We have recently made some major enhancements to our existing survey campaign to take advantage of the data collection capabilities described in the previous two blog posts.  Previously, the survey campaign was only capable of collecting a single piece of information, and there was no validation performed on the data submitted by the customer.

The newly-enhanced survey campaign addresses these shortcomings, and provides you with additional capabilities to manage the data that is collected.  Let’s quickly walk through the creation of a survey campaign to see how easy it is to setup.

The first step in creating a survey campaign is to select the start and end dates and times for your campaign.

Next, you simply need to provide a description for your campaign, and the keyword that you would like to use (what your participants will text to initiate the survey).

The third step is where the magic happens.  In the initial message to your participants, you ask them for the first piece of information.  Below the message box, you will see a check box with the description “This message requests data from the participant”, which is checked by default.  In the section below that check box, you specify the data attribute that you are collecting from the initial message, the message to send the participant if they reply with data that is invalid for the specified data attribute, and the message to send to the participant when they send a valid response.  The valid response message could be another question.  If it is, simply check the box below the message to expand another area asking you for the data attribute, invalid data response, and valid data response (which could be yet another question) to handle the reply from that message.  You can configure the survey to ask as many questions as you wish.  There is no limit.

Finally, review the details of your survey campaign, and click “Activate Campaign” to finish.

After creating your survey, you will be brought to the campaign details page.  The survey campaign details page has been enhanced to provide a simple rundown of the questions you are asking your survey participants, and the data the respective questions are collecting.

After your survey starts, and your customers begin participating, you will begin to see up-to-the-minute stats on the participation.  These stats include the number of participants who initiated the survey, the number of participants who completed the survey, and the number of participants who have answered each of the questions.

In addition to the completion statistics, you are also able to see a complete timeline of participants interacting with your survey, which can be exported as a comma separated value (CSV) file.

Also new is the ability to export all of the data you have collected via the survey.  On the side navigation menu, you will see a new option to export the survey data.  Clicking this will bring you to a form asking you for your name and email address.  Filling out the form and clicking “Submit” starts a process on our server that will export all of your survey data.  When the export is complete, you will receive an email containing a link you can use to download a CSV file containing all of the data collected from your survey participants.  You can then import that CSV file into your favorite spreadsheet program for some good, old-fashioned number crunching.

The survey campaign was the first to get these capabilities, but it is not the last.  We are hard at work integrating data collection into our other campaigns as well.  We are also working on exciting ways for you to analyze and act on the data you have collected from your participants.  Stay tuned for more details!

Tags: data collection