department to another. When this is done, Department scores are automatically recalculated (including all history) to reflect the new hierarchy. This may take up to 12 hours to take effect.
Using the 'CCS Only?' Flag
Set the 'CCS Only?' flag to 'Yes' when this Support Group will only be used for Compliments, Complaints and Suggestions, i.e. when the Support Group handles CCS feedback but doesn't resolve tickets or requests, e.g. a Complaints Team or a Business Relationship Management function.
Support Groups with 'CCS Only?' set to 'Yes' cannot be used for transactional surveys.
A Support Group must satisfy two conditions before its 'CCS Only?' flag can be set to 'Yes':
- The Support Group must have no transactional surveys completed for it.
- The Support Group must be a Department with no Teams, i.e. its Department field must be blank and no other Support Groups (Teams) can have this Support Group as their Department.
If a transactional survey is received for a Support Group whose 'CCS Only?' flag is set to 'Yes', the survey will be flagged as being in error and will not appear on any views, reports or dashboards. To fix this you will need to either change 'CCS Only?' to 'No' for this Support Group, or follow these steps to assign the survey to another Support Group.
Using the 'Active?' Flag
The 'Active? flag of a Support Group determines three things:
- Whether this Support Group appears in the 'Department' drop-down list when adding/editing a Support Group in the Portal. Inactive Support Groups will not appear in the drop-down list of Departments.
- Whether this Support Group appears on the Customer Satisfaction Trend chart in the monthly customer satisfaction report. Inactive Support Groups will not appearing on the monthly customer satisfaction report (Note - Only Departments appear on this chart, not Teams).
- Whether this Support Group appears in the Departments or Teams filters in the interactive dashboards. Inactive Support Groups will not appear on the drop-down lists for these filters. Note, however, that the surveys for inactive Support Groups will still be included in the dashboards.
There is nothing stopping you from continuing to issue surveys for inactive Support Groups. Net Promoter Scores will continue to be calculated for inactive Support Groups (and visible on the Gauge), inactive Support Groups will continue to appear on League Tables, and automated reports (daily Service Recovery, weekly Weekly Promoters, monthly Survey Responses) will continue to be generated until no more surveys are being completed for them. Surveys for inactive Support Groups will still be included in the interactive dashboards.
Even when set to inactive, a Support Group's surveys will still contribute to Net Promoter Score calculations. To exclude the surveys for a Support Group from contributing to a Net Promoter score, see below.
A Department cannot be set to inactive until all of its Teams have been set to inactive.
Excluding Support Groups from your Net Promoter Scores
You are able to permanently prevent surveys for a Support Group from contributing to any Net Promoter Score.
This is useful, for example, if you are using CIOPulse to measure NPS for IT, but a Facilities team is using the same customer support software as IT and collecting feedback.
How do you exclude a Support Group?
If you'd like a Support Group excluded, please email us at [email protected] and we will mark the Support Group as excluded for you.
Once excluded, the Support Group will have '(EXCLUDED)' appended to its name. You will also see 'Exclude from NPS? Yes' at bottom of the Support Group edit page.
Once a Support Group is excluded, all Net Promoter Scores, current and historical, will be updated within 12 hours.
You can have more than one Support Group excluded.
If you edit a Support Group in the Portal, do not remove "(EXCLUDED)" from the Support Group Name.
What Support Groups can be excluded?
You can exclude a Support Group that has a corresponding ticket queue in your customer support software. Or you can create a dummy Support Group that only exists in CIOPulse, i.e. it has no corresponding queue in your customer support software.
If the excluded Support Group exists in your customer support software, then all surveys for this Support Group will be automatically excluded. For example, you may want to automatically exclude all tickets for a Support Group that is not part of IT.
Alternatively, you would use a dummy Support Group to select specific surveys you want excluded, e.g. surveys where an agent has completed a survey about themselves. In this case, you will need to manually move such surveys to the dummy Support Group using the Reassign Transactional Surveys function.
In order to exclude a Support Group it must either be:
- A Department with no Teams.
- A Team.
It cannot be:
- A Department that has one or more Teams belonging to it.
- A Support Group where 'CCS Only?' is set to Yes (i.e. that is only used for Compliments, Complaints and Suggestions).
What is the impact of excluding a Support Group?
Feedback will be excluded from:
- All Net Promoter Score calculations, current and historical. No NPS Gauges will be available for excluded Support Groups.
- Live feedback sliders.
- All interactive dashboards
- Future Monthly Customer Satisfaction Reports.
Feedback will not be excluded from:
- Daily Service Recovery reports and alerts.
- Weekly Promoter reports.
- Ad-hoc and monthly Survey Responses reports.
- Historical Monthly Customer Satisfaction Reports
Surveys from excluded Support Groups that appear on ad-hoc, daily, weekly and monthly reports are easily identifiable because the Support Group Name will have the (EXCLUDED) suffix.