DEPRECIATED: Automated Follow-up Surveys

DEPRECIATED: Automated Follow-up Surveys

NOTE: This article describes the previous version of Automated Follow-up Surveys which is being depreciated and replaced with the new features released November 2022.
Please the Automated Follow-ups article for details.

What is the Automated Follow-up Surveys by Email and SMS/Text feature?

As of April 2019, scheduling automated follow-up activities is only supported in version 4 contact records; this feature is not currently supported in version 5, but there are plans to support it in the future.
Many agencies and programs have a mandate to follow-up with clients.  This follow-up can be to check in with the client to see how they are doing, ask if they received the help they needed, and offer further assistance if needed.  Other times, this follow-up is to conduct a client satisfaction survey, to gather data on how well the agency or program is serving the community.  Usually, this follow-up is conducted via a phone call.  However, more and more people prefer to communicate through other channels, such as email, online Live Chat and SMS texting.  In iCarol, you can now schedule follow-up to occur via email or SMS texting and these follow up messages can be sent at particular times.  When the email or SMS text message is sent to the help seeker, they will receive a link to an online form that, when filled out and submitted, will generate a call report in your iCarol system.

How to schedule an automated follow-up via email or SMS text:

  1. Fill in the call report as per your organizations' procedure
  2. On the Finish tab, at the bottom of the Schedule a follow-up activity section, will be  Automated Follow-Up Surveys
  3. Fill out this section with the appropriate information
    1. Send this Survey: choose which survey to send to the help seeker
    2. Send To: This will be the help seekers' email address or SMS text phone number
    3. Send After: Check the appropriate boxes to indicate when the survey is to be sent to the help seeker
    4. Send Via: Choose Email or SMS text
    5. Message: The message typed here will precede the URL to the online survey form when the help seeker receives the email or SMS text message.  For SMS text messages, please keep in mind that there is a character limit (1600 characters).  Longer messages will be split into multiple messages if needed.
  4. Submit the call report form
When the help seeker fills out the survey form, a call report will be generated in your iCarol system with the answers to the questions asked.  This call report form will be marked as "related to" the original call report form, so you will know which client responded.  When you view the original call, from which the follow-up was scheduled, you will see a link at the top of the call, next to the call length. that says "Related (name of call report)".  If you click this link, you will see the call report that was created with the answers to the survey questions the help seeker gave.  Please note, if you scheduled the follow-up survey to be sent multiple times, and the help seeker responded multiple times, each response will generate a separate call report form and all of these call report forms will be related to the original call report form.

After the automated follow-up survey is scheduled, and the call report submitted, you can edit the original call report to see the status of the automated messages sent and scheduled,  At the bottom of the Automated Follow-Up Survey section, you will see where the messages were sent (the email address or SMS text phone number will be shown), when they were sent, the response date and the status.  The status will be listed as either pending, responded or stopped, which are each defined as follows:
  1. Pending means the automated message hasn't been sent yet, as it is scheduled for a date in the future, or it has been sent, but the client hasn't responded yet.
  2. Responded means the message was sent and the client completed the survey.
  3. Stopped is particular to automated messages sent via SMS text.  If the client responds to an automated SMS text follow-up message with STOP, this status will be shown and any future messages scheduled will not be sent
Particular to automated messages sent via email. If the help seeker wishes, they can unsubscribe from the automated email messages by clicking the 'Unsubscribe' link in the email beneath the body of your message. The status of an email that has been unsubscribed to will be listed as sent. Future attempts to send an email to an address that has unsubscribed will be unsuccessful. The status of these future emails will remain as pending to indicate the request cannot be sent. 
Note, this feature may have an additional cost associated with it. If your organization is interested in enabling this feature, then a designated Support Contact from your organization can go to 'Help' in the left side menu and submit a case to request more information.

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