Annual Customer survey - reopen closed survey or copy to create new one? | XM Community
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Hello, 

We do an annual customer sat survey, where participants may be the same from year to year. We distribute via Qualtrics mailer email and personal links. Our survey questions have not changed from last year. We want to ensure each contact takes the survey only one time per year, so set “Prevent Multiple Submissions” to ON last year. 

Can I re-open the survey from last year  and distribute to the same people as last year? 

Example: 

  • John Smith received the 2022 survey via Qualtrics email and responded. 
  • Can I reopen the survey in 2023 by removing the expiration date, and create an Email distribution that includes John Smith, so can he take the survey again in 2023?  Will his taking the same survey again in 2023 record a new response, or overwrite his 2022 response? 

Or would I be better off just copying the 2022 survey into a new 2023 survey and distributing that? (which is what I am leaning toward - I’m worried that by setting “Prevent Multiple Submissions” to ON I will prevent John Smith from taking the survey in 2023 if he did the same survey in 2022, or will somehow overwrite his past response). 

Would love any advice on approaches to doing annual surveys to the same customer lists - thanks in advance! 

Hi @KatyJones,

I’ve gone both ways in the past. The easier way definitely was to just activate the survey again.

You do not have to extend the expiration date, though. Just send a new invitation (with a new expiration date anyway). Just make sure that you don’t have any rules in place (in the XM Directory) that prevent sending more than one invitation in x months. 

Once John Smith has a new invitation, he’s able to provide a new feedback. 

Agree both ways should work fine, and have done so.  Typically if no change between surveys then I would go with re-activating the survey again.  The response date allows you to easily determine which response relates to which year etc.  

If you were to want to make any changes, it is when I would duplicate the survey. 

As far as preventing multiple submissions setting this is more so if you use an anonymous link not individual link - whereby the respondent has likely cleared their cookies for this to work 1yr later.  If your using individual links, which would be my assumption based on what you provided, then a new link from a new distribution would allow the new response to be recorded.

Great explanation @ScottG about the unique link :)

While both the options are appropriate, the efficient one would be to have both the data (2022 and 2023) captured in a single survey. This will help you to see trending at a dashboard level with ease, its less time consuming too. 

Thank you, everyone! Very helpful! 

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