When you send a survey, you’re looking for answers. So it makes sense to store those responses as user attributes which equip your team with the information they need to personalize every customer’s experience based on the responses they gave.
Teammate permissions
Teammates need the manage surveys permission to be able to set Surveys live.
Storing customer responses as user attributes
While you’re creating your survey questions, look under “Question settings” and click “Store answer to a user attribute”.
Note: On Long text entry survey questions, this feature is unavailable.
Then, either choose an existing attribute or create a new one.
Note: You must have the 'can manage workspace data' permission to create a new user attribute. Learn how to manage permissions for your team here.
Your survey responses to this question will now be stored under this user attribute as customers respond to your survey. See how responses to different question types are stored.
There are a couple of important things to note:
Attributes have a 255 character limit. Responses exceeding this limit will be truncated. However, you can view the full response on the survey's stats page.
You cannot save responses as company attributes.
For NPS, numeric rating, star and emoji scales, you can only save responses as number attributes. This means for star rating and emoji rating scales, the position of the star or emoji the customer selects will be the number attribute saved. (E.g. the 🙁 will be stored as a 2 in the Emoji rating survey above.)
For small free text, dropdown & multiple choice and multi select, these can only be saved as text attributes.
The large free text cannot be saved as an attribute due to the character limit for attributes.
Once you’ve started storing customer responses as user attributes, you are ready to set up workflows to drive action based on response data.
Storing emoji rating responses
Emojis are stored to number attributes as a numeric value. The number will depend on the scale used.
3 point emoji scale:
Emoji | 😠 | 😐 | 😄 |
Stored as | 1 | 2 | 3 |
5 point emoji scale:
Emoji | 😠 | 🙁 | 😐 | 😄 | 🤩 |
Stored as | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Storing multi-select multiple choice responses
When a user selects more than one answer from a multiple choice question, their answers will be stored as comma separated values on the attribute. As with all other question types, if the character length exceeds 255 characters (which is the attribute character limit), the answer will be truncated on the attribute. You can see the full answer list in their survey report.
How responses are stored
Survey responses are stored per step submission. This means that for surveys that have multiple steps, any time a user answers all required questions in a single step and clicks the ‘Submit’ button, we will store the responses for that step.
Storing responses in this manner allows us to capture response data from users who don’t complete the survey (i.e. they dismiss or abandon it), in addition to users who do complete it.
If a user navigates away from a survey before completing or dismissing it, the next time they see the survey they will be returned to the same step that they were last on. In other words, they will not be expected to start the survey again and can pick up from where they left off.
Things to note:
It’s not currently possible for a user to go back a step in a survey.
When storing responses as attributes in Intercom and triggering actions based on the data collected, it’s important to remember that the attribute will be updated in real time (potentially before the user has completed the survey) and consider the impact that this behaviour might have. If sending follow up messages, it might be best to orchestrate this experience in a Series, to ensure that actions are only taken appropriately e.g. if the user should have completed the survey, or if there should be an explicit wait time before they receive more content.
Let’s put those user attributes to work!
Trigger a Series
If you stored responses to your NPS® survey as user attributes, you could then trigger a Series to begin after a user has given an NPS® score of 6 or less. You could send a follow-up email from their Customer Success Manager asking them if they need any additional help or would like to schedule a quick chat. Learn more about orchestrating your customer messaging with Series to drive action at the optimal moment.
Tailor workflows
Use collected user attributes inside Intercom to target messages, create rules, filter reports and build other powerful automated workflows. For example, if you stored responses to your survey question about dietary requirements, you could set up a background rule in Workflows that routed customers to the correct dietician on your team to handle their specific food query. Find more information about automating your Help Desk with Workflows.
Configure the Messenger experience
Make the Messenger experience more personal by surfacing content based on a user’s interests. For example, if you stored responses to your “Favorite hobbies survey” as user attributes, you could promote a cycling blog in the Messenger to users who selected this as their favorite hobby by making this user attribute the audience rule. There are plenty of ways to customize the Messenger home with apps.
Find more inspiration on how to create responsive customer experiences by checking out these 9 cool ways you can use stored data. 💪
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