Survey Research Automation

Automatically send targeted surveys to customers whose feedback matches a filter you define—no manual recipient lists, no one-off sends.

Who this is for: CX Leaders, Customer Research teams, Product Managers

Overview

Survey Research Automation connects an email survey to a feedback filter so you can keep learning from the right people without lifting a finger each time. Define an automation—for example, "any time feedback lands in my group customers requesting Product X, send them the survey Product X use case survey"—and whenever new matching feedback comes in, Unwrap queues the survey send to that person. It's built for CX and research teams who want deeper feedback on specific issues, feature requests, and what to build next, and it replaces the old routine of exporting a list and uploading recipients by hand every time.

You stay in control of who actually gets contacted: by default, every queued survey email waits for your approval, and you decide when (if ever) to let an automation send on its own.

Prerequisites

• Permission to view and configure. Viewing the Research Automation page requires read access to both surveys and groups. Creating or editing an automation requires permission (Admin or Survey Admin permissions) to update surveys (plus group read access). Approving or rejecting sends requires the same survey update permission.

• An email survey. Automations can only be attached to email surveys—you won't be able to add one to a survey that uses another channel.

• Feedback with a customer email. Each feedback entry must carry a single email address on a custom field whose Field Type is User Email (selecting that field type automatically sets its Unit to Customer Email), so Unwrap knows who to contact. Entries without an email—or with more than one email on that field—are skipped.

How It Works

Once a day (currently 13:00 UTC), Unwrap evaluates each active survey automation against your incoming feedback. An entry qualifies when it matches the automation's filter, satisfies the timing rules (dwell time and max feedback age), hasn't already been sent that survey, and has exactly one customer email. Qualifying entries are queued as survey sends. If the automation has Auto-approve off (the default), each send sits in a Pending queue for you to review; if it's on, sends go out without a manual gate. Deduplication is per survey—Unwrap will never queue the same feedback entry to the same survey more than once—so recipients aren't double-surveyed. (We're actively improving this cadence to check as new data is ingested, rather than only once a day.)

Getting Started

There are three ways to reach automations, depending on where you start.

Create an automation from a survey

1. Open the email survey and go to its Audience (Recipients) tab.

2. Click Automations (the ⚡ button near the top of the recipients table). The Configure Survey Automations modal opens.

3. Click Add configuration.

4. Name the automation in the Automation label field (for example, "Recent detractors"). If you leave it blank, Unwrap fills in a default name.

5. Build your audience filter. Use the filter builder to define who qualifies. Unwrap shows a live preview—"[n] matching entries match this filter"—as a rough estimate of your filter's shape (see Best Practices for what it does and doesn't count).

6. Set the timing under Run configuration (see Configuration Options): Dwell time and Max feedback age.

7. Choose Run once and Auto-approve as needed (both off by default).

8. Click Add configuration to save. You'll see "Survey automation created."

Create an automation from a Group

1. Open a group in Explore, then choose Configure Survey Automations from its actions menu.

2. Pick the target survey from the dropdown (the group is pre-applied as the filter) and add any desired additional filters.

3. Configure timing and toggles exactly as above, then save. Unwrap points you to that survey's Audience tab to see it listed.

Review and approve queued sends

1. Go to Surveys → Research Automation.

2. Use the status tabs at the top to move between Pending, Approved, Auto-approved, Rejected, and All.

3. Filter by automation using the Filter By Automation dropdown to focus on one automation's sends.

4. Review each card—it shows the recipient, the survey, the timestamp, and the feedback entry that triggered the send.

5. Approve or Reject individually, or select multiple and use the bulk Approve Selected / Reject Selected actions. A rejected send can be reverted back to Pending.

Configuration Options

Best Practices

• Start with manual review, then graduate to auto-approve. Leave Auto-approve off until you trust that your filter is catching the right people—especially for filters that lean on NLP, like Groups. Auto-approving from the start is only recommended for purely deterministic filters (for example, a specific source).

• Use Max feedback age to avoid blasting stale feedback. When you switch on an automation, a tight max age keeps it from surveying people about months-old entries.

• Handle historical backfill with two triggers. To survey a backlog once and then keep going incrementally, create one automation with Run once on and no max feedback age (the one-time backfill), plus a second automation that runs continuously with a 1–2 day max feedback age (the ongoing stream).

• Watch the live match count while building filters. The "[N] matching entries match this filter" preview helps you gauge whether your filter is too broad or too narrow before you commit. Treat it as a rough estimate of your filter's shape, not a send count: it reflects entries that match the filter and have at least one customer email, and it does not account for the exactly-one-email rule or for entries another automation has already staged.

• Use Run once to stop an automation cleanly. Toggling Run once on an active daily automation lets it complete one more run, then stops it—handy when you want to wind something down without deleting it.

Limitations

• Sends are evaluated once per day (currently 13:00 UTC). Even an "immediate" automation (blank dwell time) queues at the next daily run, not the instant feedback arrives. Faster, ingestion-based checking is in progress.

• Email surveys only. You can't attach an automation to a non-email survey.

• One customer email per entry. Feedback without a customer email, or with multiple emails on that field, is skipped.

• No re-sending the same entry to the same survey. Dedup is per survey, so an entry that already triggered a send to a survey won't trigger another to that same survey.

• Edits apply to the next run only. Changing a filter, timing, or toggle affects future evaluations—it doesn't retroactively change sends already queued.

• Deleting an automation doesn't recall its queued sends. Existing Pending/Approved sends remain reviewable and are labeled Deleted Trigger.

FAQ

Q: Why isn't anything getting queued? A: The most common reasons are: no feedback has matched your filter yet; matching entries are missing a customer email (or have more than one on that field); your Max feedback age is too tight; or those recipients already received this survey. Note that the filter's match count is a rough estimate—it counts entries with at least one customer email and doesn't apply the exactly-one-email rule or dedup—so it can read higher than the number that actually sends. Confirm your feedback source is bringing in a single customer email per entry.

Q: When should I turn on Auto-approve? A: Once you trust that your filter reliably targets the right people. For NLP-based filters like Groups, review manually for a while first. For deterministic filters (like a specific source), auto-approving right away is often fine.

Q: What's the difference between Dwell time and Max feedback age? A: Dwell time waits a set number of days after feedback is submitted before the entry is eligible to send—useful if you want to let a situation settle. Max feedback age does the opposite bound: it skips feedback older than a set number of days, so you don't survey people about stale entries. Dwell time must be less than max feedback age.

Q: How do I run an automation against my historical feedback? A: Create one automation with Run once on and no max feedback age to survey the backlog a single time, then create a second automation that runs continuously with a short (1–2 day) max feedback age to keep surveying new feedback going forward.

Q: I bulk-selected sends but not all of them got approved. Why? A: Bulk actions only affect sends in the target status. "Select all" selects the Pending items on the page, and if your selection includes items already in another status they're skipped—you'll see a message noting how many were reviewed and how many were skipped.

Q: What happens to queued sends if I delete an automation? A: They stay in the queue and remain reviewable, labeled Deleted Trigger. Deleting the automation stops new sends from being queued but doesn't pull back ones already staged.