Survey Management - OOB Functionality or Custom

[shonamac]

Hi Everyone,

Our company is beginning to implement Servicenow and I'm tasked with ensuring all requirements are met.

I'm currently looking at Survey Management and am having a few issues getting exactly what we want so thought I'd reach out to the community.   I know there has been a few threads on this previously so apologies if this has already been covered.

Here are our requirements:

We're an MSP so deal with external customers (companies)

We'd like the survey to be sent on resolution of any case.   We would like to be a bit personal and specify if it's an incident or request and perhaps add the subject.   (some of our customers have multiple cases open at the same time, so knowing which one has been resolved is essential)

We'd like to have the option of turning surveys off completely for subsets of companies

Ideally we'd like the survey to be part of an email template, rather than have the users click on a separate link and login as we feel the uptake on completing surveys will be low if they have to login to a 3rd party system

We'd like the responses to be contained in one place and have some identifier of what incident / service request they belong to

If possible, any responses which are negative would re-open the relevant case so we can contact the customer to ensure we do resolve their issue or request to their satisfaction

From my initial work on this I don't think the OOB functionality will give us what we need.   For example they need to login to complete the survey, is there anyway that they can click on the link and not have to login to complete the survey (I see there was a public role on the legacy surveys but not sure if this applies to the new survey management) Even better can the survey be embedded in an email and still be received in a servicenow table

The Survey responses look terrible, every question has it's own separate entry - we'd much prefer to have the whole response from the survey contained in one entry as reporting on this seems like a nightmare.

The survey email is actually received before the email advising their case has been resolved. Are we able to combine the resolution email and survey email into one, or would we just have to turn the resolution email notification off and on the survey notification put the content such as "your incident has been resolved, please complete this survey"

Sorry for the long winded description, hopefully there can be a simple solution here

Thanks

Shona

[TrevorK]

Hopefully I can address your questions:

a) Public access?

From my understanding with the Survey piece (specifically using Assessment and not Legacy Survey), I do not think you can make the survey public. However, you can easily make a Page public and use it to accept the survey responses anonymously, then write back to the database with the results.

You could also do it via an email response (inbound actions), however I am not sure how you would go about ensuring the input is consistent and valid. Not sure I would even attempt this unless it was just a single question you were asking.

b) Notifications

You can configure your notification to go out when an Assessment is created (off the Assessment table). You are able to "fool" the user into thinking it is their Incident/Request closure notification because you control the text within it.

We have a Business Rule that runs against the Incident/Resolution to determine whether we want to send out an assessment for it. If we do, it sets a read-only flag to true. If we do not, it sets a read-only flag to false. This allows us to easily separate our notifications out so that ALL Incidents/Requests get a closure note that is identical (except for our survey link). But from a technical point of view, they are 100% different.

c) Reporting

Yes we found the reporting was horrible and allowed for no advanced data mining on the results. We just ended up creating a table to hold all the survey responses so that, on a single row, it contained the result to each question for a survey. Rather than the default of each question having it's own row.

Remember when dealing with Survey you need to mentally remember that the user sees what you show them - and you can easily show them whatever you want to. Do not worry about the technical side, gather your user requirements and then develop the technical solution - do not do both hand-in-hand. The notifications are a great example - you can have multiple notifications that are identical to the user, yet go out on different conditions. So technically they are unique, but visually they are the same. Often you get hung up on the technical side (they are different notifications) when at the end of the day, they can visually be the same (to the end user). Hopefully that made some sense.

Good luck! If you have any questions I would be happy to help.

[shonamac]

Hi Trevor,

Thanks for taking the time to reply.  

Regarding the public access piece.   I had read an article where on the legacy surveys you could make them public so your users would not have to sign in to the portal to complete them.   This doesn't look to be the case in the new surveys and I'm not sure if this is possible.

Do you think it's possible we can embed the survey into an email, or will we always have to click on a link to take the survey.

I like what you've done around business rules to determine whether an assessment is sent, and having all responses go into a custom table sounds like what we need too.

I'm sure I'll have lots more questions around this and other topics, so again thanks for your help

Shona

[TrevorK]

We personally did not use the Legacy Survey piece - but I think I have read the same thing, that they were able to be done by the public. I have not seen any way to do this in Assessments (in Eureka).

You can get around this by creating your own UI page, etc. but that is going to be some work to do. Not impossible by any stretch (we have a survey in it's own UI page we created), but definitely some work and potential issues when upgrading versions. I would almost think you are better off creating your own survey app within SN at this point - because if you tie into SN's Assessments and something major changes you may face a large rewrite of your code. Creating your own survey app would not be challenging, it would just require some HTML knowledge. You get the added benefit of controlling all the formatting too (for example, our custom one has a pie chart in it that changes based on what the user selects).

I am personally not sure how you would embed the survey in an email - the user would still need to either respond to the email or go to a webpage. If you are looking for a simple response (Good, Average, Poor) you could easily embed links in the email to set the subject line/body when they reply. However, I have never seen a survey (in or out of SN) that allowed for multiple questions and such from within just the email window. A better developer than I might be able to tell you how to embed a bunch of code into your email, but I would also make sure it will get through spam filters, etc. at that point if you are having active content in it.

If you have seen external surveys embedded in an email, it should be fairly straight forward to figure out how they did it. I have just never seen these - any survey I have done it always takes me to a webpage.

[shonamac]

Thanks for your reply Trevor,

I'll take a further look at this and see if I can make something work for us.   This is a massive learning curve but enjoying it so far