Relationship surveys

Transactional surveys tell you how a single support interaction went. Relationship surveys tell you how your customers feel about IT (or a project) overall. They’re short, three-question NPS surveys you run periodically — an annual “How satisfied are you with IT?”, or feedback during and after a project like a Windows rollout. This page explains what they are, the two ways to send them, and how to set each up.

What a relationship survey is

A relationship survey is a 3-question Net Promoter survey. The difference from a transactional survey is that Question 1’s wording is dynamic — you set what you’re asking about using the bun (“business unit name”) parameter in the survey URL.

• &bun=IT → “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with IT?”
• &bun=the%20Windows%2010%20Rollout → “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the Windows 10 Rollout?”

As with every ciopulse survey, you can’t add or remove questions or change the 0–10 scale.

You can preview your relationship survey with your own URL from View your URLs in the Portal, adding &discard so the test response isn’t saved.

Survey records and Survey Series

Before you send invitations, you create a Relationship Survey record in the Portal for the responses to attach to (e.g. Annual Survey 2026 or Project X – Q1). Every record belongs to a Survey Series, which lets you compare results over time on the Survey Series dashboard — for example Annual Survey 2024 vs 2025 vs 2026, or VIP Stakeholders Q1 → Q4. If a survey doesn’t belong with others, assign it to “No series”.

There are two kinds of series: Automated (ciopulse creates the survey and sends invitations on a schedule) and Manual (you create each survey and send invitations yourself).

Two ways to send a relationship survey

	Automated	Manual
Who sends invitations	ciopulse, by email	You, via your own email system (usually a mail merge)
Best for	Recurring surveys (e.g. every 6 months) to a known list	One-offs, or when you’d rather send from your own domain
Recipient list	Uploaded “Stakeholder Group” CSV	Your own mailing list

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Option 1 — Automated relationship surveys

ciopulse emails the invitations for you, on the schedule you define.

Step 1 — Upload a Stakeholder Group

A Stakeholder Group is the list of people to survey. Prepare it in Excel and save as CSV with five columns, in this order:

1. Email address — where the invitation is sent (ciopulse doesn’t validate these, so check them carefully).
2. First name — used in the email greeting.
3. Customer ID — a unique identifier stored against each response (employee ID, full name, or email). Use Anonymous for anonymous responses. If two responses share an ID, the later one replaces the earlier.
4. Segment 1 — a Segment code from the Portal, or NONE.
5. Segment 2 — a Segment code from the Portal, or NONE.

In the Portal, go to Upload Stakeholder Groups, give the group a name, and upload the CSV. ciopulse validates it and reports any errors (e.g. duplicate IDs, invalid segment codes) for you to fix and re-upload.

Privacy

Uploaded CSVs are encrypted at rest. The email addresses are used only to send invitations — they’re not stored against individual responses and never appear on a report or dashboard. Only the Customer ID is stored against a response.

Step 2 — Create an Automated Survey Series

Go to Survey Series → Add Automated Survey Series and set:

• Series Name and Series Code (unique, no spaces or special characters).
• Stakeholder Group to invite.
• Schedule — choose a basis and the supporting fields:

Schedule basis	Example
n’th day of every m month(s)	15th of every 3 months
n’th day-of-week of every m month(s)	1st Friday of every 6 months
Last day-of-week of every m month(s)	Last Monday of every 2 months
Last day of every m month(s)	Last day of every month
Every n days	Every 90 days
Listed dates	1/1/2026, 1/5/2026, 1/9/2026 (GMT, dd/mm/yyyy)

• Not Before / Not After dates — the window in which the series may run.
• Days Open — how long each survey stays open for NPS purposes.
• Survey Subject (what Q1 asks about), Email Subject, Email Body ({{name}}, {{subject}} and the mandatory {{button}} placeholders), and whether to skip the welcome page.
• Active? — set to Yes to make the series live.

Tip

For a one-off automated send, set the schedule basis to Listed dates and enter a single date. The earliest a survey can run is tomorrow (GMT) — you can’t schedule one for today.

ciopulse checks the schedule once a day (around 1–2am GMT) and, when a series is due, creates the Relationship Survey record and emails the invitations (about 90 per minute). Use the “Click me” test link on the series to send yourself a sample invitation first.

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Option 2 — Manual relationship surveys

You send the invitations from your own email system. ciopulse just records the survey and collects responses.

Step 1 — Create the survey record

Go to Relationship Surveys → Add Relationship Survey and set:

• Survey Name (for your reference).
• Survey Code — unique, no spaces/special characters; you’ll pass this in the rsid parameter.
• Survey Series — pick one, or “No series”.
• Invitation Count — how many people you invited, so a response rate can be calculated.
• Close Date (GMT) — responses after this date aren’t counted in the NPS (you can change it later and the NPS recalculates).

Step 2 — Build your survey link

Find your base relationship-survey URL under View your URLs. It looks like:

https://survey.cio-pulse.com?stc=djTP6A&rsid=Sep26&bun=IT&cid=C123456&sgid1=Fin&sgid2=NSW

Parameter	Required	What it is
rsid	Yes	The Survey Code you set up in the Portal
bun	Yes	The text used in Q1 (encode spaces as %20, & as %26)
cid	No	Customer ID — unique per person; omit or use anonymous for anonymous responses. If a person responds twice, only the latest is kept
sgid1	No	Segment 1 code (or NONE)
sgid2	No	Segment 2 code (or NONE)

Step 3 — Send via mail merge

Send the invitations from your own email system, typically a Word + Excel mail merge so each recipient gets a personalised link with their own cid and segment codes. Triple-check every recipient’s link before sending — mail-merge hyperlinks are notoriously fiddly; if one misbehaves, delete it and re-insert it from scratch.

Maximising response rates

A short communications sequence lifts response rates a lot: a heads-up before launch, the launch email, one or two reminders, a thank-you, then what we learned and what we’re going to do. Closing the loop — telling people how their feedback changed things — is what keeps them responding next time.

Seeing the results

Relationship survey results appear in their own reports and dashboards — see Dashboards & reports. You can compare every survey in a Series side by side to track your NPS trend over time.

Still need help? Email support@cio-pulse.com.