Automatically completing surveys

Auto-completion of surveys is the process of making unfinished surveys — ones where the survey taker did not click Submit or Finish — available for reporting purposes. Typically, this process is used to increase response rates for survey programs where survey takers answered and submitted answers to required questions but dropped off before completing the survey. This sometimes happens when integrating with Promote for TripAdvisor because survey takers sometimes don't realize they did not finish the survey.

Note: The answer given for the Quick Start question is saved automatically. The initial value will be stored even if the survey completion is partial or interrupted. This functionality transfers the value automatically from the email to the web survey.

When you are ready to setup the automatic process, follow the instructions in Auto-completing after a specific page.

Approved business use cases for auto-completion

These are the only approved use-cases for automatically completing surveys:

  • The survey integrates with Promote for TripAdvisor and sees a drop-off because survey takers do not realize the have to finish the integrated form to complete the survey. Auto-completion may be performed on surveys where survey takers who reach the TripAdvisor page are considered to have completed the survey.

  • The company considers the survey complete when the survey taker has navigated past a specific page — all required questions have been answered and submitted by navigating off the pages that contained them.

  • After the survey reaches its expiration timestamp.

  • JavaScript is acceptable only in surveys JavaScript validation.

  • To auto-complete based on a question being answered, the question must be required.

  • This process should not run more than once per day.

All other use cases include unacceptable risk to the quality of the results.

Required company discussion and approval

When a company wants to auto-complete surveys, they need to know and agree with these points:

  • This procedure is non-standard and not recommended practice. For surveys where survey takers frequently drop off, it is generally better to shorten the survey. However, for surveys with a high drop-off and which are integrated with Promote for TripAdvisor, auto-completion may be acceptable.

  • Because the procedure is non-standard, it requires additional on-going maintenance (costs) as things change in the installation.

  • Changes to the logic that identifies when to automatically complete a survey can require costly upgrades to the process logic. This is in addition to the on-going maintenance work.

  • When the company pays bonuses to employees based on survey scores, the company needs to decide how and when to use the scores from auto-competed surveys.

  • When the company has procedures to close the loop with respondents, it can be confusing to a survey taker who purposely chose to drop-off and not submit the survey. For example, a survey taker might give a low score and then opt to drop-off. If that survey gets automatically completed, it might trigger an Alert and a follow-up Case form with the respondent, which might have a negative impression on the survey taker.

Important: You must have this discussion with, and get approval from, the company before implementing auto-completion. You must have this discussion with, and get approval from, the company before implementing auto-completion. The auto-complete process is a manual process and, therefore, may not capture all scenarios perfectly. For example: if a survey taker attempts to move past the first page without a value in a required question, the page will throw an error to the survey taker which will cause the record to be marked as completed. Or, if the auto-complete flag is on the second page and a user navigates to the second page then goes back to the first page and deselects their answer, the record will still be marked as auto-completed.

Auto-complete capabilities

Consider the following to automatically complete surveys:

  • Auto-completed surveys can either run through post-processing (Alerts, Text Analytics, etc.) or they can by-pass post-processing and be directly marked as ready for reports. This depends on the value of the Survey status (e_status) field set during the process.

  • The Partial survey (a_survey_is_partial) field remains flagged as true for auto-completed records and it can't be set to false. For information about this field, see Survey taker interaction.