Feedback Server Features

Feedback Server’s designer uses the latest web 2.0 AJAX and asp.net technologies to create surveys quickly with simple drag and drops in a visual WYSIWYG environment.

Each survey form can be build on an unlimited number of pages using a wide choice of wizards to create quickly and easily questions ranging from single choice, multiple choice, matrix, scaled, constant sum or ranking based questions. A question library is available to keep the most commonly used questions into one place.

          

Complex free form based layouts can be build using custom questions based on the various answers types provided by Feedback Server (e.g : textboxes, calendars, file upload, list collections). While Feedback Server comes already with a wide selection of answer types its possible to create new answer type as well either using the Feedback Server’s user interface or its SDK.

           

For surveys targeting an international audience each form can be translated into any number of languages without having to create different surveys or forms for each new language. The multi-language feature supports all international language encoding standards. Survey content can be send to external translators using the W3C XLIFF compliant format and then re-imported without having to give access to the translators.

        

As corporate design is very important surveys appearance can be fully customized using one of the existing style templates or by creating new templates using the real time style editor. Each style supports custom HTML headers and footers, centering and resizing surveys. Colors of the background, answers or questions can be customized as well and each submit buttons of the survey can be replaced by a custom image.

    

Surveys can be printed out in Word document to comply with offline requirements where paper are required. If online and offline surveys are used both results can be aggregate into one single results within Feedback Server once data collection is finished.

     

Avoiding multiple submissions and avoiding “noise” answers to a survey is very important to obtain a consistent set of information for data analysis.

Feedback Server can protect a survey using several security layers. A survey can be secured by any number of layers, if the respondent fails on one of the layer he won’t be able to access the survey or submit any answers.

Out of the box Feedback Server provides a large set of layers ranging from simple IP, cookie, password, CAPTCHA to more advanced layers like quota based access to close a survey once a certain number of respondent have taken the survey. New security layers can be easily build and added to Feedback Server using its SDK.

        

Also provided with Feedback Server is complete token management system to create unique token either automatically or by importing your own token list. Each token can be distributed online or even off line to give survey access only to respondents owning a valid token. Personal information like email, name can be assigned to each token to track back who responded to the survey or not.

        

Feedback Server offers several many different ways to deploy a survey to the respondents.

A survey can be deployed using a standard unique web link provided by Feedback Server for each survey. This link can be cut and pasted within emails and any standard HTML pages and will open the survey in respondent’s web browser.

Beside the standard generated link it is also possible to create a “friendly link” which can be composed by any custom text to shorten the link size and to ease the usage of the link by respondents.

        

Feedback Server features as well a complete mailing system to send out surveys to any number of emails using its user interface. Each recipient will receive a link and customizable invitation message to take the survey along with a unique code which can be used to track back answers of respondents or to protect the survey against multiple submissions.

Once the mailing has been send each survey administrator is able to see all pending emails or emails having already responded to the survey A reminder can be send to the respondent who did not take the survey after a given time.

        

A survey can even be embedded as a native ASP.net web control inside any ASP.net page using either VB.net or C#. As such each survey will be fully integrated into a website to match the corporate identity of an organization.

  
  

Each deployed surveys are shown to the respondents as a 508 compliant cross browser compatible HTML web page and support any modern or older browser on the market. No page reload or scrolling while posting respondent answers as Feedback Server uses the latest AJAX technologies for its surveys.

          

Feedback Server supports standard integrated validators like required fields, emails, dates but it’s also possible to create custom verification rules by building regular expressions, custom javascript code or using the SDK to create new answer validators. To ensure that your information entered is safe checking is done on both client side and server side.

       

A set of rules can be setup to define the flow of the respondent within the survey using advanced conditional rules. Each rule can be composed of several sub-conditions based on previous answers given by the respondent or external parameters like querystring, browser type or server side session variable. The flow can be controlled using either branching to redirect the user to a given page or skip logic to hide selected questions and answers.

       

To give the respondent the feeling that he’s unique surveys questions or answers text can be dynamically generated with answers given by the respondent using the piping feature for example to display a text entered in a text field within a question shown on a subsequent page .

    

Once the respondent has finished the survey Feedback Server can be either setup to display a customizable “thank you” message based on user answers or redirect the respondent to another site. Answers given to the survey can be reviewed before the final submission and made available as a Word document for download at the end of the survey to the respondent.

       

Once data have been collected and stored it’s time to do some analysis using Feedback Server reporting tools.

Out of the box Feedback Server offers several reporting items like graphic charts, pie charts and bar charts are provided including a free text management interface to display text entered by respondents, display details of a single respondent to see his IP, score, date he took the survey including all his answers. Each report administrator is able to modify respondent’s answers as well.

          

Feedback Server features a report builder to create any number of new reports needed. Each report can be setup using “report items” on any number of pages that are needed. All reports can be saved as a standard Word document which can be changed or used for printing purposes.

          

Each report can be filtered by dates, language or questions filters to provide a more detailed view of the data. Questions filters can be created using any number of conditional rules based on answers given by respondent to the survey.

       

A complete list respondent can used to display respondent based on their survey status (finished, in progress). A full text search is available to find specific respondent based their open text answers.

          

All data can be extracted and exported to third party tools like Excel, Access and can be used directly within SPSS without any conversion work. Feedback Server supports as well the import of existing data, as such its possible to leverage existing data or data collected offline using a paper survey and create consolidated views within Feedback Server.

    

Survey administration can be done online from any place using a simple web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. No client side tools to install, everything is available at any time from everywhere and using any operating system giving full control to administrators and respondents

Each new survey can be build from scratch or using one of the provided templates. Surveys can be exported and imported using industry standard Xml files to share them between different installation or users.

  

Surveys can be organized within folders which can be assigned either to a single user or a group of users, for example some folders could be made available only to the marketing department while others would be available to the human resources only. Moving surveys from one folder to another can be done using an easy to use drag and drop enabled interface. To avoid any data losses a trashcan system allows the recovery of surveys deleted by mistake.

    

Surveys can be open or closed for responses at any time and features the ability to let a respondent to save its progress and resume it at any time using a personal code or to change his answers once they have been submitted. Navigation between pages can also be enabled and opening and close dates while responses are accepted can be setup.

       

Feedback Server features a panel system to create a set of information related to a single entity which will be available across the surveys and use this information to achieve cross-analysis between respondent answers and its entity.

An entity can be for example a customer, employee or student but these are just example as entities are a set of information customizable by the Feedback Server administrator to meet organization’s business needs.

       

No need anymore to ask your respondents for information that is available within an organization, thanks to the panel system you can use this existing data along with respondent answers. A panel entity structure can be integrated as a question in any survey form to make it available to the respondent to which it belongs.

The advantage of this approach is that respondents are directly able to see and update their own information, thus generating a huge economy in time. No more long phone calls to get the latest phone numbers or adresses of existing customers. Each customer will be able to update his information right from a simple survey form which will then be updated right into the system holding his original data.

    

Panels can be either entered manually using the standard Feedback Server panel creation and data entry system or using one of the available panel connectors to connect to sources like Microsoft SQL Server 2000 / 2005 to link existing data with Feedback Server or to CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics CRM or SalesForces CRM to use stored customers or leads and use this information with your surveys.

       

Thanks to Feedback Server’s SDK is very easy to create new panel connectors to use any existing data from any existing data management system within an enterprise.