Quality Assurance Surveys

Quality Assurance Surveys

What is the Quality Assurance Surveys Feature? 

Many help lines like to conduct follow-up quality surveys of their help seekers, a few days or weeks after their initial contact. These surveys are used for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to ensuring your help seeker received the services they needed, and ensuring their interaction with your agency was positive.
When you setup Quality Assurance Surveys in your system, you are able to:
  1. Create a new contact record to use as your Quality Assurance Survey, customized to align with your organizations follow-up policies and procedures
  2. Choose the existing contact form version you wish to associate this Quality Assurance Survey to
  3. When a Quality Assurance Survey is associated with an existing contact form version, additional options are available to designate the purpose of the follow-up activity being scheduled
  4. Choose if you would like a reminder to pop up to remind your users to schedule the Quality Assurance Survey follow-up. You are able to specify the reminder to pop up every X contacts. For example, every 5th contact the Vols-Staff member would get a reminder.
  5. Set the default selection for how many days after the initial contact the survey should be scheduled to happen. This date can always be changed by your Vols-Staff when completing the initial contact record.
Below is the information that iCarol Support will need to help you get started with setting up your new Quality Assurance Survey:

Contact Form Versions: You get a new contact form version to use as your Quality Assurance Survey. You also choose one of your existing contact form versions you wish to associate this new Quality Assurance Follow-Up Survey to.
  1. What do you want to name your Quality Assurance Survey?
  2. What do you need to collect on your Quality Assurance Survey? You will need to provide all of the data fields (categories, groups/questions, and items/answers) you’d like to have; be sure to also include if the possible answers should be in a pull-down list, check boxes, or a text box. Typically, we see clients define data fields to comply with reporting requirements, as well as to track issues to help analyze the types of sessions you experience. Please provide the list of the data fields you’d like to have in your contact form version in Word or Excel format.
  3. What is the name of the existing contact form version you want your Quality Assurance Survey associated to? 
  4. In the existing form this Quality Assurance Survey, "Purpose is survey" will be available to choose when a follow-up activity is being scheduled for the purpose of a Quality Assurance Survey. Which of the following optional additional purposes should also appear, if any: Purpose is assistance, Purpose is advocacy.
    1. Note, when "Purpose is survey" is selected, the follow-up activity will appear under "Surveys" in the left side table of the main Contacts page; when no purpose or "Purpose is assistance/advocacy" is selected, the follow-up activity will appear under "Follow-Ups" in the left side table
Schedule Follow-Up Reminder Pop-Up: You can choose to set a reminder to pop-up during the initial contact record associated with the Quality Assurance Survey. The pop-up will remind your users to ask the help seeker for consent to follow-up with them.
  1. Do you want a reminder to schedule the follow-up to pop-up?
  2. If yes, how often would you like it to pop up? For example, every contact, every other contact, every 10th contact, etc.
Schedule Follow-Up to Occur: You set the default selection for the date to schedule the follow-up to occur. This date can always be changed by your users when they are filling out the initial contact record.
  1. How many days after the initial contact should the follow-up be scheduled for? You can choose anywhere from 1-30 days.
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.

How to use the Quality Assurance Follow-Up Surveys Feature

Many help lines like to conduct follow-up quality surveys of their help seekers, a few days or weeks after their initial contact, to see if the service was useful, timely, courteous and other factors. With iCarol, you can set up such a survey form, and then your phone workers can invite your help seekers to accept being contacted to do the survey. When the time comes, a phone worker contacts the help seeker, conducts the survey and submits the results. Administrators can run statistics and reports on the overall results, and can use the individual contacts for quality improvement purposes. Please send iCarol staff your request if you want us to turn that feature on for you.

If you have the optional feature that allows you to conduct follow-up quality surveys, here are the steps involved in scheduling, conducting and reporting on them.
  1. First you simply need to schedule when the follow-up quality survey should occur. When creating a contact record, before Submitting, on the Finish tab (or at the bottom of the 'single page' view), choose "Followup Survey" as the purpose of the "Follow-up Activity". Then fill in the other required fields, and select a due date sufficiently in the future (say, 7 days) .You might also want to choose a particular person for Assigned To. This step now indicates that the person has agreed to participate in the follow-up quality survey at a later date.
  2. Next you need to find scheduled follow-up quality surveys so that you can conduct them. On the main Contacts page, under All Contacts, My Recent Contacts, etc, you'll see an area for Surveys. When there are open surveys scheduled (not yet conducted), they will appear on this list. And when they are due or past due, the word Surveys will be highlighted in red. If you do have one scheduled and ready, click on View to see the original incoming contact.
  3. Now that you have found one ready for surveying, you're ready to conduct the survey. Near the top of the form, you'll now see a link to "Create a related Follow-up Quality Survey". Click on that link and it will bring you to a new contact record - the actual survey. Complete the survey and click on Submit. You will also need to close the follow-up that was scheduled.  To do so, in the original contact record, scroll to the bottom of the screen, click "Edit the follow-up below", click the drop-down menu next to Status, choose Closed, then click the Save button.  Now the original contact record will automatically not show up in the Survey section on the main Contacts page (because its survey has been completed and follow-up closed).
  4. As you conduct these surveys, you can start getting data on the main Statistics page. Make sure to filter any chart by clicking on the filter named "Contact Records and Vols-Staff" and un-check all of them but the Follow-up Quality Survey, then click on Update Chart. Now you can get charts and statistics on your follow-up surveys (the aggregate scores to the survey questions). If you are not familiar with using this Analysis tool, please see the Using iCarol Statistics training on the Help page.

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