Ask a team what’s wrong with their feedback program and they’ll usually blame the survey. Too long, too generic, not enough people answering.
That’s sometimes true. But the more common problem comes after the survey. The results come in. Someone builds a dashboard or a slide deck. Everyone nods at it in a meeting. Then the next survey goes out, and nothing has changed.
The asking worked. The reporting worked. Nothing happened in between.
Earlier this year we relaunched SurveyRock after rebuilding it from the ground up over three years (the full story is here). Since then, a lot of our work has gone into that gap in the middle: figuring out which answers matter, and making sure a real person is responsible for doing something about them. Here’s what we shipped.
Finding out which questions actually matter
Say you run an NPS survey with fifteen questions alongside the main score. One of those questions is probably what’s dragging the score down. Finding it usually means comparing one question against the score at a time, and hoping you checked the right one first.
Key drivers looks at all of your questions at once and ranks which ones move most closely with the score you care about. That can be NPS, a rating, or a slider.
It also handles a common trap. People who rate your support highly often rate your delivery highly too. A simple approach gives both questions credit for the same thing and hands you a ranking that looks confident but isn’t. Key drivers is built to separate them.
The part we spent the most time on is what happens when your data can’t support an answer. If there aren’t enough responses, if everyone gave the score the same rating, or if two questions were answered exactly the same way, it tells you so instead of producing a ranking anyway. When something looks off, like a question where nearly everyone picked the same answer, you get a warning next to the result.
One honest note: key drivers shows you which questions move together with your score. It doesn’t prove that one causes the other. Treat the list as a place to start looking.
Key drivers is available on the Growth plan and above.
Then someone has to do something
A key driver result, a theme that keeps coming up, a customer who clearly needs a follow-up call. On their own, these are just findings. They sit on a dashboard until the next survey replaces them.
Actions turns a finding into a task. You can raise one straight from a theme, a key driver result, a suggestion in an executive summary, an insight, or a single response. Give it an owner, a status and a due date. The finding it came from stays attached, so whoever picks it up sees exactly what you saw.
When you assign an action to someone, they get a notification in SurveyRock and, by default, an email. Every morning, a digest lists anything that’s due that day or overdue, so nothing waits for someone to remember to check.
When you raise an action, we also record where the score stood at that moment. Once enough new responses come in, you can see how the number has changed since, with a reminder that other things may have changed too.
Actions are on every plan, including Free. Free accounts can have three open at a time, and every paid plan is unlimited. Plenty of feedback work is done by one person without a team behind them, and “someone owns this and it won’t get lost” shouldn’t need a paid plan. (Raising an action from a key driver result or a theme needs Growth, because that’s where those features live.)
The part you don’t see in a demo
None of this matters much if the wrong person can see data they shouldn’t. So alongside the features above, we built the access controls underneath them.
- Sensitive contact fields. You can mark a custom contact field as sensitive. After that, its values are hidden from anyone without permission to see them, everywhere in SurveyRock, including exports. That rule is enforced in one place, not left to each feature to remember.
- Custom roles and groups (Enterprise). Instead of a fixed set of roles, you can create your own, and give permissions to a whole group the same way you would to one person.
- SCIM 2.0 (Enterprise). If your company manages access through an identity provider that supports SCIM 2.0, it can add, update and remove workspace members for you. When someone is removed, their surveys are handed to the workspace owner instead of being left behind with nobody in charge of them.
If you ever need to know exactly why a particular person can or can’t see something, our support team can show you.
This isn’t exciting work. It matters the first time a security review asks how access really works, or the first time your team grows past the point where everyone just knows who should see what. We wanted it in place before that day, not after.
What this adds up to
None of these changes is dramatic on its own. Together, they’re the difference between a tool that helps you ask questions and make reports, and one that helps you figure out what matters and follow through.
You can read more about key drivers and actions on their own pages. And if you’re already using SurveyRock, actions are live now. You can raise your first one from whatever you’re looking at today.