We just made SMS and IVR Surveys easier and more powerful with these two new features:
- You now may update contact attributes (custom fields[1]) based on your contacts’ responses to SMS questions and IVR questions.
- You are able to set conditions in SMS surveys and IVR Surveys.
These two new features allow you to send questions to specific people based on the values of one or several of your custom fields and provide you with a way to set quotas for your campaign.
Here’s how it looks like:
In the past, you could create customized surveys using the jump logic feature, which allows your respondents to skip to a specific question depending on their response to a previous question.
For example, if you want to ask specific follow-up questions to female respondents only, the previous question can be:
What is your gender? Reply with 1 for Female. Reply with 2 for Male.
If the respondent is female, she will proceed to the next question. If the respondent is male, he will skip to a later question in the survey. This can be done by setting a jump to question action. However, this use case is only possible if the question above is asked within a campaign. You may ask:
“What if I already have disaggregated data (i.e., contacts with different attributes)?”
That’s where the new features come in. First, let’s talk about the conditions feature. It allows you to do two things:
1. Send questions only to specific groups based on the custom fields you’ve set
With the conditions feature, you can upload your disaggregated data, set custom fields, and use this classification to create campaigns for very specific people.
2. Send questions to a set number of people
If you have thousands of contacts, you can set a cap to a specific number of people. In our example, let’s say you only need answers from 5,000 female respondents. you can set a condition that in which Female Respondent #5001 will no longer receive the survey questions.
What does updating contacts have to do with this?
If you don’t have the information that you need to set your conditions, you can launch a campaign solely for gathering demographic data. In our example, you can set an action to update a contact’s Gender to male or female. When you go back to your contacts database, you’ll see that this is automatically updated under the Gender column.
Do I need to create a separate campaign just to update contact information?
No, you don’t have to. You can use both features (updating contacts and setting conditions) in the same campaign, just as how you would use jump logic. Just that the added benefits are an updated contacts database and the power to set quotas to prevent you from wasting your credits.
There’s more…
Conditions can also be used for actions such as sending airtime top-ups to specific groups. We’re sure you can think of more ways to maximize this feature. We’d love to hear from you.
[1] Custom fields can be found in the contacts page. These are the fields (i.e., columns) that you have added to your contacts database.