Chat surveys

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Chat Surveys

    Chat surveys enable ServiceNow customers to collect vital information from users through conversational questionnaires before and after interactions with live or virtual agents. This approach replaces traditional forms, allowing for a more engaging and efficient data collection process within the chat client.

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    Key Features

    • Survey Creation: Utilize Survey Designer to build and customize survey content, including various question types and properties such as mandatory or optional responses.
    • Chat Context Mapping: Optionally save survey responses as chat context variables to enhance the routing of chats to appropriate live agents or virtual agents.
    • Activation Management: Easily activate or deactivate pre-chat surveys via the Now Assist settings, ensuring control over user interactions in both Virtual Agent and Self-service environments.

    Key Outcomes

    By implementing chat surveys, customers can:

    • Gather essential pre-chat information to better assist users.
    • Collect feedback post-chat to improve service quality and user experience.
    • Automatically link survey results to specific interactions with live agents, aiding in performance assessment and continuous improvement.

    Display conversational questionnaires to your end users to gather important information from them, before and after they chat with a live or virtual agent.

    How chat surveys work

    Instead of using forms to collect information from your requesters, you can create different questionnaires that run in the chat client to capture preliminary user information or post-chat feedback. The questions in the following pre-chat survey example ask users to identify their service issue and to provide additional details.

    Survey administrators and administrators use Survey Designer to:
    • Build survey content: Survey Designer provides various controls for defining survey questions. The example above shows the choice list control, which displays a list of items that your users can choose from. Each survey question has corresponding properties that you can set to manage survey behavior. For instance, you can make a survey response mandatory. If you make a survey response optional, users can skip the question in the survey. You can also configure your survey so that an introductory note starts the survey and an end note displays after users finish the survey.
    • (Optional) Save certain survey responses as chat context: When defining your survey, you can map a particular survey question to a chat context variable so that survey responses are stored in the context variable. You can then use these variables to route chats to live agents in certain queues, by specifying the chat context variables in routing conditions or to the virtual agent.

    After creating the surveys, administrators configure the surveys to run as conversations in the chat client. The chat client renders the chat survey as a live chat conversation.

    Activating and deactivating pre-chat surveys in Now Assist

    By default, you can manage pre-chat surveys by navigating to All > Conversational interfaces > Settings and and opening Pre-chat surveys in the General tab. Now Assist honors these settings in both Virtual Agent and Self-service.

    You can also turn pre-chat surveys on and off specifically for Now Assist Self Service. Navigate to All > sys_properties.list, and under com.glide.cs.nass.prechat.enabled set the value to True or False.

    What to do next

    Setting up chat surveys involves these main steps:

    1. (Optional) Define chat context.
    Configure the chat context variables for storing survey responses using Context Variables in Chat Settings.
    2. Create chat surveys
    In Survey Designer, build your conversational questionnaires for gathering pre-chat information and post-chat feedback from your requesters. If you defined chat context variables to store certain survey responses, you can map the appropriate survey question to the corresponding chat context variable.
    3. Define pre-chat survey configurations.
    Determine the pre-chat questionnaire to be presented to your requesters based on conditions that you apply.
    4. Define post-chat survey configurations.
    Control the post-chat questionnaire displayed to your requesters to gather feedback on their experience with live agents.
    5. If using Virtual Agent, define context topic intent configurations.
    Use pre-chat survey information to determine the appropriate Virtual Agent conversation topic automatically displayed to your requesters, rather than prompting them to choose from a list of conversation topics.

    The Interaction Related Records list stores the post-survey chat results and creates a related record that links the assessment to the live agent (fulfiller).