Admins / Users

4 Key Criteria for Selecting a Salesforce Survey Platform

By Rajesh Unadkat

Branded content with SurveyVista

The landscape of customer feedback and survey platforms has significantly evolved within the Salesforce ecosystem in recent years. Businesses now have quite a few options when it comes to choosing a survey platform that works well with Salesforce.

But with many offerings having similar features and benefits, how can you determine the best option for you? We explain the key criteria that really matter, eliminating the ‘bells and whistles’ that you can easily do without.

1. Salesforce Native Is a Must

In the early Salesforce AppExchange days, some solutions were “integrated” with the Salesforce CRM, but the integration was often buggy, which resulted in delays to data sync.

Now, with new survey platforms built on Salesforce Lightning, it’s a different story. These native solutions remove integration complexities and transform the way you can collect and act upon customer insights.

There are substantial benefits to choosing a survey platform built natively:

  • Seamless Data Management: A native solution ensures that survey data is directly tied to customer records (such as accounts, contacts, and opportunities) and interactions within Salesforce. This integration streamlines data management and enables you to make informed decisions based on holistic customer insights.
  • Real-time Insights: By conducting surveys within the Salesforce environment, you can gather real-time feedback that reflects the most up-to-date customer sentiments. This agility allows for quick responses and adjustments to address emerging trends or concerns. For instance, you can consolidate customer feedback scores across various contact types at the account level, facilitating the identification of actionable insights and continuous improvements over time.
  • Data Security and Compliance: A native solution ensures that your data remains within the Salesforce environment, residing in the same country as your Salesforce instance. Your data is protected under Salesforce’s security measures, reinforced by a comprehensive array of certifications and adherence to standards and regulations such as ISO, SOC2 / SOC3, GDPR, HIPAA, HiTrust, FedRAMP, NIST, among others.
  • Efficiency: The convenience of managing surveys within the same platform used for customer relationship management eliminates the need to switch between different tools. This saves time and resources, ultimately enhancing team productivity.
  • Personalization: With access to customer data stored in Salesforce, you can tailor surveys for specific customer segments, creating a more personalized and relevant experience.
  • 360-Degree View: Native survey data contributes to a comprehensive understanding of each customer’s journey and preferences. This holistic perspective fosters more meaningful interactions and better decision-making.
  • Actionable Insights: The integration of survey data with Salesforce’s reporting and analytics capabilities makes it easier to derive actionable insights from customer feedback, while driving continuous improvement and innovation.

Features to Look For in a Survey Platform

When evaluating a customer feedback management system or survey platform, it’s essential to consider the features that align with your organization’s specific needs and goals. They can be loosely grouped into three areas:

2. Great User Experience

  • User-Friendly Interface: The platform should be intuitive and user-friendly for both survey creators and respondents. A simple and clear interface makes it easier to design surveys and collect responses.
  • Mobile Responsiveness: Surveys should be mobile-responsive to ensure a seamless experience for respondents on smartphones and tablets.
  • Customizable Design: Customization options should match your organization branding and data collection needs. The platform should allow you to create customized surveys with a wide range of built-in question types (such as multiple choice, open-ended, rating scales, Salesforce data-driven questions etc.). 
  • Flexibility: A comprehensive survey solution should offer the versatility to create surveys and forms that align with diverse objectives. This includes:
    • Gauging customer satisfaction, employee engagement, product feedback, and more.
    • Gathering various types of data, such as lead generation forms and webinar registrations.
    • Conducting a wide range of checklists, including customer on-boarding, health and safety assessments, project risk evaluations, opportunity win-loss analyses, and more.
    • Administering quizzes, such as sales enablement, customer engagement, knowledge assessments, and more.

3. Painless Data Management

  • Automated Data Mapping: Automated Salesforce Data Mapping allows you to streamline the process of creating and updating Salesforce standard and custom object records based on question responses. It also supports pre-filling question responses with existing CRM data, enhancing efficiency and data accuracy.
  • Audience Segmentation: The ability to segment your audience based on various criteria (for example, demographics or behavior) is valuable for targeting specific groups with tailored surveys, thereby increasing the response rate.
  • Multi-Channel Distribution: Ensure the platform supports various distribution channels, including email, web form, mobile, social media, and SMS, to reach your target audience effectively.
  • Response Management: Features for categorizing, tagging, and tracking responses are essential for efficiently managing and analyzing feedback.
  • Customizable Scoring: Look for a platform that allows you to create custom scoring rules based on survey responses. This enables you to assign numerical values or weights to specific answers or question types to calculate scores automatically.

4. Analytics and Scalability

  • Real-Time Reporting and Analytics: The platform should offer robust reporting and analytics tools to help you gain insights from survey data quickly, and with ease.
  • Sentiment Analysis: Look for survey platforms that employ NLP techniques to automatically analyze open-ended text responses for sentiment categorized as positive, negative, or neutral.
  • Multi-Language Support: If you have a diverse customer base, look for a platform that supports multiple languages to collect feedback from a global audience.
  • Cost, Scalability, and Support: Consider your budget and whether the platform can scale as your organization’s survey needs grow. Gain insights into the product features and level of support offered by the platform vendor by reviewing AppExchange feedback and testimonials.

Summary

When it comes to surveys and forms-based data collection for Salesforce, it’s imperative to choose a native solution for the huge operational benefits it brings to a Salesforce user. You should also look for features and functions that align with your organization’s unique needs and objectives as well as a great user experience and painless data management.

SurveyVista, a customer favorite on the Salesforce AppExchange, stands out as a 100% native Salesforce platform. Known for its user-friendly interface and exceptional customer support, SurveyVista offers an effortless integration with Salesforce, allowing you to create and distribute surveys across various channels and life cycles while keeping all your data right inside the CRM for better insights and analytics. 

Discover the power of native Salesforce surveys and forms by requesting a demo with SurveyVista today.

The Author

Rajesh Unadkat

Rajesh is the founder and CEO of SurveyVista, a Salesforce native survey platform that empowers organizations to thrive in a data-centric world.

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