Follow-up Survey Calls

A review request emailed the day a job closes tells you how the visit went. A phone call three months later tells you how the work held up: the part that didn't fail, the leak that came back, the tech who explained things well. That second answer is worth more, and almost nobody collects it.

Follow-ups do this for you. A finished job (or reservation, or agreement) puts a survey call in your Work Queue at the time you choose. Whoever takes it reads a short survey to the customer, and the answers are saved against that exact job and the people who worked it.

When you'd use this

You want an honest quality score that isn't limited to the people who bother to leave online reviews.
You want to know which technicians customers rate highest, over many jobs and not one memorable complaint.
You want to catch an unhappy customer while there's still time to fix it, before they leave a one-star review.

If you only want online reviews, the review request email on its own is simpler. Follow-ups work alongside it (see The review request below).

Switching it on

The quickest way is the automation template. In Automations, start a new automation and choose Job completed → survey call in 3 months. It is set up like this:

When a job's status changes, if the job is now closed,
then Create Follow-up Survey Call, after a delay of 3 months.

Change the delay to suit your work. Recommended: 1 month for repairs, 3 months for installs and seasonal service, 6 to 12 months for big-ticket installs. The delay now accepts months directly.

You can build variations the same way. Add conditions (only certain job types, only jobs over $500), or trigger off a reservation checkout or an agreement closing instead. The action's Follow up on setting ties the survey to the job, reservation or agreement the automation is about.

New accounts get asked about this during setup, as Checking in after a job. The box starts unticked, so it only switches on if you say yes.

The rules that stop you over-calling people

Automated follow-ups respect three rules automatically:

One per job. A job that is reopened and closed again doesn't get a second survey.
Not too often. A customer who had any follow-up in the last 60 days is skipped. Change the number in Queue settings.
Do not survey. Tick Customer asked not to be surveyed again on any survey and they are never called by an automation again.

Skipped follow-ups show in the automation's activity log with the reason, so you can tell "skipped" from "broken".

These rules apply to automations only. Staff can always take another survey by hand. On any job, agreement, reservation or customer page, the Follow-ups & surveys card has a Take a survey button, and you can survey the same customer as often as you need.

Starting with jobs you've already finished

The automation only catches jobs as they close, from the day you switch it on. It never looks back. To survey work you've already done, for example every job since January, use Add past jobs to the queue in the Work Queue's ... menu. You need the Manage Follow-ups & Queue Settings permission.

Pick the jobs. Choose a date range, and optionally a job type or business unit. Only finished jobs count; cancelled and still-open jobs are left out.
Choose how to handle customers with several jobs.
- One call per customer, about their most recent job. Recommended. Nobody gets three calls in a week, and the most recent job is the one they remember.
- One call per job, if you want a rating for every technician on every job and your customers won't mind.
Set the pace. Pick a start date and how many calls a day your team can realistically make (20 is a good start), weekdays only. The follow-ups are spread across the coming days, oldest jobs first, so the queue doesn't suddenly hold 600 calls.
Preview. You see how many finished jobs matched, how many calls will be created, and what was skipped and why: customers who asked not to be surveyed, jobs that already have a follow-up, customers surveyed recently, or other jobs for the same customer. You also see the date range the calls will cover. Nothing is created until you press Add to queue.

Made a mistake? The same window lists Earlier runs. Remove untouched takes a run's calls back out of the queue. It only removes calls nobody has tried yet, so a survey someone already started or finished is never lost.

Recommended: do this once when you start using follow-ups, then switch on the automation for everything going forward. Running it again later won't double up, because jobs that already have a follow-up are always skipped.

Writing the survey

A starter survey, Service follow-up call, is already there. It asks for a 1–5 satisfaction score, whether the technician was on time and professional, and whether anything could have been better. Edit it, or build your own, in the survey builder (Build surveys from the Work Queue's ... menu). Set Who answers it to Staff read it to the customer on a follow-up call.

A few rules for a survey read aloud:

Three to five questions, maximum. You're calling someone at dinner time. Every question past five costs you completed surveys.
Put the 1–5 rating first. If they hang up after one question, you still have the score.
Pick the score question. If a survey has more than one rating question, choose which one is the "score" that the dashboard averages.
End with an open question. "Anything we could have done better?" produces the comments that actually change how you work.

Phone surveys never appear in the customer portal. Portal surveys and phone surveys are kept apart.

Taking the survey

From the Work Queue, open the follow-up and press Call. When they answer, press Start the survey. The survey window shows who you're calling, what job it's about, and who worked it. Tap the score, answer the rest, add anything they said in the notes box, and Save survey.

The answers are saved:

to the customer's notes and the job's notes, as a readable summary;
on the Follow-ups & surveys card of the job (or reservation, or agreement), so anyone looking at that job later sees what the customer thought of it;
on the customer's Follow-ups tab, which lists every follow-up they've ever had, across all their jobs.

If you can't reach them, use Try again later. If they don't want to do it, use Declined survey with a reason. Both behave like any other queue item.

After a low score

When a score is at or below the low-score line (2 out of 5 by default), the survey window asks whether a manager should call them back. Say yes and an Urgent call goes straight to the top of the Work Queue, tied to this survey. Assign it to a specific manager if you like, and add a line about what went wrong.

Recommended: always say yes. A customer who told you it went badly and then heard nothing is the one who writes the public review.

The review request

After saving a survey, the window offers Send review request. That's your usual review request email. It follows the same rule as always: it's only offered when the customer hasn't already left a good review, so you never ask a happy reviewer twice. If they have, the window tells you so instead.

Sending it after a good phone survey is the best-timed review request you'll ever send: they have just told a real person they were happy.

The survey dashboard

Follow-up Surveys in the left menu (or Survey dashboard in the Work Queue's ... menu) shows:

Average score: last 30 days, last 90 days and all time, with an arrow showing whether the last month is better or worse than your long-run average.
Happy customers: the share who scored 4 or 5.
Reached: how many follow-ups ended in a survey, versus declined or never reached.
Score by month and surveys by month, to see a trend and whether you're keeping up with the calls.
Employees who worked the jobs, ranked by average score. Everyone who had an appointment on the job or logged hours against it gets that survey's score. Nobody is ranked until they have at least three surveys, so one bad call can't put someone at the bottom. People below that line are listed separately as "not enough yet".
Lowest recent scores and what customers said: the two lists to read every week.
Breakdowns by job type, by business unit, and who took the surveys.

The employee rankings need the View Per-Employee Ratings permission, separate from seeing the dashboard, so you can share the overall scores widely without putting individual ratings in front of everyone.

Common mistakes

Surveying too soon. A follow-up the week after a job is a thank-you call, not a quality check. Give the work time to prove itself.
Long surveys. Completion drops off sharply after the third question. Cut ruthlessly.
Ignoring the low-score callback. The whole point is to find unhappy customers early. If the callback sits unworked, you've paid for the call and got nothing.
Reading rankings with small numbers. A tech with four surveys averaging 3.5 and one with forty averaging 4.4 aren't comparable yet. Look at the survey count before drawing conclusions.
Surveying a customer who asked you not to. Tick Customer asked not to be surveyed again the moment they say so; automations respect it from then on.