Support teams work in shifts, under queue pressure, often across several time zones. That shapes which polls make sense: nothing that needs everyone online at once, nothing long, and plenty that turns what agents see all day into something the rest of the company can use.
Here are the polls support leads run, and when.
Paste any of these into the message box in Slack.
Choice poll. Agents tick every shift they can cover, with a reminder before it closes.
/poll "Holiday weekend cover: which shifts can you take?" "Fri early" "Fri late" "Sat early" "Sat late" "Sun early" close after 3 days remind 1 day before closing
Premium: closing automatically, reminders
Close automatically: after 3 daysReminder: 24 hours before closing
Short text with voting. Weekly help-centre gap finder. Agents react to gaps they see too.
/poll "Which question did you answer most this week that has no help article?" short text :bulb:
Free
Choice poll. Let the people using a process decide whether it stays.
/poll "New refund macro, two weeks in. Keep it?" "Keep" "Keep with changes, see thread" "Roll back" limit 1 close after 2 days
Premium: vote limits, closing automatically
Limit votes: 1 per personClose automatically: after 2 days
Scale from 1 to 5. A Monday workload check after a ticket spike.
/poll "After last week, how is your load?" "Plenty of room" "Comfortable" "Full" "Stretched" "Underwater" scale anonymous
Free
Anonymous
Before a holiday period, post the shifts you need covered and let agents tick every one they can take. Leave it multiple choice, because you want the full picture of availability, not one preference per person. Close it a week out so you have time to fill gaps by hand. Keep the options as real shifts ("Friday, early"), not days, so you are not left guessing who covers the evening.
After an outage or a launch week, the queue recovers before the team does. An anonymous one-question workload check the following Monday tells you whether people need a lighter week. Ask it then, not mid-spike, when everyone already knows the answer is "underwater".
In a quieter month, a regular mood check-in does the same job early.
Agents know which questions come in every day and have no article. Ask them weekly with a
short text poll and a voting reaction: each agent names a gap, the rest react to the ones
they see too. The top few go to whoever owns the help centre, with a count attached,
which is far more convincing than "support says the docs are bad".
When you change a macro, a tagging scheme or an escalation rule, give it two weeks and
then ask the agents who use it whether to keep it. A limit 1 poll (Premium) with "Keep",
"Keep with changes" and "Roll back", plus a thread for the changes, settles it. Process
decisions made without the people running the process tend to get quietly ignored.
New tooling or product training for agents should end with a two-question check: how useful was it, and what is still unclear. The second answer is your next training session. The training session feedback template has the wording.
Before planning the next sprint or quarter, during a crunch, or any time you suspect some of the team is carrying more than they say.
/poll "How was your workload over the last two weeks?" "Way too much" "A bit too much" "About right" "Room for more" anonymous limit 1
Premium: vote limits
When you want an early, honest signal on how the team is feeling, before it shows up as missed deadlines or resignations.
/poll "How are you feeling this week?" "Rough" :rain_cloud: "Meh" :cloud: "Fine" :partly_sunny: "Good" :sunny: "Great" :rainbow: anonymous limit 1
Premium: vote limits
Right after a training, workshop, onboarding session or lunch-and-learn, while attendees still remember what was useful and what dragged.
/poll "How useful was this session for your work?" "Not useful" "Slightly" "Somewhat" "Very" "Extremely" scale anonymous
Free
When you need to find a slot that works for a group and calendars alone don't tell you who can really make it.
/poll "Which of these times can you make for quarterly planning next week?" "Mon 10:00 UK / 05:00 ET" "Tue 15:00 UK / 10:00 ET" "Wed 16:00 UK / 11:00 ET" "Thu 14:00 UK / 09:00 ET" "None of these work" close after 1 day remind 2 hours after posting
Premium: closing automatically, reminders
When your team is choosing between software tools and the people who will use it every day should have a say.
/poll "Which project trackers are worth a two-week trial?" "Tracker A" "Tracker B" "Tracker C" "Keep what we have"
Free
Keep the poll open long enough to span every shift, usually a day or two. Avoid
@channel, which pings people off shift; post in the team channel and pin it if needed.
Yes. People understate how stretched they are when their name is attached. With
anonymous, nobody, the creator included, can see who answered what.
Before planning the next sprint or quarter, during a crunch, or any time you suspect some of the team is carrying more than they say.
Right after a training, workshop, onboarding session or lunch-and-learn, while attendees still remember what was useful and what dragged.
A poll that never closes never quite decides anything: votes trickle in, the result shifts, and nobody knows when to act. An automatic close fixes the deadline up front. In Simple Poll you add close after and a duration, and the poll closes on its own. Automatic closing is a Premium feature; anyone can close their own poll by hand.
Response rate is the share of people you asked who actually answered: the number of respondents divided by the number of people invited, times 100.
Sales teams already live in Slack: deal rooms, win channels, the manager pinging about the forecast. Polls fit into that rhythm when they are fast and when reps can see what comes back. Nobody on quota will fill in a ten-question survey on the last day of the quarter.
Simple Poll is the #1 polls and surveys app for Slack. 945,000+ teams use it. Free to start: type /poll and your first poll is live.