subject: Surveys from Salesforce CRM: Choosing the Right Survey Tool [print this page] Surveys from Salesforce CRM: Choosing the Right Survey Tool
You are responsible for Sales and Marketing for your company. Thanks to your Salesforce.com system, you have better visibility into your sales funnel, your marketing programs are performing effectively and your customer service group has streamlined their support process. But a key piece is missing from your CRM strategy: you still don't have a way to gain insights from your customers and bring them back into Salesforce.com so that the feedback can incorporated into everyone's daily activities to improve your customer relationships. This feedback includes:
How satisfied are your customers with your products and services and how can you improve it?
Why do you win or lose deals and how can you improve your win rate?
What can you change in your next marketing event to make it even better?
What aspects of your sales process are not working well?
What are the opportunities for improving your customer service?
Online surveys are a good way to elicit feedback from customers. There are many economical, easy-to-use online survey products in the market that help you rapidly and easily create surveys and send them to your customers. But how do you use customer surveys with your Salesforce system? The first way is to extract the mailing list from Salesforce.com into a spreadsheet, send surveys to this list, analyze the individual responses, summarize them and manually input the summary into your Salesforce.com system. However, this is a very manual process which is not scalable and can be error prone. There is better way: use a survey tool that is seamlessly integrated with Salesforce.com, so that you can send surveys from within your Salesforce.com system to selected objects such as leads or opportunities or contacts and have the data come back automatically into those records in the system. Once the data is in the Salesforce system, you can now run Salesforce reports and analyze the feedback. There are many affordable online survey tools that are fully integrated with Salesforce.com.
But how do you select the right Surveys for Salesforce tool? Here are five things to look for:
The Surveys for Salesforce tool must be listed on Salesforce AppExchange: When a survey tool is listed on AppExchange, it means that its integration is verified by Salesforce, including the security standards. Your Salesforce system is your system of record for all customer interactions, so you want to make sure your invaluable customer data is protected at all times. Why take the risk and select a survey tool that is not listed on AppExchange?
It should be easy to create new surveys or modify existing surveys using the survey tool. Your sales operations managers and your marketing events managers should be able to easily create surveys, map them to Salesforce.com, and send them out without any help from the IT organization. Any survey creation tool that has a steep learning curve will have adoption challenges and you will miss out on collecting valuable customer insights.
Support for key question types: According to our analysis, over 98% of the customer surveys use less than 10 question types. Any survey tool that offers you a huge choice of question types is likely to have been designed for a market researcher, and not for a sales operations, marketing, or customer support manager. You want to make sure that your survey tool has enough functionality for what you need, but that you are not evaluating a Hummer when you need a Honda to get the job done. Complexity leads to lower adoption rate and impedes your ability to gain customer insights.
Easy and accessible analysis functionality: While you may bring some of the relevant survey responses into Salesforce.com for collaboration or reporting, or just to make it a part of your Salesforce record, you may also find yourself going into your survey tool to do some additional analysis of the responses. Hence, it is important that your survey tool provides easy charting and analysis capabilities, and that you are not required to have deep statistics or analysis background to gain additional insights.
Cost Effective: If a survey tool provider wants to charge you based on how many Salesforce users you have, run as fast as you can. You should only be paying for the number of users who create or send surveys. In addition, since the survey tool comes pre-integrated with Salesforce and is assumed to be easy to use, you should not have to pay a fee for setup or integration.
Hence, the ability to integrate customer surveys into your Salesforce system is invaluable in gathering and acting on customer feedback. If you use the criteria above to evaluate and select a tool for Surveys for Salesforce, you will be rewarded with an effective, secure and easy-to-use tool that not only provides you deep insights into your customers, but also avoids information silos by bringing all data back into your CRM system.
