Plan, schedule and review a targeted customer survey

A scheduled survey gathers feedback from a deliberately chosen audience at a planned time. For a B2B support team, it can help evaluate an onboarding experience, a support process change or a defined period of account service. Its usefulness depends on asking the right people a clear question and deciding how the team will act on the answers. A large recipient list alone does not make the findings representative.

Decide what the survey will help you change  ·  Prepare a Scheduled Survey form  ·  Create a scheduled-survey draft  ·  Build and inspect the recipient list  ·  Schedule the reviewed campaign  ·  Example: review the support experience after implementation  ·  Interpret results and export carefully  ·  Troubleshoot form, audience and scheduling problems

Decide what the survey will help you change

Start with a decision, such as whether customers understand the new escalation process or whether an implementation handover left unanswered questions. Identify whose experience matters, the relevant period and the owner who will review the feedback. Keep the form focused enough that a busy customer Contact can answer it without reconstructing months of account history.

For an account review, consider the Contact’s role as well as their Company. A technical administrator and a procurement contact may evaluate different parts of the service. Avoid treating several responses from one Company as independent proof that the same percentage of all customer organizations is satisfied.

Prepare a Scheduled Survey form

1. Open Settings → Customer surveys → Survey forms. Select the intended existing form or choose New Survey.
2. Choose the Scheduled Survey form type for a scheduled campaign. Satisfaction Survey is the separate type used by the satisfaction/workflow process; its required CSAT question should not be assumed to apply to every scheduled form.
3. On Setup, choose the required Community for the intended branding, portal context and community-logo placeholders. Review Division if the form should be limited to an operational division; role-based division access still applies. Form scope is separate from the campaign’s recipient filters and does not grant customer portal access.
4. Use Setup, Metrics and Questions to build the intended form. Use Add question for the relevant built-in metric or reusable custom survey question.
5. If you need a reusable question, maintain it through Settings → Customer surveys → Custom fields survey. These are survey questions; do not follow an old general Custom Fields location-selection procedure.
6. Review Survey Page and Invitation Email. Confirm the sender, subject, body and required survey link. Use supported placeholders such as {{survey_url}} in the intended template context.
7. Use the form Preview to inspect the unsaved survey page and invitation email. Preview does not send anything.
8. Save the form and make it active only when its content and intended audience are ready. Confirm that it appears as an available Scheduled Survey form before preparing the send.

You need Administer survey engine permission to administer the survey setup, and relevant division access still applies to forms. Read-only visibility does not grant authority to schedule invitations. Follow your organization’s approval process for the recipient list and question content.

Create a scheduled-survey draft

1. Open Settings → Customer surveys → Surveys (Schedule) and choose New Scheduled Survey.
2. On Setup, enter a clear Name and Description that identify the purpose, period and audience. Avoid leaving the default name when several campaigns may be reviewed later.
3. Select the intended Survey form. A new draft may initially choose the first available active Scheduled Survey form; verify it instead of assuming it is the correct one.
4. Choose Send to: Contacts with previous case, Use custom list or Anonymous link. Configure the relevant recipient path below.
5. For an email campaign, set Send on to a future date/time and verify the displayed time in the intended scheduling context.
6. Choose Save Changes to store the draft. Saving a draft does not activate the campaign.
7. Reopen the saved draft and review the form, audience, date and recipient count before using the separate Schedule action.

Build and inspect the recipient list

The recent-case cohort is not a “send to all active contacts” switch. Filters determine the candidate contacts, and the resulting list needs a human review. If a Company has many Contacts, decide which experience the survey should measure before loading an overly broad audience.

When a list looks wrong, correct its criteria and inspect it again before scheduling. Do not use live invitations as a test of whether the filter selected the intended people. For a CSV, maintain the list through the organization’s approved data-handling process and avoid including unrelated customer fields.

Schedule the reviewed campaign

1. Open the saved draft and confirm the correct active Scheduled Survey form, Name, recipient mode and audience.
2. Check that Send on is in the future. A past or current timestamp is rejected; it is not a supported “send immediately” shortcut.
3. Review the actual invitation and survey-page preview, sender identity and selected recipients one final time.
4. Choose Schedule only when the campaign is approved to send. Confirm the resulting list/status.
5. At and after the planned time, check the campaign’s actual send state and subsequent results. Processing occurs through a background schedule and mail queue, so do not promise arrival at the exact minute selected.
6. Once sent, the campaign setup cannot be edited. Investigate the recorded result before attempting a correction or creating another campaign.

The sender records recipient send progress after admitting or suppressing the relevant mail-queue work. A scheduled campaign, a queued email and a received invitation are different outcomes. Investigate delivery failures using the actual campaign and recipient evidence rather than assuming that every selected Contact received an invitation.

Example: review the support experience after implementation

A support lead wants to understand whether customer administrators can operate a newly implemented integration and know how to request help. The useful questions concern the handover, the clarity of the support route and the remaining obstacle. A generic satisfaction question alone may not reveal what needs to change.

1. Agree the cohort: for example, relevant recent-case Contacts for the implementation Division and an intentionally maintained case tag. Choose an appropriate Case window rather than accepting 90 days without review.
2. Create or select a Scheduled Survey form with a small number of clear questions. Avoid combining “Was onboarding fast and technically complete?” into one response: the two experiences can differ.
3. Preview the customer page and invitation. Explain the purpose in the customer’s language and identify the period being reviewed.
4. Load and inspect the recipients. Remove Contacts whose case was unrelated or whose experience falls outside the planned cohort.
5. Save the draft, have the operational owner review it, then use Schedule with a future Send on value.
6. Review responses with Company and Contact context. Identify a concrete next action, such as improving the escalation guide, and assign an owner for following up.

This is an operating example, not an automatically generated campaign template. Use supported fields and verified customer facts. If a response identifies a live service issue, manage the resulting case through the normal support workflow rather than leaving it only in a survey export.

Interpret results and export carefully

Open the campaign’s Results action to review its response information. The current results include Responses, Opened, Ignored and Response rate, with an Export action for the relevant results. Check the underlying rows and scope before relying on a summary metric.

• Keep the campaign purpose, recipient cohort and send period with any report.
• Read comments and individual answers alongside numerical scores; a small respondent group may not represent every customer.
• Do not interpret an opened invitation as a completed response or an ignored invitation as a negative satisfaction rating.
• Avoid comparing response rates from very different recipient modes or cohorts without explaining the difference.
• Treat exports as point-in-time copies and share them through the approved process. Exporting feedback does not assign the follow-up work.
• Record the operational decision and owner that follow from the findings, then review whether the change improved the customer task.

Troubleshoot form, audience and scheduling problems

Continue learning

• Configure survey forms and invitation content
• Reference scheduled-survey settings
• Maintain reusable survey questions
• Use Divisions deliberately
• Interpret support performance in context