Using Forms for customer satisfaction surveys (instead of CSAT)

[Jonne Riikonen]

Hello Community!

I'm looking for some thoughts and discussion for some issues we've recently encountered. Some of them may be new, some may be already resolved (or worked around) by others -> would appreciate any input here 👋

We recently decided to go ahead and test/pilot the "Forms" feature of JSM to potentially replace the CSAT survey at when issues are resolved. The main reason for this is that the form is so much more versatile when it comes to the fields and content, it can potentially bring much more (valuable) feedback than the overly simplified "1-5 star + optional comment" that is included in the CSAT by default (/locked).

What we did was to build a form, this was the relatively easy part. Given that the form can be added multiple time to a ticket, we did not link the fields to any Issue field (as those don't hold multiple values).

In our use case, we also need to be able to gather non-support-issue related feedback from our customers, for example after visiting them on-site or something. To do this easily, we made a new "Customer Request Type" of which the content is basically the previously created form. This works quite well, with the exception that once the button "Create" is clicked in the Help Center, it still waits for the "Submit" -button of the form itself to be clicked (this is stupid and risks that the customer doesn't send the forms by accident -> we will address this with some automation that detects an added form on a certain type of ticket of which the status remains as "Open", or something).

We then found out that the form data resides within the form and not actually on the issue itself, it also cannot be easily fetched from there with standard JIRA -tools, we haven't tried via API (I believe this may be possible). This is sad, because it already almost kills the whole benefit in this use case. All of the data for later use has to be manually gathered from the form (if you don't link them to issue fields, which in our case cannot be done).

To replace the CSAT survey, we were looking to alter the message that is sent out after issue is resolved. It turned out that only the text can be edited and the link is actually hard-coded. This was a big disappointment 👎. Furthermore, we found out that if we disable the CSAT, we also lose the "Reports" button from the project, thus make ourselves blind to the old (and new) responses 👎👎. We do need to switch off the CSAT survey though, as we don't want to send CSAT surveys to the "Feedback" -type of requests that are generated when the form is used in "stand-alone-mode".

Now, encouraged by some earlier work with the hidden issue fields etc, we found out where the Satisfaction comments and values are hiding -> They are accessible via JSON and smart values 🦾. Not only they are readable, they're also writable 🦾🦾 (though, a slight worry may come as one can also alter existing data like this 🤔). We managed to build an automation that fetches data from the issue and writes it in to the CSAT -> We are now able to automate the CSAT field population even if the CSAT is switched off 🥳, the amount of stars is even shown on the ticket! Sadly, the "manually inserted" comment does not show up when hovering (as it does normally).

To overcome the issue of having potentially multiple forms in one ticket, we simply altered the previously made automation with some checks if there's previous data and in such case, create a new issue and populate that instead (yes it's a duplicate issue, but it doesn't even need to show up for the customer since they only need to see the one where they gave the feedback).

The amount of "extra custom fields" needed to is somewhat overwhelming, some of them would not be needed if the forms were accessible via JQL for example.

Current issues to resolve (may change later):

• Accessing issue data with anything else than manually looking (with eyes), JSON or JQL or anything (within JIRA), to use for data and automations
• How to make value adding reports/dashboards from the form results
  • For now, the only way is to copy the form answers manually to issue fields and then preparing a "standard dashboard"
• Automate form submission to populate the fields automatically, to avoid the manual step

Has someone else been using the Forms for such or similar use case? Would love to hear any ideas or experiences you've had :)