Sending the survey via SMS

Administrators can choose to send out the survey via SMS on a per-schedule basis through the Peakon interface, after which employees with a phone number will receive a link to the survey over SMS, in addition to the regular email. The employee will also get an SMS reminder to complete the survey halfway through the survey round, and every four days thereafter.

This article covers:

• How it works
• Enabling the SMS notifications
• Updating an employee's phone number

How it works

The sender of SMS messages

In most countries, the sender of the survey SMS will appear as Peakon. However, in some countries, depending on the individual carrier network and/or regulation, the SMS may appear to be coming from a regular phone number.

The SMS notifications

• New survey: "<Admin> would like your help to make <Company> a great place to work"
• Reminder: "Please take a few minutes to help make <Company> a great place to work" 
• New survey (kiosk enabled): "<Admin> would like your help to make <Company> a great place to work. Use your personal code <Code> to answer"
• Reminder (kiosk enabled): "Please use your personal code <Code> to help make <Company> a great place to work"

The language detection

The language setting for SMS messaging uses the same logic used to determine a user's language in Peakon. The language will be identified using the first of the following that has been set on Peakon before defaulting to English.

1. Forced language on the schedule
2. Assigned language on the employee's profile
3. The language of the user as detected by their browser if they have logged into Peakon previously

Unsubscribing from the survey over SMS

To unsubscribe or re-subscribe to receiving SMS messages from Peakon, employees can send an SMS with the word STOP or START, respectively, to one of the numbers below:

• United States: +1 888 2737 006
• United Kingdom: +44 752 0619 640
• Australia: +61 480090410
• Denmark: +45 609 94980 1662
• Sweden: +46 769 436370

SMS Delivery Rates

Sending your engagement survey over SMS normally works well to phones in most countries. However, SMS as a technology is inherently less reliable than email, and country-specific regulation, carriers and subscriber configurations do affect delivery rates. Therefore, it sometimes happens that an employee might not receive their engagement SMS as expected.

In that case, please contact Peakon support at support@peakon.com, so that we can investigate the underlying reason and even re-send the SMS if needed. 

Peakon utilizes a popular and proven external provider for SMS delivery called Vonage Communications APIs (formerly Nexmo).

To guarantee the best delivery rate for your engagement survey over SMS, always make sure to send a test survey to at least one employee in each country where employees will receive the overall engagement survey.

Enabling the SMS notifications

1. Go to Administration.
2. Click on Schedules.
3. Select your preferred schedule
4. Within the schedule, select the SMS tab
5. Enable SMS notifications option.

Updating an employee's phone number

When using the CSV file upload method to import and update employee records on Peakon, please ensure the following formatting is present on the file:

• Peakon's downloadable template will already contain a column on the sheet for adding phone numbers. When not using Peakon's template ensure a column is present on the sheet called "Phone".
• Phone numbers need to include an area code, eg. Phone numbers in the UK would have +44 followed by the rest of the phone number to read as +4412345678910
• The phone number is stored on the file as a text type cell for the import to work. This is important as any other cell type will likely cause errors during the import.

Editing a phone number during a live round

When an employee's phone number is edited during a live survey round, they will automatically get the survey resent via SMS. 

If the phone number is changed before an open survey round, the survey will be sent via SMS on the new phone number once the new round starts.