Surveys are a great way to interact with your contacts. Textline has pre-built NPS and CSAT surveys, but we also understand that not everyone will want to use the pre-defined survey types and that many would like to ask different questions. As a result, Textline also offers Custom Surveys, so you can ask your contacts any question you want:

The answers can then be validated and grouped for your reference. Custom Surveys are only available to Pro plan customers.

The first part of Custom Surveys is building your survey. To start building your survey head to the navigation bar at the top and click on Surveys -> Custom Survey. Here you will see a list of Custom Surveys already built (if you have any). To start building a new survey, click on New Survey at the top right.

The first page you will see is the Settings page. You will be prompted to name your survey and set the frequency limitation for your survey. The frequency limitation is there to help prevent you and your Agents from spamming contacts with this survey in the time range you set. If you set a frequency of 0, there will be no limit to how often the survey can be sent. These settings can be changed after the survey is built.

The second step is to build your survey. You will be greeted automatically with the first question which also serves as the intro. From there you can add more questions and when you are done adding questions, you can add an outro message. As you add your questions, you will also get a preview of what the survey will look like to the right.

When building your survey, you have a few options for your questions:

When making a question, you will need to set a question type. You can choose one of the following:

This is a question where you can ask a question you want the Contact to answer with a specific answer choice. This question type will work hand in hand with the Validation options below. You will want to type in answer choices and then hit enter (or return) on your keyboard to save the answer choice. You can enter as many answer choices as you deem fit. These answer choices will be used for metrics once contacts start responding to your survey. When crafting your question, we suggest that you include your answer choices in your question to make it clear to your contacts what they should answer with. Note: answer choices are not case-sensitive, so "Yes" and "yes" are the same.

Some examples of how to use this question type are:

This is a question where you can ask a contact to give a number in response. This is great for ratings (1-10, 0-100, etc.), but also can work for any number range you may want to ask for. This question type will work hand in hand with the Validation options below. The individual numbers will then be used for metrics once contacts start responding to your survey. When crafting your question, we suggest that you include your desired range in your question to make it clear to your contacts what they should answer with. Note: this question type uses whole numbers.

Some examples of how to use this question type are:

This is the most basic question type. It allows you to ask a question where you allow a contact to write anything they want as an answer to a question. This is most useful for feedback questions or questions that may be specific to a contact's experience. Responses to this question type are NOT counted in the metrics.

With custom surveys, Textline can check what a contact responds with against what you want them to respond with. This is supremely important when you want to use Textline metrics to help quantify the responses for your surveys. Each option is explained below however, no matter which one you use, when using a Specific Question or Number Range question type, you will always be able to manually correct invalid answers in the responses section. If at any point the survey is ended, configured outro messages will not be sent and the survey will not be marked as completed.

This validation option will have Textline move on to the next question no matter if the contact responds with a valid or invalid answer choice. This helps speed up the survey workflow but puts more onus on your Agents to manually correct invalid answer choices to have correct stats.

This validation option will repeat a question if a contact sends an invalid response. This works best when you have valid answer choices in your question so that the contact will get a hint to use the answer choices you have provided them. If they send an invalid response again, then it will end the survey.

This validation option will end the survey on any invalid response. This works best when you have valid answer choices in your initial question and don't want to spam the contact with continued questions.

Once your survey is built, you can always revisit the setup in the Settings->Message tab. One thing to note is that while you can change the question and answer choices, doing so can affect the efficacy of your metrics. It is best to create a new survey if you will drastically edit them. Also once created, you can NOT add or remove question types, as this will affect the efficacy of your metrics, so you will need to create a new survey if you would like to make such a change.