Surveys give you a structured way to collect feedback from users after incidents, service requests, or other business events. This guide walks you through building a survey, setting up automatic triggers, and accessing responses.
Why manual feedback collection breaks down
Most teams want feedback after incidents or service requests, but asking manually doesn't scale. IT teams end up with inconsistent data collection, low response rates, and no systematic way to identify service quality trends. The people who need this data — service managers and team leads — either get nothing or get anecdotal feedback that's hard to act on. Manual outreach works for high-severity incidents, but you'll never get meaningful data on day-to-day service delivery.
How ServiceNow surveys work
A ServiceNow survey is a structured form with question types like rating scales, multiple choice, and text fields. You build the survey once, then configure triggers that automatically send it when specific conditions are met — like when an incident closes or a service request completes. The survey gets delivered via email with a link back to your instance. Responses flow into a dashboard where you can analyze completion rates, satisfaction scores, and identify patterns. The progression is: basic survey with manual sends, then triggered sends, then response analysis and service improvements.
From basic surveys to feedback programs
Once your basic survey works, the improvements that matter are: segmenting surveys by service type or team so questions stay relevant, setting up response rate monitoring to identify survey fatigue, and integrating survey scores with SLA dashboards to track service quality trends. Production-quality survey programs use conditional logic to ask follow-up questions based on initial responses, route negative feedback to management for follow-up, and feed satisfaction data back into service improvement initiatives.
Before you start
- •Assessments plugin (com.snc.assessment) activated
- •survey_admin or admin role
- •Email properly configured for outbound notifications
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Step by step
Create the survey record
Navigate to Assessments > Surveys > All and click New. Fill in the Name (this appears in emails), Short description (internal reference), and set Active to true. In the Advanced tab, set the Survey type to 'Survey' and leave Anonymous unchecked — you want to track who responded. Save the record.
Use descriptive names like 'Post-Incident Feedback' rather than generic ones — you'll have multiple surveys eventually.
Add survey questions
In the Survey Questions related list, click New. Set the Question type first — use 'Scale' for satisfaction ratings (1-5 or 1-10), 'Choice' for multiple choice, or 'Text' for open-ended responses. Fill in the Question text exactly as users should see it. For scale questions, set Max value (typically 5 or 10) and add Scale text to explain what the numbers mean. Set Order to control sequence and mark Required as needed.
Start with 3-5 questions maximum — longer surveys have terrible completion rates.
Configure automatic survey triggers
Navigate to System Definition > Business Rules and create a new rule. Name it clearly like 'Send Post-Incident Survey'. Set Table to your target table (incident, sc_request, etc.) and When to 'after'. In the Filter Conditions, add 'State changes to Closed' or your specific completion state. In the Advanced tab, check the 'Advanced' checkbox and add a script that calls gs.eventQueue() with event 'survey.trigger' and pass the record's sys_id as a parameter.
Test triggers on a non-production table first — survey spam annoys users fast.
Set up survey email template
Go to System Notification > Email > Notifications and create a new notification. Set Name to match your survey, Table to match your trigger table, and When to 'Event is fired'. Set the Event name to 'survey.trigger' (matching your business rule). In the Who will receive tab, add the user field that contains the person to survey (like Caller or Requested for). Write a clear email subject and body that explains why they're getting the survey and includes the survey link using ${survey_link}.
Connect survey to notification
Return to your survey record and scroll to the Survey Triggers related list. Click New to create a trigger. Set Name descriptively, Table to your target table, and Notification to the notification you just created. Set Active to true and configure any additional filter conditions if needed. This links your survey to the automatic sending process.
Test the complete workflow
Create a test record on your target table (incident, request, etc.) and close it to trigger the survey. Verify the email sends, the survey link works, and responses appear in Assessments > Survey Results. Check the Survey Dashboard under Assessments > Dashboards for completion rate tracking. If anything fails, check the Event Log under System Logs > Events for errors.
Monitor response patterns
Navigate to Assessments > Survey Dashboard to view completion rates, average scores, and response trends. Set up regular reviews of this data — weekly for new surveys, monthly once established. Low completion rates usually mean too many questions, unclear emails, or survey fatigue from over-surveying the same users.
Best practices
Never survey the same user more than once per week across all surveys — track this manually or build suppression logic into your triggers.
Set survey expiration to 7-14 days maximum — older feedback loses relevance and clutters your response data.
Always include at least one scale question for trending and one text question for actionable feedback — pure ratings tell you if there's a problem but not what to fix.
Test survey emails from a real user account, not admin — corporate email filters often block automated messages differently.
Build survey triggers with explicit state checking rather than just 'on update' — you'll avoid duplicate sends when records get touched after closing.
Test Your Knowledge
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