Overview
The Survey Center offers a straightforward way to create engaging surveys to share with your guests. Let’s look at some key best practices to keep in mind then review the steps to create and publish a survey.
What do I need to know before I begin?
Like with any campaign or promotion, you must go into survey creation with a clearly defined goal and a measured plan of action. You will need to identify the problem, pain point or information you want to gather, then identify the relevant guests, and finally serve up the survey in a way that is relevant, analysis friendly and guest friendly.
Identify the Problem
What do you want to know more about?
Are you worried about a specific location? What about a new LTO item ? Service or ordering experience ? Were they asked to use their loyalty card? Were servers comfortable with the loyalty program ?
Pick only 1 problem, and base your survey off of that. Keeping it to a specific issue will let you hone in on accurate
Do you want to know about the food ? Ask only about the food! Guests can conflate different parts of the
experience if you let them. Try and keep your survey is specific as possible, so they don’t let 1 busy service day take away from your amazing food!
Identify the Relevant Guests
Exactly like sending out marketing campaigns, it’s vital to select the relevant segment of guests to send a survey. In this case, you want guests who have engaged your brand recently. The best way to identify them is to leverage their recent guest activity, or even better, to send the surveys in real time.
You can key off of a specific action in a restaurant – say trying a specific menu item – and then immediately send them a survey about that item! Paytronix has found that the highest open and completion rates of surveys has some when a relevant survey is sent in real time to guests.
Analysis Friendly
The best survey results can be plugged into Excel with little to no doctoring. To keep the focus on that, try and keep the potential guest answers in mind, and keep to a format that is easily actionable in excel!
It is very difficult for you (or anyone!) to do analysis on open ended questions. There is no program that can read open ended responses and translate them into a format that you can do analysis on. The only option is reading through potentially thousands of results one by one!
Stick to questions that are not open ended response. This means single value multiple choice questions, having guests select from a list and having guests select from a scale. If you feel an open-ended question is absolutely necessary, try to characterize potential responses into a multiple choice if possible
Guest Friendly
Surveys should be short!
Try to keep 1 minute in mind. Every survey should be specific, concise and able to be comfortably answered in 1 minute.
We recommend testing the survey by deploying it to a segment of test cards, prior to sending to your full audience.
Guests are more likely to answer relevant surveys! Try and tie it into a recent action the guest took, even if it was as simple as them recently visiting the restaurant.
Should I offer a reward or incentive for completing a survey?
Incentives will give you more survey answers. The unfortunatedownside is you may getmoreanswers that aren’t accurate as guests may take the survey just to get the incentive. In general if you aren’t getting enough results, we suggest widening your targeted guest segment before incentivizing to get more results.
How do I build a survey?
Navigate to Marketing Tools > Survey Center.
Select Create New Survey.
You are now in the Survey Tool and can create your survey.
In the Editor tab, enter:
Survey Title
Survey Description
Start/End Date for the survey to run
Number of Days Survey is available for response (after the survey end date)
Click the Add Question button to add a question to the survey.
Type in your question then choose the question type from the dropdown.
There are four question types:
Multiple Choice (Single Answer): Allows the guest to choose a single answer from a variety of options.
Multiple Choice (Multi-Select): Allows the guest to choose more than one answer from a variety of options.
Rating Scale: Asks the guest to rank a question on a numbered scale.
Paragraph Response: Asks the guest to provide a freeform answer.
When you have finished adding your questions, click Save to save your survey.
Now that you’ve built your survey, click on the Preview tab at the top of the page to see how it will look to your guests.
Once your survey is completed, you’ll be sent to the your survey’s dashboard. Here you can Preview, Copy, Edit or Delete the survey using the buttons shown below.
How do I distribute my survey?
Now it’s time to share out your survey. You have a few different options for how you can distribute your survey. We’ve outlined a few of the most popular options, below.
REMINDER: Always preview your survey before you send it out!
Navigate to Marketing Tools > Email Builder> Create New Email.
Follow the steps in this article Email Builder Guide to build your email. When you are ready to Personalize your email, you’ll want to select Parameters > Text Box then select the survey from the dropdown and it inserts as a button link.
Once your email is completed and approved, navigate back to Marketing Tools > Campaign Center. Your survey email will be located under the Messages tab.
You may now build out your Campaign. As every campaign is different, we recommend reading through our guide to Campaign Builder here: Campaign Builder Guide
Push/Pull Messages
You can share your survey through a link in a Push or Pull message through your branded mobile app. Follow the steps in this article What are Deep Linked Push and Pull Messages? to create your Push and/ or Pull messages. Once you’ve built the message(s), navigate back to Marketing Tools>Survey Center>Distribute>Create a Campaign for this Survey, which will take you the Campaign Builder tool.
You may now build out your Campaign. As every campaign is different, we recommend reading through our guide to Campaign Builder here: Campaign Builder Guide for specific steps to create a Push and/or Pull message based campaign.
Campaign Mobile Interstitials
If you prefer to target your guests with your survey as part of a scheduled, recurring message through your mobile app, you may want to create a Campaign Mobile Interstitial. Follow the steps outlined here What are Campaign Mobile Interstitials? to link your mobile interstitial image to your survey. When your guests click on the image, they’ll automatically be taken to the survey.
Clickable Images
You can also share out a survey by linking an image from your Image Carousel in your branded mobile app. When your guests click on the image, they’ll automatically be taken to the survey. For more information on setting this up, please read What are Clickable Images in Mobile Experience Builder?
Finally, remember that your friends at Paytronix are here to help. Do you have a question about one of the best practices described above or the steps to build out a survey? Please contact your customer success manager, solutions consultant or email Paytronix Support at [email protected].
Additional Resources
Email Builder Guide
Campaign Builder Guide
What are Deep Linked Push and Pull Messages?
What are Campaign Mobile Interstitials?
What are Clickable Images in Mobile Experience Builder?