SP cloud - Creating surveys

Owned by Elena Kolesnik
Last updated: Jul 21, 2021 by Iryna Ihnatiuk
9 min read

This page describes how to create a survey, activate it, and see all surveys configured for a certain project.

Prerequisites

  • Ensure that your user has Admin permissions in the Jira project where you want to create a survey
  • Ensure that you have Surveys for Jira installed and configured

Creating a survey

  1. In the Jira project where you want to create a survey, go to the project settings.
  2. On the left panel, click Project Surveys, which will open the Project Surveys page.
  3. Click Add Survey.
  4. Go through the survey wizard and fill out the necessary fields in the survey tabs.
  5. Click Save. The survey will be displayed in the list of project surveys.



  6. After you finish configuring survey settings, make sure you activate this survey in the list of surveys for this project.

In the updated Surveys for Jira app, multiple surveys can be activated per project at the same time.


Email

You start creating your survey with specifying how survey email should look like for your audience.


Fields description

FieldDescription
Survey Name

Give a name to your survey to differentiate from other surveys in the project. This is not visible for survey recipients or people working on the tickets.

Email Subject

Enter an email subject that you want your end users to see in the survey email.

Survey Email Include

You can customize your survey emails to include either a survey Rating form or to display a Web link to your survey form. This is how the Web link will look like in your email

Work With

Depending on how you want to shape your surveys you can choose to work with star rating or specify a yes/no question as the main survey question for the users. 

When you work with star rating, you will be able to choose the color for stars.

Recipient

Select the recipient for the survey. Note that the surveys won't be sent for unassigned tickets if the Assignee is selected.

Email Body

Here you can design a body of your survey that the end user will receive. You can use the placeholder variables in order to personalize your email template. To add a placeholder variable just click it in a list of placeholders.

The placeholder values wrapped by "$$" signs will be populated by the information submitted in the ticket that triggers the survey. The following placeholder variables are available:

  • $$Reporter$$
  • $$issueKey$$
  • $$issueLink$$
  • $$Summary$$
  • $$Assignee$$
  • $$ratingSelector$$
  • $$ratingSDLink$$ (for service projects)
  • $$issuetype$$
  • $$project$$
  • $$created$$
  • $$updated$$
  • $$status$$
  • $$description$$
  • $$summary$$
  • $$lastcomment$$

Important

This is critically important that you insert the$$ratingSelector$$placeholder into your email so that it has a link to your survey form. For service projects, you have to insert$$ratingSDLink$$placeholder if survey recipients are customers (non-Jira users). Without these links, users will not be able to access the survey form and thus - submit their feedback.

You can use HTML and CSS to format and brand your emails.

 


Form

Your users are notified about the surveys via email and then open a survey form by clicking a link embedded in the email. Use the Form tab to configure how your survey form will look like. This is the essence of the survey where you put all your survey questions.

If you would like your users to submit a comment along with their star rating, select "Yes" for this option. You can set up your surveys to ask for the comment only if a negative rating is given.


Fields description

FieldDescription
'Form settings' section
Here you specify the introductory text for your survey form and define general survey form settings.
Form body

Enter an introductory text for your survey.

Important

This is critically important that you insert the $$ratingSelector$$ placeholder into your survey form as well so that it has the rating scale in case a user wants to change their rating.

The following placeholder variables are available:

    • $$Reporter$$
    • $$Assignee$$
    • $$issueKey$$
    • $$Summary$$
    • $$issuetype$$
    • $$project$$
    • $$created$$
    • $$updated$$
    • $$status$$
    • $$description$$
    • $$summary$$
    • $$lastcomment$$

HTML is also supported so you can add nice formatting to your surveys.

Ask user for a commentIf you would like your users to submit a comment along with their star rating, select "Yes" for this option. This comment will be displayed in the survey feedback on the ticket and in the survey reports.
URL for completed surveysAfter taking a survey, users can be redirected to URL that you specify in this field. Make sure to add https:// before the site address.
Thank you message

Appreciate feedback your users provide with this message. It's shown to the user after they submit survey answers. Alternatively, you can select not to notify a user.

'Questions' section

Here you can add various types of questions to your survey, define their order, and define other question related settings. 

Question dialog

Use the question dialog to add questions, specify whether a question is required to answer, add options for the single and multiple choice questions.


Important

Please note there can be up to 50 questions per survey and up to 2500 characters per answer.

Questions table

As you add questions to your survey they are displayed in the Questions table.

In the table you can perform the following actions with the survey questions:

  • View the type of the question – text, checkbox, or dropdown for instance
  • View whether a question is required for a user to answer
  • View whether the question is active at the moment. You can deactivate a question if you temporarily don't wish to ask your users that but don't want to lose it and keep it until the time you want to turn it back on. You can activate and deactivate questions from the Actions menu in the table.
  • Change the order of the questions in your survey. To do that, use the Actions menu in the table.
  • Edit and delete questions


Conditions

Use the Conditions tab to define the criteria that will trigger your surveys. On the Conditions tab you define how your surveys should be sent, whether they should be filtered, and what actions should be done based on survey activity.

FieldDescription
'Trigger Point' selection
Use this section to define whether to send survey for all tickets meeting trigger point conditions or only certain ones.

Status change

Select a status that will trigger a survey. For instance, if you select "Done", then whenever the tickets in this project reach the "Done" stage, an email survey will be sent to the selected recipient.

You can set different issue types separately. For instance, you can opt to only send surveys for the "Bug" issue type.

JQL match

You can create a custom JQL query to serve as a trigger point for the survey. Then you can just select your saved filter for this option. For example, you can survey on the tickets that belong to a certain product component or filter out requests of a certain type only.

Please note, that your Saved filter does not have to be Private to be used within Surveys JQL condition. To check that, go to Filters page and check Access column. If the necessary filter is Private click Edit, select type of access Project and select the name of your project, click Add and Save. Once this is done, the filter will be available in the drop-down list in the JQL Match section.


'Frequency' section
You can further filter the surveys sent based on the values in the certain fields. For example, you can ask for feedback for every major bug but for the minor ones - send surveys for only 10% of those.

Send survey once per ticket

Here you can define whether you want to send a survey again if the ticket is reopened and then closed again.

Sometimes it happens that a ticket is resolved, a recipient replies to the survey and then for some reason the ticket is reopened, someone works on it and resolves a ticket again. This might trigger a survey to be sent to a recipient again, and often this is exactly what the companies want (survey on how the service was provided this time) but sometimes companies wish not to overwhelm and exhaust their recipients with too many surveys. You can opt to only send a survey once per issue.

Send surveys for all ticketsIf you select this option, then surveys will be sent for all tickets in this project that meet the trigger conditions.
Filter surveys by

You can filter your surveys even further.

By default, the app draws on the Priority field but you can select another single select custom field.

For example, you can:

  • Survey people for all critical and major bugs (100%), send the survey to only 50% of the medium bugs randomly, and not survey people on minor and trivial bugs at all (0%).
  • Survey people that report bugs on Windows (100% for the Operating System custom field) and not survey the ones that are on Mac OS X or other operating systems (0% for other values for this custom field) so that people using other operating systems are not affected by this.


Testing your surveys

We recommend that you test your surveys to see the complete flow before you launch them for a certain project.

To do that you can enable and trigger a survey on your test project. The easiest way is to create a ticket so that you are a reporter and select Reporter as a recipient. Once the ticket meets the survey conditions, an email should be sent to you. As you go through the flow and answer survey questions, you will see whether you like how the email looks, how the actual survey form presents the questions, and thus will be able to experience it first hand. You can customize your surveys in any way you want, and they will be sent out based on the trigger points and frequency that you define. 

In addition to that, you can force send surveys without changing the general rule for your surveys.

When you force send surveys, triggers are being ignored. If you have several active surveys per project, emails will be sent to each of them.




Don't forget to check survey information in the ticket and a report after you submit your feedback.

Once you are happy with the results, feel free to activate the survey for the necessary project, and happy surveying!

Viewing project surveys

Once you create several surveys, the Project Surveys page displays a table with all of them. You can see which surveys are created in the project, which surveys are currently active, and who and when created the surveys. You can enable the necessary survey, edit its settings or delete it entirely.

Help menu – If you feel stuck, the View docs link will guide you through all products details, and you can always reach out to us and request a feature or report a bug.

Using multiple survey settings inside one project

Let's say your Halloween or Christmas survey has slightly different wording or questions to add festive mood. This is also helpful in case you just launched a new version or made certain big changes in your products or services and want to only survey people on the bugs they submit. In order to keep the settings of your original survey, you can create a new one and enable that other one. Once this is no longer needed you can just disable the temporary survey and enable your main one again. Or multiple surveys can be activated per project at the same time.

Setting up permissions to view survey reports, feedback and rating

Now, you need to set up permissions you'd like the project survey to be enabled for. 

  1. Go to the project that you have enabled the surveys for and select Project settings.
  2. On the left panel, click Project Surveys Permissions, which will open the Survey Permissions Configuration page.
  3. Set up the visibility of survey rating, feedback and report for this project. By default, any survey rating, feedback and report are visible to Jira project admin role only.

Once you set up the permissions, settings will be applied to all surveys inside a given project and for this project only.



Helpful links

SP cloud - Analyzing survey results