Automated Lost Customer Survey: Salesforce.com Set-up Factors to Consider

Last week, I shared six commonly used lost customer research question types and discussed how each type can be used in designing an in-depth online or telephone lost customer research survey. In that post, I also established that it is important to gather contextual information about why each lost customer canceled their contracts at the point of cancellation, as this will help guide the objective of  lost customer research projects. One way to do this is to set-up an automated lost customer survey in Salesforce.com to gather data for basic lost customer. This week, I will share four tips to consider when setting-up an automated lost customer survey in Salesforce.com.

There are many options for automatically surveying lost customers in Salesforce. These options are broken-down into two primary categories which are outlined below with a breakdown of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach:

Link-Based Surveys

These are surveys that are embedded via a link into a Salesforce automated email message that is triggered by a specified activity (i.e. a change in customer status). The data generated from these surveys is collected and analyzed outside of Salesforce.

• Advantages:
  • Salesforce has a limited number of fields that can be collected depending on their specification. The following webpage describes these limitations for each license type: http://login.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/limits.htm.
  • You have the ability to collect free form responses without using up large portions of your data space in Salesforce.
  • The price point is generally lower. In fact, it can sometimes be free.
  • Analytics are built into some of the survey tools like Instant.ly, so you do not have to build an analysis dashboard. However, you will only have access to the data points collected in the survey for this analysis, which limits its coverage or increases the time requested from respondents to complete the surveys.
• Disadvantages:
  • The responses are not collected in Salesforce.
  • The customer and respondent data are not collected with the survey responses, which can make analyzing the data more time consuming, as you will need to map any demographic or use case data that was not collected in the survey into the survey data in order to analyze these factors.
• Examples:
  • Instant.ly
  • SurveyMonkey.com

Integrated surveys

These are surveys that collect data and automatically integrate results into objects within your company’s Salesforce.com account. The data generated from these surveys is collected outside of Salesforce, but analyzed within the CRM.

• Advantages:
  • The responses are collected in Salesforce and can be tracked via a Dashboard that leverages other demographic or use case data that is collected in Salesforce.
  • There is more flexibility in tracking your results over time for a regular lost customer survey because other data points that are tracked in Salesforce like demographics and use case can be tied into a Dashboard and altered at any time and maintain backward compatibility with the initial survey.
• Disadvantages:
  • The integrated solutions can cost up to $3,495 per year to use and often require a higher level license in Salesforce.com. However, some can be much cheaper or even free. You will need to search the Salesforce App Exchange to see what is available.
  • You need to be more careful about the way you specify questions to avoid causing problems with Salesforce data limitations. The following webpage describes these limitations for each license type: http://login.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/limits.htm.
  • Setting up an automated version of the data collection process is more time consuming than setting up a one-off lost customer survey, so it is best to have a survey set-up that is well defined.
• Examples:
  • ClickTools (easiest to use, but most expensive)
  • SurveyForce (Free, easier to use, but limited options and question types available)

In setting up an automated survey you will need to consider the following four factors:

1. Target Respondent: Who do you want to survey at each company and how do they relate to the way that records are stored in Salesforce? In most instances, there will be multiple contacts tied to each company. This means surveys triggered on customer or other company level information will generally trigger many emails. So you will need to engineer a trigger or series of triggers that is limited to a single respondent if you want to limit the survey to only a single contact or a group of contacts.
2. Question Sophistication: Are advanced question layouts required to ask the survey questions? This will determine the question capacities that need to be available in the survey tool that you are using regardless of whether or not it is integrated into Salesforce.
3. Depth of Survey: How many questions do you want to ask each respondent? The more questions and open-ended questions that you want to ask the customers, then the more data capacity that will be required.
4. Survey Type: Is this a one-off survey or a tracker survey? If this is a one-off survey, then it is most likely not worth integrating it into Salesforce.

Next week, I will share 10 tips on designing an automated lost customer survey invitation and survey.