Pre and post-conversation surveys

For lots of reasons — reporting data to funders, getting to know your chat/text visitor and being prepared for their needs, or ensuring a visitor is within your service area — you may wish to collect some information from them before beginning your live chat or texting/SMS conversation. iCarol can help you accomplish this using our pre and post conversation surveys.

Before a Live Chat

Registration

Visitors that initiate a Live Chat conversation from your website will first go to a registration page. This page can be customized to fit nicely into the rest of your website’s branding and can include custom coloring and your organization’s logo.

Data Collection

On the registration page you’ll also have the chance to ask the visitor any number of questions before they begin the chat session. Common questions include those about demographics like age, race, or gender. Many organizations choose to ask the visitor to rate how they are doing on a simple scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, which can then be compared later against the same rating they might give after the chat is over, helping to measure your organization’s impact. You may also wish to ask their location, and if you enable geographic restrictions and wish to only serve local visitors, this location information can be used to prevent them from chatting with your organization if they are outside of your service area, and instead directing them to a better resource closer to where they are. Keep in mind that asking a lot of questions could present barriers to your visitor deciding to move forward, so we advise only asking questions that you consider essential.

Assess and Display Risk Level

Some organizations wish to ask questions about a visitor’s safety, for example questions about homelessness or suicidal ideation. Our customers have the option to highlight a visitor in the iCarol chat queue, based on their answers to such questions, triggering a custom selection of risk levels to appear next to the chat in the queue. This visual risk indicator can help you determine which chats need to be addressed first, which may need to be assigned to an experienced chat specialist, or flag a chat as one that should be silently monitored by a supervisor.

After a Live Chat

Post-Chat Survey

The information collected from the visitor becomes a part of your finished Contact Record. The information provided in the post-conversation survey cannot be altered, protecting data integrity and preventing any tampering with customer feedback. All of the information collected both pre and post-conversation is stored in the record which can then be reported on using the tools in Statistics, or exported for offline analysis.

Before a Texting/SMS Conversation

People who text with you can also answer some questions before the conversation begins. There is a choice of two different ways to accomplish this with SMS/Texting:

1. Registration
   When a visitor sends their first text/SMS message to your service, they will receive an auto response directing them to a URL where they will answer the questions you wish to ask prior to beginning the SMS conversation with them. Similar to a pre-Chat conversation, you may choose to ask questions about demographics, or ask that they input a postal code or other location that helps you determine whether or not they can be serviced by your organization or should be encouraged to reach another organization instead. Once they complete and submit their answers, they can proceed to the texting conversation with your specialists.

2. SMS Survey
   When the visitor sends a text to your service, they’ll be sent a series of text messages asking questions of your choosing. They can provide a custom answer, e.g. Q: What is your zip code? A: 90210, or you can ask a question with multiple choice answer options. In this example, a question you might ask by SMS/Text would be:
   “How are you doing right now?
   Answer 1 for “I’m doing okay”
   2 for “A little upset”
   3 for “Moderately upset”
   etc.

   Or, “What is your age?”
   A = 0-12
   B= 13-17
   C= 18-24
   D= 25-40
   etc.

After a Texting/SMS Conversation

When the conversation ends, your SMS visitor can directed to a URL where they are asked your customized post-chat questions. These questions can measure the impact your counselor had on them, or how satisfied they are with the service they received. If you again ask them to rate how they are feeling on a scale as you may have during the registration or SMS survey prior to the conversation, this helps you quantify the positive impact you’ve had on the visitor and show funders and stakeholders that you are making a difference.

Like all data collected prior to the conversation starting, the information collected in this post-survey becomes a part of your finished Contact Record and can be reported on within iCarol or exported for offline anaylsis.

Want to know more about this or any other iCarol feature? Feel free to connect with us by emailing: info@iCarol.com