Survey Invitations Demystified: Part 1 Builder

You can generate several types of invitations for your survey depending on the business use-cases of your organization. Some of the use cases would require the survey api’s while for certain others you can use the default invitations provided in the builder. In a series of posts, we are going to be discussing some of the options to generate survey invitations. This post talks about survey invitations you can generate from the survey builder. Read on to find out more

A few housekeeping stuff before we get into the nitty-gritty of invitations

Communities: For all surveys that involve external participants such as a contact or a lead there needs to be an active community setup. Communities come free with most editions of Salesforce and it is fairly easy to set one up.

Authenticated Surveys: Surveys rely on salesforce SSO for authenticating users and employees. For authenticating contacts and leads, you will need to rely on the authentication capabilities given by communities and this may involve the purchase of additional licenses. Authenticated survey responses are tied back to the participant. All authenticated survey invitations expire after a single take!

AnonymousSurveys: Survey invitations can be anonymous, which means that no information about the respondent is captured, the responses hence cannot be tied back to a participant and a participant can take this survey as many times without the link expiring.

Identified Surveys (aka Identified links): There are tons of use-cases where a survey would need to be tied back to the respondent but at the same time you don’t want to use authentication (SSO or want the customer to log in with a user name and password) before submitting the survey. This is where identified surveys come in and the idea here is that the survey invitation is generated with the information about the participant and these will expire after a single take.

Invitations generated by the Survey Builder: Get Survey Link

Types of invitations supported: Authenticated Surveys, Anonymous Surveys

As soon as you activate a survey, the survey builder generates 2 sets of invitations

1. A link for particpants in your company like users and employees
2. A link for particpants outside your company like contacts and leads

                                    Survey Builder -> Get Invitation

You will notice that there is a check box to anonymize the invitations in this modal. These links can be sent out via various email clients or even via the marketing cloud. There is an option to download the QR code equivalent of these links as well

Invitations generated by the Survey Builder: Send Email

Types of invitations supported: Authenticated Surveys, Anonymous Surveys, Identified Surveys

You have the option to send a survey via email directly to a single recipient or to a list in salesforce from the survey builder. The invitation link settings control the type of invitation

Here is what each of the options mean:

a) Unique link is the same as an identified survey.

b) Anonymize responses will obfuscate the survey responses

c) Don’t require authentication ensures that users are not asked to log in before taking the survey

d) Autoexpires gives you the flexibility of expiring the survey in a future date

In the next post we will take a look at some of the other ways to distribute surveys via process builder and flows