Close relative of Turn a calling list into a filled
spreadsheet. That one fills rows you
already have, for leads you already know. This one collects fresh answers from
people you know nothing about yet, and cares about counting them.
Make the answers countable before you make the agent
The single decision that determines whether this works. Asked “how satisfied were you”, people say very, quite good, ok ok, no complaints, theek hai. Every one of those is a true record and the column is useless: you cannot sort it, filter it, or say what percentage were satisfied.1
Make every answerable question a Choice column
In Grist, set the column type to Choice and list the answers you will
accept.The agent is then held to your own words.
theek hai is recorded as
Neutral, and an answer that fits none of them is not written at all
rather than being rounded into one that would mislead you.2
Leave open questions as Text, and expect few
One or two at most. “Anything else you would like us to know?” belongs in
a Text column and is read by a person, not counted.A survey of eight open questions is eight columns nobody will ever read.
3
Describe each column in Grist
A one-line description on each column — “how satisfied they were with the
delivery, not the product” — is the cheapest accuracy you can buy. It is
read by whatever fills the column.
4
Add a Summary column
For the colour the choices cannot hold: who was in a hurry, who was angry,
who asked a question you had not thought of. It is also the only thing that
gets recorded when somebody refuses.
Write the questions as a script
Agent → Behaviour. A survey prompt is unusual in that the ORDER is the point — you want every respondent asked the same things the same way, or your totals are comparing different questions.Set it to write after the call
On the spreadsheet card, When to save → After the call. For a survey this matters more than anywhere else. The whole conversation is read at once, so an answer given out of order still lands in the right column, and someone who says “actually, make that satisfied” is counted once. Saving mid-call would also put a pause between each question, which on a four-question survey is four pauses in ninety seconds.Record the refusals too
Voice → Summarise each call. Most of your list will not answer your questions. On a survey that is not failure — it is your response rate, and you need it to know what your results are worth. A call where somebody says only “I’m busy, don’t call again” fills the Summary column and nothing else. That row is doing real work: it tells you the call happened, it tells you why there are no answers, and it tells you not to ring them next time.If you also make a column for the outcome — Choice, with
Completed / Refused / Busy / Wrong number — it fills from what they said,
and then your response rate is a filter rather than a count of blanks.Ring the list
Voice Campaigns → New voice campaign, upload your CSV, map the phone column and{{lead_name}}.
1
Ring twenty people first
Not five hundred. Twenty is enough to see whether a question is being
misheard, and cheap enough to throw away.
2
Read those twenty in the sheet, not the transcripts
Sort by each Choice column. If one is mostly empty, that question is not
landing — usually because the options were not read out, or the wording
invites a sentence instead of a choice.
3
Fix the script, then run the rest
Changing the question after four hundred calls means four hundred answers
to a different question.
Reading the results
Everything countable is a column of your own words, so Grist does the rest — group bySATISFACTION, count the rows, done. No parsing, no cleaning, no
reading.
The Summary column is for the twenty minutes afterwards when you want to know
why the unhappy ones were unhappy. That is the part a total cannot tell you,
and the part worth a person’s time.
Timing changes your answers more than wording does. Nobody answers a
survey at 9am on a Monday. Set the campaign’s calling window to when your
customers are free, or you are measuring who was available rather than who was
satisfied.