Survey Management and data gathering

smcgrath44 · ‎01-20-2015

We are having some challenges with the Survey Management application and wanted to reach out to the community and see if we are alone or not. We want a survey sent out to each user upon resolution of a ticket. The information that we would like to get back goes well beyond the questions and answers in the survey. We would also like to get the following:

Technician who resolved the ticket
The Assignment Group that the resolving tech is a member of for the ticket
Business Service, Category and CI information that can be reported with survey data

We on on Eureka. We have been legacy surveys and want to utilize the new survey tool that ulitize the assessment and metrics tables. Does anyone out there have a similar challenge and or solution to this? Much thanks!

Steve McGrath

ServiceNow Administrator

Harvard Business School

TrevorK · ‎01-20-2015

We have just implemented surveys ourselves...or assessments...or whatever you want to call them. We opt'ed to use the new survey/assessment features and not legacy surveys, even though when we went through it legacy surveys seemed much easier. Our choice was based on a suspicion that legacy surveys would not see future development, whereas assessments would.

My post below will be based on using Assessments (Survey Management module), however I can reference the Legacy Survey's if you need.

I believe we are doing everything you want to do - we are sending out an email upon resolution of a ticket. I will walk you through our steps, and let me know which numbers you want me to go into further detail:

1) Upon closure of an Incident or RITM, we determine if a survey is required. For example, we do not want to survey students and there are certain assignment groups that do not receive a survey. We use a flag on the TASK table that we fill in if a survey is required.

2) Our notifications are two-tiered. We send a normal "Your Incident has been resolved" if our "Survey Required" flag is false. This comes off the Incident table. If "Survey Required" is true, we send a notification off of the Assessment Instance table. Because the Assessment Instance has "Trigger ID" (a field that contains the sys_id of the record calling it), we use a Mail Script to lookup the associated Incident or RITM information based on the sys_id. We then send out a "Your Incident has been resolved" email similar to above, however it is from the Assessment Instance table. We include our survey specific information in it (we use some cool graphics to entice them to click on the survey) and the Incident/Task information, which is obtained through the mail script.

3) Client takes the survey, we then do a custom table to transform the results into a format that is much easier for management to handle (a table where each row contains the questions/answers, rather than the ServiceNow format of each row being a question). We have some reporting we need to do based on the results of a specific question, and this kept it the "prettiest" for management and the most functional for our user base. The table just updates upon a survey changing to "Complete". Because we have the "Trigger ID" value (which again is the sys_id of the incident/task that called it), we can reference who the analyst was that did the ticket, the business service, etc.

Just in case anything does not make sense, I have attached a screenshot of our survey invitation email. It is run off the Assessment Instance table. While we do not show the CI/Business Service/etc., I think the other fields we pull demonstrate that we can pull those fields too.

If you have any further questions, feel free to post them. Or send me a message privately/email me and I can go into it further. We personally found the new Assessment module a bit overwhelming at first and it took longer than expected to develop it into something usable. But I think our stats are at a 12% response rate, so we must be doing a good job (our research department indicates this is a good response rate for unsolicited electronic surveys).

My apologies - I realize this is a bit long but I was unsure where exactly you were looking for feedback.

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1000772 · ‎01-14-2016

Yes, I do see that and can get to and filter the survey's from each other. Now, if I can get to the same place in a report so I can list the comments and/or produce a graph, I'd be happy. At very least we try to follow up on negative comments, we produce a report, distribute it to our area managers, and get back to our users. Thanks for the help.

1000772 · ‎01-14-2016

I found this table and it has what I need. I think I'm ok now and thank you again for your help. With all the docs I read and research I did, all I needed was that table name.

1000772 · ‎01-14-2016

Did you really create a new table, or are you referring to an existing table within SN? How useful is this new tool if we have to create a custom table to analyze the data? Thanks.

TrevorK · ‎01-14-2016

The easiest way that we found to report on the data was to create a custom table. All the survey responses (when using the assessment module) are stored in asmt_metric_result, however they are stored question-by-question. What this means is that if your survey has 5 questions on it, each of those 5 questions is a row in the table.

For us, this posed challenges to reporting within the default Reporting tools ServiceNow provides. For example, what if you wanted to know what Question B was when Question A is "Good"? We decided the absolutely easiest way was to store these in a custom table that updates as assessment results are entered because it would allow all of our users the technical ability to report without coming to see us (what's easier than a flat table?).

The survey tool itself is useful - otherwise you would have to write the whole thing yourself. We have done both - we have survey's we have created outside of the survey tool and surveys we created within the survey tool. Without a doubt, the survey tool is easier to get going. It lacks high-end features, but those are not needed by most people (at least at the beginning). There may be other ways to achieve what we did without a custom table, especially if you have an integration to a business intelligence tool. We just took the easy route, which is creating a flat table that stores all of the responses from an individual survey in a single row, to allow all our users the ability to report on things without dealing with us.

Hope that helps. If you have any more questions I would be happy to share our experience.

jkydd · ‎01-21-2016

Trevor, I would first like to say thank you for all the information you have provided. I do have a question regarding reopening a case/incident. As an example:

>User selects the frowning face within survey

>Instance gets created in [asmt_metric]

>daily scheduled job runs to see if new instances appeared

>'trigger_id' is identified within Metric Results instance

>case/incident status is changed to 'open'

Is this possible or is there a script already available to reopen a closed case based on a survey response? I hope this makes sense, but I will gladly try to explain further if needed!