The past month has seen over 50 new features and improvements delivered, but the main focus was across three key areas: enriching survey Factor-based analysis, time-saving workflow automations and efficient operations for contact management. Here is what these changes mean:
Factors: See the Big Picture in Your Survey Data
What Are Factors?
In large-scale surveys, you often want to understand performance across broad themes, like “Engagement,” “Wellbeing,” “Safety Culture,” or “Leadership Quality” – rather than isolated responses to individual questions. A Factor is a composite score calculated from multiple related questions. For example, a “Staff Engagement” Factor might combine responses about job satisfaction, commitment and advocacy. This approach gives you a more reliable measure than depending on a single question, while creating clearer, more benchmarkable headline results.
Simply: combining the answers to questions gives more robust analysis capabilities, and more actionable insights. Surveys like the NHS Staff Survey and the UK Civil Service People Survey use this methodology extensively. Factors like “Engagement” provide organisations with a single, comparable score that tells thousands of staff stories at a glance.
What’s New
Factors are even more deeply integrated into reporting. You can now:
- Filter and split reports by Factor values – just like you can with demographic fields like department or location. Want to see how high levels of “Safety Culture” combine with incident reporting? Now you can.
- Run Key Driver Analysis for any Factor – start your analysis with a specific Factor (e.g., “Staff Wellbeing”) and immediately understand what’s driving performance on that dimension.
- Save Factor filters to dynamic dashboards – your Factor-based views stay current as new responses arrive.
- Spot Factor-based questions instantly – questions that measure a Factor now have distinct visual tags.
- See Factors in every report format – Response reports, exports, and email summaries can all include Factor data automatically.
Why this matters: You can now take those carefully constructed composite indices and put them to work throughout your reporting, without requiring any manual calculations or external processing.
Automated Survey Creation: Set it and let it do the work
Why Workflow Automation Matters
Research confirms the obvious fact that automating repetitive workflows saves time and reduces errors. Industry data shows organisations that automate their workflows report efficiency gains and high ROI within a few months of deployment.
For survey programmes with recurring schedules, like monthly pulse surveys, quarterly listening exercises, annual feedback cycles, customer satisfaction surveys or patient experience surveys – automation makes a huge difference. Every cycle involves the same basic steps: create a survey from a template, pre-fill standard questions (period name, year), open it to respondents. Repeat. All that manual execution risks inconsistency, missed deadlines and human error. Not to mention, it isn’t all that exciting to do, or the best use of your talents.
We already intelligently automate invitation emails, reminders, thank you emails and many others. Now we have further automated the creation of the surveys themselves.
What’s New
Template-level automation for recurring surveys:
- Automatic survey creation at scheduled times – Event-based survey creation will now create a survey automatically, for example on the 1st of each month, or on any one of thousands of date patterns. Surveys open as part of the workflow and are ready to go.
- Smart title generation – Template-defined formats are applied automatically, so every survey has a unique, meaningful title.
- Auto-pre-filled metadata – Questions can be populated automatically, so every response is correctly set up without manual intervention.
Why this matters: Your monthly surveys now happen reliably without you having to do anything. The consistency prevents errors. The reliability prevents missed windows and collection period variations. And the time saved adds up – especially for programmes running dozens of automated surveys across the year.
Contact Improvements: Managing Email Deliverability with Confidence
Under the UK’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), when sending email marketing, you must maintain valid unsubscribe mechanisms and honour opt-out requests promptly. The ICO mandates that recipients have a “simple way to opt out… in every message.” We have always provided this capability. We also provide a ‘DNC’ (Do Not Contact) capability, which meets the requirements of legislation in the US and elsewhere.
For survey administrators, this means managing “Do Not Contact” (DNC) status is essential for compliance and deliverability. When emails bounce repeatedly or recipients mark messages as spam, your sender reputation suffers, affecting delivery even to those who want to receive your surveys. That means carefully maintaining DNC lists and monitoring bounce rates is an important activity.
What’s New
Greater visibility and additional options to protect your deliverability:
- DNC status visible in audiences – Check if a contact is on the DNC list directly. No need to hunt through separate reports.
- DNC status shown in user lists – You’ll see DNC status inline, perfect for checking why someone isn’t receiving messages.
- Self-service unblock for recipients – individuals can now request an email to change their DNC status. This reduces your support burden and ensures recipients can re-engage.
Why this matters: Better visibility means fewer “why didn’t they get the email?” queries. Automated unblocking reduces manual admin work while honouring recipient preferences. It protects your compliance posture and your sender reputation.
Plus: Even Faster Document Generation
Behind the scenes, PDF report generation has been substantially enhanced. The system now uses advanced queuing processing that scales with demand, rather than competing for shared resources within your secure, dedicated instance. For you, this means:
- PDF reports generate reliably, even during high-traffic periods
- More efficient resource usage across the platform (which reduces environmental impact)
- Reduced waiting times when exporting large collections of documents or reports
Coming Up
Factors automation, enhanced text analytics, and dashboard refinements continue through July…
Questions? Find us at support@socialoptic.com or in the chat.