The Conversation Builder is a logic-based tool that allows you to craft your Conversations and customize them based on any point of data you track about this contact, whether it's their answers earlier on in the Conversation or data about the contacts themselves.
Jump To
Check out the video below to see a quick clip of Conversations in action. Conversations like this one begin as soon as your respondent gives their 0-10 score in the email part of your Survey Template.
The Conversation Builder allows you to:
- Customize an interactive sequence of questions and answers.
- Present your questions to your contacts in a chat-style interface right after they’ve clicked their initial rating in your survey.
- Ask a variety of questions, including NPS, CSAT, CES, and multiple choice.
Let's take a look around the Builder.
Avatar or "Character"
To ensure your branding is on point, we recommend choosing "the face" of your surveys by clicking on the friendly lady in pink in the middle of your screen. Clicking her will allow you to choose a different "Character", or you can choose "Avatar" and upload a picture of the sender of your surveys.
Cards
For the purposes of the Conversation Builder, a Card is anything that AskNicely sends to your survey respondent. This includes questions, message, and jumps to different parts of your survey.
Types of Cards
AskNicely provides you with multiple, flexible options for the types of cards that will be displayed to your Contacts.
Note: Scorecard Questions are created in the Scorecard App and not in the survey builder.
Open Questions allow for a large input of text. If using our Salesforce Integration, ensure you are creating a "Long Text Area" field for the Response to write back to.
To add a new card, click +New Question.
Groups
Cards are sorted into groups that you can jump to or skip, depending on how you build out your Conversation logic. You can have several, or only one group, depending on if and how you want your Conversation to branch.
To create a new group, click +New Group.
Logic
You can make your Conversation display in different ways based on how your respondent answers. You do this by using the "Add Logic" button. Take a look at this example. Here, we've decided to ask our contact for a comment, but this response will only display for promoters. Our detractors and passives will each get different responses.
Unless an answer has specific logic for it, the contact will receive the default response. If there is no logic and no default, the card will be skipped.
This doesn't need to simply be based on your answers. If you'd like a specific message to appear based on the respondent's segment, or their location, or any data point you track, you can do that. Simply click where it says Customize by "Rating" in an existing card to change the values you might customize the flow of your surveys with.
Customized Logic is not available for List questions that utilize the multi-select option.
Options (Legacy Feature)
Options are clickable answers in your "Topics" question (or a "List Question") that compose a pre-defined list of answers. The most common of these is the 5-option CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) question, but you can create custom options as we’ve done here.
To add another option, click Add Option. To edit an option, simply click the text. To remove the option, click the X to the right.
A great time saver on your multi-answer questions lies in that little green circle right there, which will let you jump to another group immediately if that answer is selected.
If you enter a new flow, you can create a whole separate branch of your survey, in case you want to dig deeper into one specific answer.
The Four Corners
In each of the four corners of the Conversation Builder are four important buttons.
Upper Left: Branch Names
If you have multiple branches to your Conversation, you'll be able to select which branch you want view.
Upper Right: Preview
You can now preview your Conversation live in the Conversation Builder by clicking Preview in the upper right. This will allow you to select one of your contacts to simulate taking the survey, and select the rating from the initial survey to simulate.
When you're previewing, if you make any changes, you'll need to save your Conversation before they are reflected in the live preview.
You can also choose Record Real Test Response to run this Conversation/preview as a real survey. When you submit an answer, all relevant Workflows will run and your score / data points will be recorded on the Dashboard, allowing you to test your whole survey process.
Lower Right: Save
Save early, and save often! You'll also need to save any time you want you changes to be reflected in your live preview.
Lower Left: Options
Most of the time, you won't need these. However, there may be times when Support ask you to copy to the clipboard or paste from the clipboard.
If you want to start completely over, you can select Reset to default version, which will erase any changes you've made to your Conversation and restore it to the very basic version that is present when you first convert your survey to a Conversation.
Survey Expiry
You may want to limit the time period a Contact can have access to a survey, to ensure that the Response data you are receiving is as close to the survey date as needed.
Scroll to the bottom of the Survey Builder page to reveal the "Survey Expire" checkbox. Once selected, you can set an expiry date as well as a message to display to any Contact attempting to answer your survey past the expiry date.
Common Error Messages
Comment
All AskNicely surveys require an "Open Question" card to allow Contacts the ability to provide additional feedback that may not have already been addressed in your set of survey questions.
To clear the error message you can either
- Create a new "Open Question" card and type in comment as the question key
- Utilize an existing "Open Question" and changing the question key to comment
This may change reporting for established Survey Templates. Previous data for that question will remain under the original question key name, while new response data will live in the "comment" field.
General Validation Error
Most often, the error lies in a blank field. If using logic to customize what Contacts see based on Custom Data Fields or ratings, click through your logic headings to find the specific error message.
If logic is based off of a previous List Question, deleting one of the options will produce an error in the corresponding follow-up question.
This error will also occur if a previously used Custom Data Field is deleted.
All set?
Now you've had a chance to see the tools that are available in our new Conversation Builder, give it a try! Remember, the Preview tool in the top right is your best friend in the survey building process. If you have any additional questions, feel free to click that Question Mark in the bottom right corner for help, or you can reach out to your Customer Success Manager.