A general guide to creating and issuing vendor surveys

This article will provide a big picture view on how to create surveys that can be sent out to your team in order to rate and gather information about your vendors. 

Creating a Survey Template

To start off we will need to create a survey to send out. This is done through Vendors > Manage Performance which can be found in the main header menu. 

The default view here is Survey Responses in which you can view your completed and in progress surveys. Recurring Surveys will show the surveys that are set to be sent out on an automated recurring basis. For now we will click the middle option, Survey Templates, which will show us the surveys we have available to send out. Here we will click New Survey Template to create a new survey. After giving the survey a name in the popup that appears we are brought to this page: 

This is where we will build our survey. The Name field will allow you to rename your survey while the Instruction area provides a space to provide details that might be needed by participants to complete their portion of the survey. The Survey Preview button will show you what your survey will look like when it is sent out. The Version is an important one to take note of. Once you have finish building your survey you will need to publish it using the Banner Icon before you can send it out. Once published a survey template cannot be changed. If you need to make changes to a template after it has been published you will need to create a new version using the File Icon.

Below the Instruction area is where the survey will actually be built. Surveys can be split into sections to group similar questions together and each question can be one of a few types. There are a lot of options here and we will cover all of them in a more in-depth article. For now I've added a simple range question so we can demonstrate the next step in issuing your survey. 

This is a survey with one section and one question. At this point this survey is ready to publish, but in order to actually send the survey our for completion we must first set Participant Roles in order to determine who is responding to this survey. 

Vendor/Participant Roles

Note that we have not yet mentioned selecting a vendor for our survey. This is because the survey template can be used to create a survey about any vendor which will be chosen when we go to submit our survey. By using Vendor Roles you can assign sections and questions of the survey to certain participants on a per vendor basis. For example: We want to send out a survey for two vendors, Vendor A and Vendor B. In our procurement team Mark is in charge of Vendors A and Sarah is in charge of Vendor B. In Vendorful we can create a "Procurement" role and assign that role to a section of our survey which deals with procurement. When the survey is sent out Mark will receive the survey for Vendor A and Sarah will recieve the survey for Vendor B. Let's look at how to set this up. 

To start we will go to Vendors > Manage Your Vendors in the main header menu and then click the Manage Roles button. 

This page shows the current roles we have available. Users who belong to these roles will be set on a per vendor basis, so this page just allows you to create custom roles depending on the needs of your team. In this screenshot we have a Procurement role and an IT role so when we create surveys we can assign the sections of the survey that are relevant to each respective team. Clicking Create New Role allows to create a new role with a Name and a Description. With our roles created let's assign users to these roles. 

To demonstrate we're going to assign Bernard, from our Procurement team, to the Procurement role for our vendor Blue Sun. Go to Vendors > Manage Your Vendors in the main header menu. In your vendor list select the vendor who's roles you would like to edit. In our case Blue Sun. on the vendor's page go to the Roles tab where you will see a list of the roles you have created. Edit the users in that role by clicking the Pencil Icon on the right side of the row and click the name of the team member you would like to add to that role. You may need to use the search box to find the user you are looking for. The video below demonstrates this process. 

With our Vendor Role created and a user set to that role we're now ready to assign that role to our survey.

Assigning Participant Roles

Let's go back to our survey template that we created (Vendors > Manage Performance > Survey Templates) and assign a role to our single section. This is done in the Participant Roles field for each section of the survey. 

To add a role to a section, in that section's Participant Roles field click Add Roles. This will show a list of the roles that were created in Vendor Management. Click the Plus Icon to add that role to the section. Now, for any vendors you submit this survey template for, whoever is assigned to that role for that vendor will be assigned to fill out this section of the survey. You also have the option of assigning each question in a section individually by clicking the icon next to "Assignment: per section". Changing this option will only affect that section so while some section might be per section others can be per question. You can continue to do this for the rest of the sections in your survey. All sections must be assigned a role in order to submit the survey. 

Starting a New Survey

With our template published and our Participant Roles assigned we're ready to send out our survey. Back at our Manage Performance page (Vendors > Manage Performance), with the Survey Responses tab selected click on New Survey. This will bring up a pop up that will allow us to select an existing template or create a new one. Since we've already created a template we can select it in the drop-down. This gives a preview of the survey so we can verify this is the correct version. When we're ready we can click Select Vendors to proceed. 

If you've ever run an RFx on Vendorful you'll be familiar with the setup of this part of the process. Submitting a survey has four steps which can been seen and navigated using the vertical menu on the left side of the screen. By default you start on step two of the process, selecting vendors, since the setup details were selected in the previous popup, but it is possible to go back to that step to edit the details before submitting. 

1. Setup - This step is mostly completed by the popup when creating a new survey. Here we set the name of our survey setup as well as the survey and version that is being used. The name of the setup default to the name of the survey template being used. If this is acceptable there is no need to change anything here.

2. Vendors - This is the step where we select which vendors that will be the subject of the survey. You can select any number of vendors here and a survey will be sent for each one. 

3. Schedule - Surveys can be set up as one time surveys or as recurring surveys. On this step you can select how frequently the survey should be run and on what day that should start. 

4. Review & Submit - If everything went smoothly you should be met with a screen similar to the one below. Here you can review the details of the survey. In the Questions and Assignments section you can see the survey's sections and questions and the user assigned to them for each vendor. The drop-down to the right allows you to switch between invited vendors to confirm each vendors survey is being assigned to the right person.  

If everything checks out then the survey is ready to go by clicking the Submit (or Activate if this is a recurring survey) button at the top of the view.

Common Errors

You may run into a warning banner that looks similar to the following image when trying to submit your survey. 

This is usually caused by a role not being set either on the survey template or no user has been assigned to that role for an invited vendor. The Set Participants link will take you to the survey template where you can verify that each section (or question if the section is set to per question assignment) has been assigned a role. If everything looks ok there then it is likely that one of the invited vendors has not had a role used in the template assigned to a user. You can use the vendor drop-down in the Questions and Assignments section of the review to see if there are any vendors causing the issue. Vendors without roles assigned will appear in red test with an error label as pictured below. 

Surveys in Progress and Viewing Completed Surveys

Once we've submitted the survey we can track its progress at the Vendors > Manage Performance page and clicking on Survey Responses.

Here we can see all of our in progress and completed surveys which can be filtered with the buttons at the top of the list. Surveys in progress will show how many responses it is waiting on in order to close, and clicking on that survey will show a review screen where you can see exactly who has yet to respond. By default, surveys will remain open until either all participants have responded or one week passes. Once completed, you can click on a survey to review the results. 

There's a lot of valuable information on this page. If your survey included range type answers the survey will result in a score which is shown at the top of the screen as well as any changes in score that happened since this survey was last conducted. Below this we can see a breakdown of how the vendor was rated overall for each section and question. Finally, the last section will show us how each participant rated the vendors and we can click on See full evaluation to see their complete response. 

Completed surveys can also be seen for each vendor on the vendor's page under the Performance tab which is found right next to the roles tab.