Delighted Surveys or Templates?

In this article


The TL;DR

Here's the long and short of it (the "too long; didn't read" version):

  • Surveys is best for ad hoc survey projects designed to capture feedback at a precise point in time or related to a distinct project. Surveys offers more flexibility when designing your surveys and makes building and sharing reports a cinch.
  • Templates is best for long-term or over-time survey campaigns that capture feedback about a point in the customer journey or a specific experience. Templates offers pre-built surveys, centered around time-tested best practices, making analysis over time and closing the loop a breeze.

Example use cases: Surveys

You're an analyst on the marketing team and you're hoping to learn more about your customers before creating a campaign for a new product that's launching next quarter. You plan to sample 25% of your user base and send them a set of 5 questions about their use cases, their habits, and how often they perform the task the product is designed for. After two weeks, you'll close the survey and compile the results into a suggestion to your boss. Surveys is perfect for you!

Take this example survey here.

You're a product manager for a software company, and you want to capture feedback from users about a feature that was recently released. You're hoping to add a survey in the product that users can access via a link, labeled "Leave feedback here." The survey will stay open for a month after the initial release before you present your launch results to your team, and then it will keep collecting feedback for future iterations of the feature.  Surveys fits this use case perfectly!

Check out this example survey here.

Example use cases: Templates

You lead the support team for an eCommerce company. When customers reach out with questions about product offerings, processing returns, or anything else, your team answers those emails—and you want to send a survey to ensure that their questions are getting answered sufficiently by measuring Customer Effort Score. You'll report out on the score once a month, but you'll also use the feedback that each representative receives for one-on-one coaching. Templates is perfect for you!

Take this example survey here.

You're responsible for retention metrics for your company's web-based application. A month after someone becomes a user, you want to send them a survey to check in on how their implementation is coming along, and then you want to keep checking in every six months to ensure things keep running smoothly. Any negative feedback will be routed to your support team so they can follow up with the respondent. Templates is the tool for you!

Explore that example survey here.

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Switching to and from Delighted Surveys

Switching is as easy as picking "Switch to Delighted Surveys" from the Templates dropdown menu. (Repeat the process to close Surveys and return to Delighted Templates.)

About Delighted Surveys

Delighted Surveys makes capturing feedback from your customers and employees easier and more beautiful than ever. Pre-built and customizable reports and collaboration features turn Surveys into the go-to destination for anyone in your organization working with feedback.

Visit Getting Started with Delighted Surveys and give it a crack!

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Individual feature comparison

This next section will go step-by-step through each feature area and outline the differences between the two products.

1 Distribution platforms and sending
2 Question types and customization
3 People and properties
4 Receiving and acting on feedback
5 Reporting and analytics
6 Integrations
7 Account settings and users

1. Distribution platforms and sending

Surveys allows you to send surveys via Link, which you can also use to generate QR codes for your surveys.

Templates allows you to send via one of five platforms:

  • Email, including email reminders and the ability to send from your own email domain
  • Web
  • Link and QR code
  • Kiosk
  • SDK, for in-app surveys

Templates also supports throttling, which helps prevent auto-surveying; as well as Autopilot sending, which helps schedule recurring surveys automatically.

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2. Question types and customization

Surveys offers increased flexibility through fully custom survey flows, made up of eight question types:

  • Multiple choice
  • Multiple select
  • Short-form text entry
  • Long-form text entry
  • Numeric scale
  • Smiley face scale
  • Thumbs up/ thumbs down
  • Five stars scale

These questions can be placed in any order, and logic allows you to conditionally show questions based on previous responses (e.g., if a customer says, "No, I haven't made a purchase in the last 6 months," you can send them to the end of the survey or ask why they haven't purchased). Preview the entire survey before you send it out.

Unsure of where to start? Surveys also offers recommended questions with categories like demographics, product, and marketing.

Templates revolves around best practices for established customer experience measurement methodologies, including:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
  • Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
  • Customer Effort Score (CES)
  • Product/ Market Fit (PMF)
  • Smiley face scale
  • Thumbs up/ thumbs down
  • Five stars scale

These questions will always be the first question in your Template, followed by an open-ended text question. You can then add up to 10 Additional questions, with the following question options:

  • Multiple choice
  • Multiple select
  • Text entry
  • Numeric scale
  • Email capture
  • Name capture

Both Surveys and Templates allow for branding customizations, like adding your logo and specifying your survey color, but Templates are customized on a per-survey basis, while Surveys maintain the same branding across your account.

Surveys also offers the unique Collaborate feature, which allows you to capture comments from colleagues about your surveys and reports before sharing them more broadly, even if they don't have Delighted accounts.

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3. People and properties

Templates allows you to capture respondent information such as email and name, as well as properties, like order numbers, contact ids, or other data for segmenting your feedback. Each person surveyed has a unique profile in Templates where you can track the feedback they've given over time. You can also use special properties to dynamically update parts of a survey, like the question or the email subject line, based on who you're sending to.

Surveys is simpler: you can capture the email address of the respondent, but any other information has to be gathered in a question.

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4. Receiving and acting on feedback

Once you've received feedback, you can use Templates to filter by response date and properties, to trigger Alerts based on responses, and to build Trends based on your data.

Surveys instantly builds a results feed that helps you keep track of your responses and allows you to tag your open-ended feedback.

With both products, you can export all of your data at any time. That feedback is yours!

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5. Reporting and analytics

Surveys automatically creates visualizations for each of your questions, so it couldn't be easier to view the results. Use our report builder to compile custom reports to share with your teams, and compare results from two questions for powerful data analysis. Feedback—either individual responses, single questions, or entire reports—can be shared with teammates, whether or not they have Delighted accounts.

Templates offers five unique reports:

  • Over time report
  • Snapshot report
  • Pivot table report
  • Additional questions report
  • Benchmark report

These reports are created automatically and can be filtered down by date or to a specific Trend that you're tracking in your data, either defined by keywords in the response or by properties you pass to segment data.

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6. Integrations

Surveys has minimal integrations currently, though we're working on more! Use webhooks to connect feedback to your external platforms, and use the Slack integration to notify your team when new responses are received. Surveys supports global integration authentication—so you only have to connect each integration once.

Templates offers a robust integration suite, with over fifty integrations and a REST API. Templates also features our Testimonials feature, which allows you to highlight positive feedback you've received on your website.

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7. Account settings and users

Both Templates and Surveys allow you to log in with Google or Apple SSO, change your passwords, dual-authenticate, and invite other users to your account.

Templates also allows you to set a data retention policy to auto-delete or auto-anonymize feedback after a set period of time, as well as three separate user access levels—Admin, Standard, and Limited.

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