What are event-based survey triggers?


Event-based survey triggers allow you to send surveys when specific actions are performed. These triggers allow you to seek feedback about a recent interaction with your customer. For examples, event-based triggers allow you to send out a survey right after a purchase is made. These triggers are different from one-time triggers and recurring, or scheduled triggers.


This approach also allows organizations to gather feedback at strategic touch points in the customer or user journey.


Here are a few examples of event-based survey triggers:


  1. Transaction completion: A survey may be triggered after a customer completes a purchase or transaction, allowing the business to gather feedback on the buying process.

  2. Customer support interaction: Surveys can be sent after a customer support interaction is resolved or closed, giving customers an opportunity to provide feedback on the support they received.

  3. Employee onboarding or training completion: In the context of employee feedback, surveys can be triggered upon the completion of onboarding or training programs.

  4. Customer training or meeting completion: Survey sent right after participating in a company-organized webinar or seminar or a meeting e.g., business review meetings to collect feedback about the meeting’s content, presenter and any future topics they wish to see.


How Freshsurvey collectors can be triggered after an event is completed.


After building a survey and publishing it, there are different collectors that third-party applications can trigger.


  1. Email collector- Transactional


This collector enables the triggering of a survey via API, accompanied by transactional information. It allows the passing of detailed transactional data to Freshsurvey. For example, if a survey is configured to trigger after ticket closure, the collector can capture information such as ticket ID, date and time, ticket URL, etc., and send it to Freshsurvey when the survey is responded to.


The steps below feature an example where Freshdesk is used to trigger a transactional survey.

  1. Once you activate the collector, Click on ‘Show instructions’.

  2. On clicking ‘Show instructions,’ you will find the instructions to configure ad-hoc/transactional trigger requests via API (or webhook). Please select ‘Freshdesk’ from the product dropdown.

  1. Go to Freshdesk> click on ‘Admin’.

  1. Search for ‘Automations’ under Workflows

  2. Click on ‘Ticket updates’> New Rule

  1. Enter the Automation rule name 

  2. Select the respective ‘Action performed by’ option that meets your requirement.

  3. Select the ‘Events’ on which you would like the automation to be triggered.

Ex: When ticket status is changed from ‘Any status’ to ‘Resolved’ from any agent. 

  1. In ‘Perform these actions

  • Select ‘Trigger webhook’

  • Request type as ‘POST’

  • In URL, add the callback URL copied from the instructions in Freshsurvey. 

> Toggle on the ‘Add custom headers’ and pass the ‘Key’ and ‘Value’. You can find the values from the Freshsurvey instructions.

{

    "apiKey": "<Value>"

}

  1. Now, Copy the pre-populated sample JSON payload with the respective placeholders you need to pass along with the request for contact creation and trigger. Add any additional payload information you may need in Freshsurvey under the  “transaction_context” section.

6. Click on ‘Preview and Save’>Save

Note: Please make sure that automation is turned on for the webhook to trigger. 

So far, we illustrated how we could use Freshdesk to send an ad-hoc request to Freshsruvey to trigger the survey via an Email collector. You can use this method with any Third-party application. E.g. A Survey trigger to capture the purchase experience from Shopify or An onboarding feedback from a customer, when the project is completed in Asana/ Jira. All you have to do is, in Freshsurvey to copy the right payload, choose “Others” in the “Show Instructions” right slider. You can customize the payload to your choice under the “contacts” and “transaction_context” section.


  1. Email-embed collector


The Email-embed collector allows you to integrate the survey directly into any  email system. You can automate how these surveys are triggered based on specific events, such as when an order is placed. To learn how to create an Email-embed collector, refer to the following article:

https://support.freshsurvey.io/en/support/solutions/articles/50000004081-email-embed-collector-an-overview


Once the Email-embed collector is activated, simply copy the code from Freshsurvey and embed it into your email template within your email tool. Configure an automation to determine when the template, including the embedded survey, should be sent to the customer.


Point to note: The trigger condition i.e when the survey is sent to the customer is managed from the different system viz. Sendgrid or Marketo, so we render the survey, when the customer clicks on the first question. Depending on the Email Embed configuration the response is collected with or without the contact mandatory fields. I.e. If “Allow anonymous responses” is unchecked, we capture the contact mandatory fields to before recording the response, If it is selected, we just capture the response.



  1. Other Ad-hoc triggers


If you have an Email collector set up in Freshsurvey with a one-time or recurring frequency but you also want to send a survey via API when a specific action occurs (e.g., a ticket group change), the Ad-hoc survey request is the solution. These requests are triggered through API calls to Freshsurvey from another system and can be directed to both Email and web-app embed collectors, irrespective of the survey frequency (one-time or recurring).


To learn how to trigger an ad-hoc survey, refer to the following article:

https://support.freshsurvey.io/en/support/solutions/articles/50000008217-how-do-i-send-an-ad-hoc-survey-