What are custom variables?
Custom variables are additional data points that allow you to personalize your surveys and enhance data collection by storing unique information about your respondents or the context of their responses. Unlike standard survey questions, custom variables are not directly presented to the respondent. Instead, their values are typically passed into the survey through the survey link (URL parameters), hidden fields, or pre-population from an external data source.
Use of custom variables
By using custom variables, you create a data template into which you can upload your survey calling data. Once you upload your data into your survey, you can use them to:
- Validate a respondent using this data and access associated details. The first field of the data template is used for validation. In order to validate survey data input for a particular survey question, you have to enable the “Require Server Validation” property for that question.
- Personalize the interaction by addressing the respondents by name and referencing past interactions.
- Pre-fill survey fields with known information, saving respondents time and ensuring data accuracy.
- Easily segment and filter your survey results based on these variables, providing deeper insights without needing to ask additional questions within the survey.
- Reporting / data analysis using custom variables.
- Send email to the uploaded data and you can use the custom variables in mail merge fields.
- Custom Variables are also being used in Quota set up.
Rules for naming custom variables
eRaay allows you to create up to 20 custom variables for each survey. Rules for naming custom variables:
- Custom variables cannot start with a number.
- Custom variables cannot have special characters or space in between.
- Custom variables should contain only alphanumeric characters.
- The same variable name must not be used as a question number.
Note: A user will not be able to make any changes to the custom variables after the survey goes Live.
