Kantata Pulse Overview

Kantata Pulse is an end-to-end sentiment tool built into Kantata OX that helps professional services organizations collect client and employee feedback, uncover actionable insights, and improve project outcomes.

Introduction to Kantata Pulse

Kantata Pulse is an end-to-end sentiment tool built into Kantata OX that helps professional services organizations collect client and employee feedback, uncover actionable insights, and improve project outcomes. Available during all phases of a project, Kantata Pulse lets you monitor sentiment in real time, helping you respond to and resolve issues before they become larger problems.

Best of all, you don’t need to add people to your Kantata account to send them Pulse surveys. Whether they’re external clients or internal team members, simply add their email address in the project’s Pulse Settings > Recipients tab to start collecting feedback.

What Problems Does Kantata Pulse Solve?

While Kantata OX has many robust tools that track key quantitative project health metrics like burn rate or task completion percentage, these numbers don’t always capture the full picture. Understanding how your clients feel about the project, and how your team feels about their work, is just as critical.

Delivering a successful project isn’t just about staying on budget or completing tasks—it’s about building strong relationships. Too often, projects that look healthy on paper end up leaving clients or employees dissatisfied, which can have a significant negative impact on your business.

Many organizations struggle with a lack of real-time feedback during projects, and post-completion surveys are often too late to drive any real change. Third-party, disconnected methods of collecting feedback are usually manual and require significant time and effort, leading to missed opportunities for early intervention and increased response rates.

Our solution? A purpose-built tool that integrates with Kantata’s project workflows to deliver meaningful feedback when it matters most: Kantata Pulse.

Like a steady heartbeat, Pulse automatically gathers feedback from clients and employees at key project moments, milestones, or phases. By automating feedback collection, Pulse reduces the administrative burden on your team. Pulse combines real-time sentiment data with operational metrics—giving project managers a complete view of project health. This early insight into potential risks allows for more proactive decision-making, ultimately improving project delivery.

When both internal and external Pulse surveys are active, you can easily identify any disconnects between how your team and your clients feel about the project. This deeper understanding uncovers issues that traditional metrics might miss, leading to better client satisfaction, higher employee engagement, and improved project outcomes.

Kantata Pulse Methodology

In professional services, every industry has its own way of describing project stages. Despite these differences, Kantata Pulse works across all industries by using clear, common language that’s easy for respondents to understand—no matter their field or terminology.

We designed Kantata Pulse around 5 key principles to help you collect reliable, meaningful data to improve project delivery and boost client and employee satisfaction:

1. How You Ask Questions Matters
   The way a question is worded shapes the responses you receive. We’ve carefully crafted each question to avoid misunderstandings, bias, or double-barreled questions (asking multiple things at once), so the feedback accurately reflects what respondents are thinking and feeling.
2. Make Surveys Easy to Take
   Kantata Pulse makes completing surveys simple and intuitive, whether on a mobile device or through email. The no-login required functionality increases response rates by reducing friction for respondents.
3. Respect People’s Time
   Our surveys are short and to the point, allowing respondents to complete them quickly. This helps encourage repeat participation, even from busy professionals.
4. Conversational Tone
   Our surveys feel more like a conversation than a formal questionnaire. By using friendly, accessible language, we create a comfortable space for respondents to share honest feedback.
5. Test, Test, Test
   Before launching our surveys, we test them with both experts and real users to make sure the questions are clear, relevant, and easy to answer. This process helps us catch and fix issues early so that we can gather the most reliable, actionable data.

By following these principles, Kantata Pulse helps you gather reliable, actionable feedback at key moments throughout your projects, empowering you to make informed decisions that drive better outcomes in real time.

Survey Categories and Phases

Our survey questions are organized into 3 main categories: Happiness, Confidence, and Collaboration. Each category measures specific aspects of a project’s progress, helping to identify areas for improvement and providing actionable feedback at every stage.

Questions are also distributed across 3 phases: Start, During, and End of the project. This allows us to capture relevant feedback throughout the project’s lifecycle, giving you a complete view of how things are progressing from beginning to end.

For more information about the default questions, see the Kantata Pulse Question Library article.

For more on what each category measures, see the Kantata Pulse Question Categories article.

Managing Pulse

At the account level, Account Administrators control which surveys are activated for the account—internal team surveys, external client surveys, or both—as well as question availability and custom questions.

For more information, see the Client and Team Pulse Settings and Creating Custom Pulse Survey Questions articles.

At the project level, project managers (i.e. users with permission to manage Pulse) control which surveys are activated for the project—internal team surveys, external client surveys, or both—as well as the survey types, survey frequency, recipients, and available questions.

For more information, see the Project Settings: Pulse Settings article.

Receiving Pulse Emails and Answering Surveys

Once Pulse surveys are activated, recipients will receive emails based on the options and frequency set up in a project’s Pulse Settings.

Internal team members with a Kantata login can also access their latest, unanswered Pulse surveys within Kantata via the Pulse > Pending Pulse Surveys page.

Viewing and Interpreting Pulse Results

Once responses have been submitted, you can view the results in the following areas:

• The Pulse Summary in the project's Activity tab
  
• The Pulse tab in the project
  
• The Pulse Dashboard (Account Administrators only)
  

For more information about interpreting Pulse results, see the Pulse in the Project Workspace article.