How to create custom workflows for survey responses

Custom workflows help you act on responses by triggering a series of steps when responses (matching user-defined conditions) come in. These include: notifying individuals via email, tagging responses, sending notifications via Slack/Teams and more. By automating the first level of resolution, workflows make it easier for teams to close the loop. 

Some possible workflows include:

• If a respondent provides a poor NPS score (less than 9), send them a follow-up survey to understand what went wrong, and create a ticket for internal teams.
• If a respondent’s job title contains ‘CEO’ or ‘Founder’, send a notification to the sales team’s Slack channel so they can engage with the respondent personally.

The revamped workflows module now features a visual logic builder, so you can create complex workflows while keeping track of the big picture. It becomes a lot easier to visualize multiple scenarios, dive in and out of them and build out your workflow.

In this article, we’ll show you how to create workflows, specifically:

• Workflows for classic/chat surveys
• Workflows for NPS surveys

Workflows for classic/chat surveys

1. Open a survey, then click on the Integrate tab.

2. Inside the Integrations section, click on Workflows in the left panel menu.

3. Click on New Workflow.

4. You are taken to a visual workflow builder - which helps you imagine and create complex workflows on a canvas. You can drag workflow items in different directions and zoom in and out anywhere on the canvas. 

Start by defining an event to trigger the workflow. There are two events you can choose from:

• When Submission is completed: a new response is received.
• When Email is sent: a survey is distributed via email. This could be one-time or recurring as per your survey settings.

For this article, we’ll choose the first option.

5. Once you’ve chosen the trigger event, you can choose to add a filter condition to specify what kind of responses are apt for the trigger. Or if you do not want to add conditions, you can define the action/sequence of actions straightaway. For this article, we’ll add a condition.

Note: The option to create conditions only appears if the trigger is When Submission is completed.

6. The configuration column for Conditions opens up. Start by clicking on Add Filter Group.

7. Choose any one of the 5 filter group options:

• Question And Answer
• Share
• Response Property
• Respondent Details
• Custom Variables

For this article, we’ll select Question and Answer. 

8. Select the Question and its answer (conditions) which you want to use as filters. Once you’re done, click on Done.

9. If you wish to add more filter groups, click on Add Filter Group and repeat the same steps described above.

10. After adding the next filter group, you can choose between two kinds of filter logic: AND (both filter groups must be satisfied) or OR (either one must be satisfied). The default condition is AND, but you can click on it to change it.

11. You can also add additional filters within a filter group by clicking on the plus icon next to one. Follow the same steps as above to add another filter. You can switch between AND and OR filter logic here as well by clicking on the AND (default) button.

12. Once you’re satisfied with the filter, click on Save.

13. The condition now has two possible paths: True or False. If the response fails to meet the condition, the workflow stops there. Now you must define the actions to take if the condition is met. Click on the block titled Add next step. Then click on the Action option.

14. There are 6 actions (also called nodes) you can take:

• Send an email to any number of individuals
• Trigger a webhook to transmit data/perform other actions at another endpoint URL
• Share responses to individuals or groups on Slack or MS Teams
• Create tags (or choose existing ones) to apply to new responses
• Create a ticket (or ticket template) and assign it to a team/agent with priority levels.
• Send a follow-up survey via email, SMS or WhatsApp

For this article, we’ll cover these two actions: first, sending an email and then, sharing responses via Slack/Teams.

15. Inside the email configuration, define the From address, add the recipients, subject line and reply-to address. You can also create the email body and add a delay period after the response is received.

Note: You can add variables for any field (except From address), by clicking on the brackets icon. You can choose variables from contacts, questions or general items.

16. Click Save after completing the configuration.

17. To add the next step, click on the plus icon at the bottom of the saved step. The same menu appears, but this time you can also choose to end the workflow.

Note: Adding the End option is not necessary to activate the workflow since the builder will add it to the end of your workflow when you save it.

18. Next, let’s look at the Slack/Teams action. Click on the drop-down menu under Share responses via, and choose an app. For this article, let’s choose Slack.

19. Click on the drop-down menu under Select channels or users. When the list of channels and users appears, choose as many as you need by clicking on the respective check-boxes. Once done, click on Apply.

20. Then click on Save.

21. If you wish to change any of the actions, hover over them, especially the top-right corner. A menu will appear with two options: to delete the action or swap it with something else. If you click on the circular icon, the action menu appears again.

Note: You cannot change or delete the first action created, only the ones created after. 

22. You can provide a name and description for the workflow by editing the respective fields in the top left corner.

23. Once you have completed building the workflow, click on Save & Activate.

24. Now your workflow is saved. If you wish to temporarily disable it, click on the toggle under Status.

25. To tweak the workflow, click on the three-dot icon to the right of the toggle.

26. You can either edit, delete or duplicate the workflow.

27. You can create another workflow click on the button titled New Workflow. If you want to see the activity history of your workflows, click on the Workflow logs button.

28. Here you can see the logs. You can filter them based on time period, the survey for which each log was triggered and its parent workflow.

29. If you click on a log, it expands to show you details.

Workflows for NPS surveys

For NPS surveys, you can create custom workflows just as described above. But there are some default workflows that you can try out. Let’s learn how.

1. Open an NPS survey inside your account, then click on the Configure tab.

2. Inside the Configure section, click on Workflows inside the left-hand menu.

3. There are three workflow templates that you can use:

• Follow-up emails to respondents
• Notifying survey creators of new responses
• Follow-up surveys to respondents

To use them, simply click on the respective toggle under the Status column.

4. For the Follow Up Email workflow, you get a pre-set email subject line and body, which you can edit and add variables where necessary. Click on Save when you are satisfied.

Note: If you wish to send different emails based on the NPS score provided by the respondent, click on the toggle for Follow Up Question By Rating. You’ll get 3 templates for Promoters, Passives and Detractors.

5. Then there’s the Response Notification workflow, which you can enable by clicking on the toggle. The survey owner (user that created the survey) is notified by email. It cannot be configured or modified.

6. For the Follow Up Survey workflow, you are taken into the workflow builder, where there’s a ready-made workflow with one action to choose a follow-up survey. Click on the drop-down menu under Target Survey to choose a survey from your account. Then select the share channel (Email, SMS or WhatsApp) and specific share that you’ve created already.

Note: A conditional node is added by default, so you can add filters if needed.

7. Next, select which contact source you want to use to send the follow up survey. You can choose between survey responses (if you’ve set up a contact field question), variables, or contacts. Choose one of the categories and click on the drop-down to select the exact source.

Note: Optionally, you can also map the respondent data to any custom variables you’ve created. Click on the respective drop-down menus and choose from the options.

8. Once done, click on Save.

9. Finally, click on Save & Activate.

10. If you wish to build a custom workflow, click on New Workflow and follow the same steps as mentioned in the previous section.

Collecting feedback is only half the job done - action also matters. Workflows enable proactive issue resolution instead of letting responses simply accumulate. Now, you can start building workflows that fit your operations and win back customer trust.

Feel free to reach out to our community, if you have any questions!