Surveys - Question flow

Overview

Question flow allows you to affect the Survey flow in a certain way. For example, you can skip a certain Question for the customer if they gave a certain answer to a previous Question or if they have certain metadata value applied to them in the import file.

Question flows are very flexible and allow for great customization of the flow of your Survey.

Important notes:

• Question flows are joined by OR and AND operators. In the case of OR you add multiple question flows to a single question and at least one of the question flow's conditions are satisfied, the action will be performed. On the other hand, if choose AND both conditions must be satisfied for action to be performed.
• Flows with Skip this question action is always executed first if present and their condition is TRUE even if there are other question flows with other TRUE conditions and other actions.
• For SMS channel genuine invalid NPS answers like "ten" instead of "10" or "999" instead of "9" won't be recorded therefore the value for the answer is automatically equals empty.
• DIGI channel requires StepByStep field in Survey Settings enabled, otherwise question flow doesn't work. 
• In DIGI, if questions are grouped and the target for "Go to" action type is nested question, then the flow will go to first question in the group, not the nested one. 
• In the "non step by step" Questionnaires, in DIGI surveys, the flows with "Skip this question" result that the top-level question is skipped, and all nested questions are too.

Action types

Question flow is based on specific action types:

Question flow based on question answers

This type of Question flows is dependent on the answer the customer gives to a previous question in the survey. For example, a certain question can be skipped if the answer to the NPS question was < 7.

Not all operators are supported for all types of questions. Please see the table below to see which operators are supported for which types of questions:

Note: it's not possible to create the Question flow for the open answer part of the configurable question with Is open flag on.

When a particular question is opened in "Edit page", you can see a highligted flow icon in another question where the current question is included in green. 

Example

Let's say you have a simple survey which contains three questions:

1. Scalable question which contains a scale from 0 to 7 (8 values). Let's call it Scalable 0-7 in this example.
2. Open question which should only be shown when the answer to Q1 is in the range between 0 and 4. Let's call it Open 0-4.
3. Another open question which should only be shown when the answer to Q1 is in the range between 5 and 7. Let's call it Open 5-7.

In this case you can add a question flow to each of the three questions to make sure the customer only sees the relevant open question:

1. Click the ­ icon on the Scalable 0-7 question, select Add condition and create a new question flow condition with the following rules:

• Select Scalable 0-7 question in the dropdown next to if
• Since we need to avoid customers with invalid answers to follow Open questions if the answer doesn't match required 0-7, we apply the rule with is empty operator. Invalid answers sent twice in a row are treated as empty value.

         The end result would be like this: 

• Click "Save Flow"

2. Click the ­ icon on the first Open 0-4 question

• Select your first Scalable 0-7 question in the dropdown next to if
• Since we need to skip the first open question for answers to the first question which are 5 or greater (since we only show the first open question if the answer is in the range between 0 and 4) we can use a rule >= 5.
  The popup window with correct settings will look similar to this:
  
• Click Save Flow

2. Now click the ­ icon next to the Open 5-7 question, select Add condition again and create a similar question flow condition:

• Select your first Scalable 0-7 question in the if dropdown again
• This time we need to skip the question for those respondents who answered 0-4 since this Open 5-7 is not relevant to them. Let's use < 5 rule here since 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 are all less than 5 and we don't want the respondents with these answer values to be asked this question:
  
• Click "Save Flow"

3. To see the result click the ­ icon:

4. Test your Survey to see if the Question flow works properly.

In case you want the question to be shown with the 50% probability, this is the example of the settings you should set. The logic is the following:

The variable "Random 1-100" generates a number from 1 to 100 to the record with equal probability and if it matches the number in the condition, the question will be skipped.Therefore, there is a 50% chances that the record has a number lower or higher than 50, and will be or not will be skipped accordingly. The probability of achieving the result of having only 50% of respondents to see that question is getting higher with the number of attempts.

Question flow based on metadata

This type of question flows is dependent on the values of metadata columns provided in the import file. Each customer might have their own set of metadata values and these are parsed individually by VoC Feedback itself.

As with question flows based on question answers, not all metadata types are supported for all operators. Please see the table below for more information:

The type of metadata is determined by VoC Feedback automatically. If the column only contains digits it is considered an integer type metadata. If it contains text or at least one non-digit symbol then it's considered to be a string.

Example

Let's say that in Import file you have an additional metadata column CITY in which the city of the customer is specified. You don't want to ask certain questions if a person is from a certain city called Citium. In this case for each such question you will need to add a new question flow as follows:

1. Click the ­ icon next to the question you want to skip
2. Select Add condition
3. Type CITY in the first input of the condition
4. Select equal as the operator
5. Type Citium in the next input.

The Question flow should look similar to this:

Click Save Flow and check your survey with an import file which contains the value to trigger the Question flow condition.

Combined question flow based on metadata and question answers

As an example, we can create Question Flow for question Open 5 - 7 and use AND operator:

If the customer answers 4 and the city is Citium question Open 5 - 7 will be skipped. 

Note! 

Additionally, you may influence a question flow through a classifier, because a classifier can be applied to a certain open questions. After the classifier is applied, you will see existing as well as new customer data from selected question(s) classified on the fly. Think of this as a way to "subscribe" for classification of certain open questions via certain classifier. More information on how to create a classifier in the article.