Testing the survey before launch

Sending out a test survey round to employees is a good idea to confirm that the survey process works as expected. Involving members from the IT department in the test round is also good practice since they will be able to fix any network issues that may prevent the survey from being delivered and the links being accessed.

• How it works
• Configuring your test survey
• Viewing test data

How it works

Once the test round has been sent, the employees will receive the survey via email or SMS containing the survey. If kiosk has been set up as a channel, also kiosk employees will be able to participate using the employee number and first name kiosk method.

Test rounds soft close instantly, meaning that they are only open for two weeks from the day the test is sent.

You can collect test data and review the dashboard for your test survey only. It is possible to restrict who has access to view test data in Access Control, under the Access Statistics section. See About access control groups and how they work for more information.

Test results will be subject to the same data aggregation settings as the real survey, therefore ensure you are testing with enough users for your dashboard to populate results. 

When launching your real survey, employees who previously participated in a test round will receive their survey at the intended send-out time in their local timezone as the system would have detected it during the test round, while the rest of the company will receive it in the UTC timezone. This can be avoided by setting the timezone on employee records. See Setting the employee time zone via Excel.

Configuring your test survey

Before testing and launching your survey, make sure that your IT department allows emails from Peakon and allows for your network to access Peakon platform's links.  If this is not ensure you may risk that Peakon emails will be marked as spam or that users will not be able to access the survey link due to network restrictions. Check out and share with your IT team Allowing email delivery from Peakon and Hosts and protocols for the Peakon services.

How to send a test round:

1. Click Administration, and then choose the Schedules option
2. Select a survey schedule by clicking on the View button
3. Set up the survey details under the tabs, but do not set the survey send out date
4. Click the Send test round icon at the top right of your screen
5. Select individual employees or a whole segment to add to the test round
6. Click on the Send test questions icon

Note: when sending a survey to yourself, even if it is a targeted schedule with targeted questions, Peakon will use your own employee record information and adjust the questions to this instead. To see how a survey will look for a specific target group, either set yourself as part of this group, or send the test survey to someone from that group already.

Survey readiness checklist 

You can copy this table for your own project material and track the readiness of your schedule.

Task	Y or N?
Emails are received in organization's inboxes
Links can be opened on company's network
Your branding (logo) renders well on both mobile and browser
Translations are correct for each question (custom questions)
Timezones are correctly set for each user and survey is received at appropriate time

Viewing test data

Once you have launched your test survey, you will be able to switch dashboards between the regular and test survey results, meaning that you can return to the test results even after launching a real survey.

How to switch to test data

1. Click the context selector in the top left corner, and select the settings option
2. Check the box for Only test data to show the test survey results
3. A banner at the top of the page will indicate that you are viewing test results
4. To switch back to the regular survey results, click on the Show company data link in the banner

It is also possible to view your test round activity in Schedules by going into Administration > Schedules > Activity > Include test rounds.