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  • Qualtrics Platform
    Qualtrics Platform
  • Customer Journey Optimizer
    Customer Journey Optimizer
  • XM Discover
    XM Discover
  • Qualtrics Social Connect
    Qualtrics Social Connect

Frontline Connect


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About the Frontline Connect XM Solution

The Frontline Connect XM Solution provides a simple, yet robust way of gathering important feedback from frontline employees who have their pulse on the issues and challenges currently facing customers. Feedback is gathered online from frontline employees via a re-usable link that can be posted to the organizational intranet, saved to an individual employee’s workstation, or sent in emails from managers to their staff.

The Frontline Connect XM Solution contains the following:

  • a pre-written survey
  • a pre-made CX Dashboard
Qtip: If you don’t currently have access to the Frontline Connect XM Solution and are interested in learning more, check out this page for more details.

Creating the Frontline Connect

Qtip: This XM Solution has been localized into various languages. You will only be able to make this project if your account language is set to one of the compatible languages. However, you can upload translations or auto-translate using Google Translate for content as needed. See the FAQs for more details.
  1. Select Catalog from the global menu.
    Image of global navigation hamburger icon expanded next to xm logo to reveal Catalog option

    Qtip: A project can also be created from the Projects or Homepage.
  2. Under COVID-19 projects, select Frontline Connect.
    Image of catalog, selecting the described project, seeing a sidebar open on the right describing it, ending with a button to get started creating it

    Qtip: You can also use the search in the catalog to find this project.
  3. Click Get started.
  4. Name your project.
    Field for project name and folder. Button to create on bottom-right
  5. If desired, put it in a folder.
  6. Click Create project.
  7. If desired, upload a copy of your organization’s logo. Max file size is 1MB.
    Top, Browse button for uploading an image file. Next, B2B vs. B2C choice, then an open text field for specifying the term for customers, then open optional text for plural form
  8. Select your company’s type. Your answer determines the type of customer information you can configure in the next steps.
    • B2B (business-to-business): Your company creates solutions, services, or products intended to help businesses run more smoothly.
    • B2C (business-to-consumer): Your company creates solutions, services, or products for the everyday consumer.
      Qtip: If you choose B2C, you will not see the options described in Steps 13-19.
  9. Specify how you refer to your customers.
  10. If the plural form of the word entered in the previous step isn’t just the same word with an “s” at the end, enter it here.
  11. If you chose B2B, determine whether you want to be alerted by email when your frontline employee indicates that a customer is “at risk.” If you answer yes to this question, provide the email address the alerts should be sent to.
    Multiple yes / no question, then text field, then open text fields for listing potential actions
  12. If you chose B2B, list the potential actions your frontline employee can take to address a customer’s needs at that time. We provide a few examples.
  13. If you chose B2B, determine whether you want your frontline staff to provide a unique customer ID or account identifier specific to customer accounts when they report an issue. If so, specify the name of the identifier, such as “unique ID” or “account ID.”
    Multiple choice question, if yes, a text field pops up. Below that, another multiple choice question

    Example: If you run a software company, the unique identifier might be “username.”
  14. If you chose B2B, decide whether you want frontline staff to provide additional customer details.
    Qtip: Think of the information that would be useful to the teams troubleshooting this issue.
  15. Add a field name. For example, “Region.”
    adding a demographic field
  16. Use Add Another inside the box to add response choices. For example, “North America,” “Asia,” and “Europe.”
  17. Use Add Another outside the box to add a new demographic field. For example, now we’ve added “Industry.”
    adding more demographic fields then saving
  18. Click Next.
  19. Determine when you would like response notifications sent to you through email and in-account notifications. You can choose between:
    Image of notification settings

    • Yes, notify me every X responses
      Example: Get notified for every 50 responses you receive, so you don’t get a notification for every response.
    • Yes, notify me once we reach X responses
      Example: Get a notification once you reach 150 responses, total.
    • Do not notify me when responses come in
  20. When you’ve filled out these fields, click Finish to generate your survey.
  21. Click Preview Survey to test your survey.
    Survey builder open with a guidance sidebar to the right that takes you through key steps

    Qtip: Did your survey Preview not appear? Make sure your browser doesn’t block pop-ups on Qualtrics.
  22. Click Done to resume the guided setup.
  23. Use the tabs along the top if you’d like to edit components not included in the blue button steps. For example, you can go to the Survey tab to edit the survey theme and add demographic questions, whereas you can go to the Distributions tab to download a distribution history for emails you’ve sent.

Frontline Connect Survey Customization

If you want to see the questions in your survey or edit them, click the Survey tab. Once inside the survey builder, you can add new questions, tweak the wording on existing ones, edit the survey theme, and much more.

The survey builder of a COVID-19 project

If there’s particular functionality you’d like to add, try searching the Support Site, or use the Support Site’s menu to the left to pick a page. In this section, we’ll cover some of the fundamentals of survey editing.

Qtip: The questions included in this survey were developed by our top subject matter experts. We advise trying to keep your survey as similar to the original template as possible, and not making too many large-scale changes.

Adding and Editing Questions

Warning: It’s important to make edits to the survey before you distribute it to customers. If possible, avoid making edits to a survey actively collecting data, or you may risk invalidating your data and changing the premade reports that come with this solution. See Testing / Editing an Active Survey.

You can add as many additional questions as you want. However, keep in mind that the shorter the survey, the more likely customers are to fill it out.

For guides to adding and editing questions, see:

Qtip: For surveys like these, we generally advise sticking to multiple choice and text entry questions.
Qtip: For any questions or fields you add after the survey’s setup, you will need to manually add this content to the dashboard by mapping the field and then adding to the desired widgets / dashboard pages.

Deleting and Restoring Questions

Warning: If you delete a question, it’ll affect the premade dashboard included with this solution! Be prepared to either make edits to dashboard widgets or create new data fields and widgets from scratch.

If you have sent a question to the trash, it is possible to restore it. To roll back many changes at once, see also how to revert a survey back to a previous version.

Display Logic

This solution comes with custom display logic. Display logic affects what questions respondents see, based on previous answers they provided. For example, we can ask the employee if a customer seems to be at risk for churn or loss of revenue, and then ask additional clarification questions based on if they said yes.

Question with blue widget on top that says the conditions under which the question will appear

Warning: When you remove or edit a question, it can affect display logic on another question. Be sure to double-check your survey before making these edits!

Piped Text

In the survey, you’ll notice a lot of questions have bracketed text in them. This text is called piped text, and it acts as a placeholder for other values. In this case, certain specifications you made in setup – the most common being how you refer to your customers – will be placed where the brackets are.

piped text in the survey text, which will be replaced when respondents take the survey

Don’t worry – when your employees are completing the survey, they won’t see the Piped Text. Here’s how this same question looks when accessing the survey link or previewing:

Question just says the word customers instead of having curly brackets

Survey Flow

In the survey flow, you’ll find an embedded data element at the top. This element helps organize your data for reporting.

Survey flow open, green embedded data element at the very beginning

Warning: This element should remain at the top of the survey flow. Deleting or moving it can affect how these fields are saved in survey responses and thus how they are displayed in reports and dashboards.

You may also see branch logic in your survey flow. This feature allows you to hide or show entire groups of questions based on answers respondents gave earlier in the survey. (Kind of like display logic, but on a larger scale.) Please do not remove or edit this element without paying close attention to the question the logic is based off of and the block of questions the branch logic is controlling.

Example: The employee specifies what kind of issue they want to report. Based on this, they are sent to a specific block of questions based on that particular kind of issue. If they want to report a specific customer issue, they will go to the “Specific Customer Issue” block.
Branch is a blue element with a condition written on it; under that, indented, is a gray block

Saving and Publishing

All edits you make are saved automatically; however, they won’t necessarily be pushed to the live version of the survey. When you are finished with all of your edits and are ready to generate a link and share the survey with your customers, remember to click Publish in the upper-right.

For more on how this works, see Survey Publishing & Versions.

Pre-Configured Workflows

The Frontline Connect comes with items already set up in the Workflows tab. This means that during the project’s setup, you did one of the following:

  1. You said you’d like to be notified if a frontline employee indicates a customer is “at risk.” As a result, we created an email task that will go out to your specified teams / colleagues letting them know that a customer is at risk.
  2. You said you’d like to be notified when you receive a certain number of responses. As a result, we set up an notifications feed task so you will be alerted appropriately.

the workflows for a frontline connect solution

As needed, you can either review or edit:

  • Who receives the notification
  • The conditions under which the condition are sent
  • The message included in the notification
Qtip: Once you’ve configured the tasks as desired, make sure they are enabled.
The same notification as the above, but the warning text is gone, and the "turn on/ off" column is set to on
Qtip: This email task is a feature of the B2B version of this solution. If you chose B2C, this workflow will not be created for you by default because the B2C solution also does not come with an “at risk” component. You can add any workflows you desire.

About the At-Risk Notification

The email will only be sent if the employee filling out the survey indicated that they would categorize the customer as “at-risk.”

After the survey event, condition is listed

Click Email to view details such as who’s the recipient of the email notification, the message, and other settings.

Action is open, green email icon towards bottom

By default, the message contains:

  • The date the customer completed the survey
  • Their first and last name
  • Their preferred email address or phone number
  • The email saved for them in the contact list
  • A recommendation to reach out to the customer within 48 hours

For additional details and editing options, see the Email Task support page.

About the Response Notifications

Depending on the frequency you chose, these conditions are set up with one of the following:

  1. Embedded data set in the survey flow.
  2. Quotas.

Do not edit the conditions on these workflows, the corresponding embedded data in the survey flow, or the quotas involved.

If you don’t want to receive this notification after all, you may delete the workflow. Please note that once you delete a workflow, it cannot be retrieved.

Qtip: This workflow is unrelated to weekly response notifications. See the linked section to learn how to subscribe or unsubscribe to weekly digests.

Sharing the Frontline Connect with Employees

Once you are completely finished with survey edits and your contact list is ready, it’s time to distribute your survey.

  1. Make sure you have published any survey edits.
    clicking the publish button
  2. Open the Guidance panel.
    the guidance panel with the launch section open. click button described
  3. Navigate to the Launch section.
  4. Select either Distributions or Begin receiving frontline feedback.
  5. Click Anonymous Link to the left.
    selecting the anonymous link
  6. Copy the link and share it as desired – for example, post it to your internal employee intranet site, save it to an individual employee’s workstation, or have managers email it to their staff.

Qtip: If you publish changes, the menu that opens will also give you your anonymous link.

Publishing a survey and being presented with the anonymous link

Other Distribution Options

If you are interested in other methods of distribution, such as SMS or emailing a contact list, see the Distributions Basic Overview for a list of options. Please note that depending on your license, not all options may be available, and some may be restricted.

Dashboards

Premade Dashboards

Our XM Scientists have developed a special dashboard for this XM Solution. This dashboard gives an overview of the results, and is ready to share as soon as you have collected data. The pages of the dashboard and the data included will depend on the type of assessment you chose and whether you have decided to give respondents an option for follow-up.

  1. Open the Guidance panel.
    the guidance panel with the analyze section open. click view dashboard to open the dashboard
  2. Navigate to the Analyze section.
  3. Click View Dashboard to enter the dashboard.
  4. Scroll through the widgets and select pages to the left to see your data.
    Dashboard with company logo, dashboard name, responses collected, then next row a gauge chart and a bar chart
Qtip: This dashboard will not generate charts and tables until you collect data. Try completing the survey through the preview button if you want to test what these dashboards look like with data. Remember you can always delete preview data later.
Qtip: Number charts will show the change in certain metrics over the past week. This information is most useful starting your second week of data collection and onwards from there.

If you instead selected Set up dashboard sharing, you’ll be redirected to the User Admin tab. See Sharing & Administering Users for guidance on what changes you can make here, and what kind of Qualtrics users can access this tab.

Dashboard Editing

Qtip: The pre-made dashboard was developed by our top subject matter experts. We advise trying to keep your dashboard as similar to the original template as possible, and not making too many large-scale changes.

Check out these introductory pages to get started.

Qtip: Once you’ve uploaded all your dashboard users, you can easily send many users or send everyone their login credentials.

Other Ways to Access the Dashboard

Anytime you enter your project’s Overview tab, you’ll be able to select View Dashboard to enter the pre-made dashboard.

You can also access this dashboard from your Projects page. It will have the same name as your Frontline Connect project, with “- Dashboard” added to the end.

Example: Below, you can see our Frontline Connect and the corresponding Dashboard.

Projects selected upper-right, next to Contacts button, down there is a list of projects with green C icons on them, the one labeled customer confidence pulse next to that green icon is it

Once you click inside, you’ll see the pre-made dashboard. Click this to view the data.

Dashboards tab. One thing is listed. The title is highlighted so you know this is where you click to enter it and see the charts and such shown earlier

Warning: Do not delete the premade dashboard! If you do, it will not be retrievable, and you will have to make a new one from scratch.

Other Ways to View Data

The Data & Analysis tab of your project allows you to edit data, export a spreadsheet of all responses, filter your responses, and much more.

the data and analysis tab

Qtip: To preview a particular column of data, choose columns to display on Data & Analysis. You can export this data at any time.

The Reports tab comes with two additional report-building features. These do not come with the dynamic, shareable filters and roles CX Dashboards have but are more basic in structure and can still be filtered and shared out to stakeholders as needed. Note that these reports will have to be built from scratch. See Results vs. Reports for a detailed breakdown of these reporting options.

navigating to results and reports

Weekly Response Notifications

Qtip: You may not see this functionality yet. That’s because this feature is still gradually rolling out. When the feature is enabled for your COVID-19 XM Solutions, you will see weekly notifications come in on Mondays.

Built in are weekly reports of how many responses your survey has received in the past week, and how many responses that makes for the survey in total. These notifications come every Monday morning.

Reports are sent as emails and as notifications in your account.

Qtip: Weekly digests are only sent for COVID-19 XM Solutions that are active and have received responses over the last two weeks.

Viewing Reports

Email listing number of survey responses. Under the text is a blue button for viewing reports

View report: Clicking View report in the email or clicking the in-product notification will take you to the Reports section of the Reports tab of your project, where you should see the pre-built report.

Notification in product saying how many responses were received

Qtip: If you’re clicking these buttons from your email, you may need to log into your account before you are taken to these tabs.

Unsubscribing from Notifications

If you no longer wish to receive notifications, you can click unsubscribe at the bottom of the email.

Unsubscribe button at the very bottom of the email

Qtip: This will unsubscribe you from all notifications. You cannot unsubscribe from a specific project.

Subscribing to Updates

Most users will be subscribed to these automatically. However, if you unsubscribed and find you want to start receiving them again, you can do the following:

Qtip: Users that have 10 or more active surveys that have received responses in the last 2 weeks will not be automatically subscribed.
  1. Go to your Qualtrics account.
  2. In the upper-right corner, click the notifications icon.
    Bell upper-right, once opened, settings gear is below that, further right
  3. Click the settings gear.
  4. Select Workflows to subscribe to notifications set up using the Workflows tab.
    navigating to settings and selecting workflow notifications
  5. You may need to select Notifications first if you at some time or another unsubscribed from all account notifications.

Terms of Use: CX COVID-19 Solutions

Free Accounts 

For customers who sign up from the “Here to Help” or “Return to Work” landing pages or via Qualtrics Surveys, the following applies:

  • Customer Confidence Pulse, Digital Open Door, & Frontline Connect: The ability to launch new projects expires 90 days after the first of these projects has been launched AND has received a response or if the customer has hit their limit of 20k total free responses received (combined across the three solutions), whichever comes first.
  • Digital Open Door: Unlimited page views.

Post expiration, customers will need to export their data within 6 months or upgrade to a paid CX product.

Existing Customers

For existing customers who have a CX5 license or a CX / RC license with rights to required features (e.g. CX 1/3 with a Digital add-on), the following applies:

  • There currently is no time restriction around how many Customer Confidence Pulse, Digital Open Door, or Frontline Connect projects can be created.
  • Upon reaching the limit of 20k total free responses received (combined across the three solutions), additional responses will be billed to the license.
Qtip: If you aren’t sure what license type you have or if you’re interested in upgrading, contact your Account Executive or XM Success Manager.

FAQs