Send your customers down different paths in a survey depending on their responses to questions for an experience that’s tailored to them. Using branching logic, you can customize which questions and Thank You steps your customer sees based on their response to previous closed ended questions.

The end user experience is identical to a survey without branching. The only difference is that the questions should feel personalized to the responses that they give.

This comes in handy when your customer:

To get started, use our checklist of things to consider before creating your survey. Then draw a diagram of all the potential paths your customers could take through the survey before building it in Intercom, like the one below:

You can add up to 12 Question steps and up to 3 Thank You step variations when you create your survey. You’ll want to keep the steps in the same order that you would like them to be presented to your customers as much as possible.

For example, using the diagram above, here’s what that would look like as an NPS® Survey with the different follow up questions for detractors, passives and promoters:

When you’ve finished adding all the potential question steps to the survey, click “Add branching logic” to start adding your branching rules:

Find the step you want to branch from and click “Add rule”:

Then click “+ Add data” and select the question that collects the response data you want to base your branching on.

Using the NPS® Survey example, you could create the following branching rules based on how customers responded in Step 1:

If multiple rules are added that are not mutually exclusive, then the first rule you added will always be used. For example, if a customer scores 0 - 6, then both of the paths shown below would be legitimate and the customer would follow the path given in the first rule:

The types of expressions you can specify (e.g. greater than 6, and less than 9, etc.) depends on the way the question response is stored. Use the chart below to see how response data will be stored based on your question type:

When a user selects more than one answer from a multiple choice question, their answers will be stored as comma separated values on the attribute. As with all other question types. If the character length exceeds 255 characters (the attribute character limit), the answer will be truncated on the attribute. You can see the full answer in the survey report.

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Emojis are stored to number attributes as a numeric value. The number will depend on the scale used as shown in the tables below:

5 point emoji scale

3 point emoji scale

Once you’ve finished adding the branching logic to your survey steps, it’s a good idea to test the experience before sending it to customers.

The easiest way to test it out is to trigger the survey from a Shareable URL. This allows you to take the survey as many times as you’d like. Note that any time you want to restart the survey, you’ll need to copy the link into a new browser tab (refreshing the existing tab won’t work).

When you’re happy with how the branching logic works, you can share your survey in the following ways:

Each question will have its own response data recorded, so you’ll be able to find the same reporting available that you use for other surveys. Find out more about using advanced survey reports in Intercom.

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