Thursday, Jan. 29th, we held a special free training session about how to connect your QuestionPro and Salesforce accounts to create new objects in Salesforce and update existing objects in Salesforce. Let’s recap what we covered!
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, widely used among organizations to help keep track of current and prospective customers. Using Salesforce, organizations can send email blasts to let customers know about current promotions, send newsletters, and do conduct targeted campaigns in hopes of converting leads into customers.
Customer Information Capturing – Best Practice
The first thing we covered in the special free training session was a few best practices about collecting personally identifable information (PII). If you’ve been following the blog, you know that I wrote a post about PII not too long ago, covering some of the best practices. In short, let customers know why you’re collecting their contact information, provide your privacy policy if you have one to help them know what your policies are around storing and using that information, and be up-front about how you’re going to be using their contact information. Will you be contacting them directly? Will they receive monthly, weekly, or daily promotion emails from you? Letting customers know upfront how you’ll be using their information can go a long ways to establishing trust between them and your organization.
Creating a New Object in Salesforce from a Survey
We took a scenario and ran through it during this session. The scenario we used was going to a trade show and capturing leads at the booth we were hosting at that trade show. To do this, we created a quick customer information form using QuestionPro’s survey tools, then linked our QuestionPro and Salesforce accounts. Once you’ve linked the accounts, you can choose whether the survey is being used to create new objects in Salesforce (a new object being a new lead, new customer, etc.) or updating an object in Salesforce. For this particular survey, we created a new lead in Salesforce, and captured not only their contact information, but how soon they were intending to make a purchase from our company and the products they were interested in, and assigned a score to the lead using QuestionPro’s scoring logic. All of that information was written to Salesforce after we did some simple mapping of the questions to the appropriate fields in Salesforce.
A few key takeaways:
- Contact your Salesforce admin for the security token when connecting your accounts. Once a security token is reset, anywhere it was used previously, that security token is now reset and needs to be reconnected. So before resetting it from Salesforce, check with your Salesforce administrator first.
- Be sure that you’ve created the necessary custom fields in Salesforce if you need to (we created fields to capture what products our customers were interested in, as well as the scoring number).
- And last, but not at all least, be sure to check the box in the Salesforce mapping in QuestionPro to “Use Answer Values” so that you show the text values in Salesforce, and not just the numeric values for the answers to the questions.
Updating an Object in Salesforce from a Survey
To complete the scenario, our customer that we were focusing on made a purchase! Hurray! We decided to ask them about their experience with two primary aspects of the purchase: the purchase itself and the purchase experience. We created our survey in QuestionPro, tied it to the Salesforce account, selected that we wanted to update objects instead of create new objects, and then mapped the questions again. Once more, we were sure to check the “Use Answer Values” to import the text values in Salesforce. This helped the sales manager know exactly what the respondent chose as their satisfaction levels instead of seeing the numeric values. Once again, we used some custom fields in Salesforce to record the satisfaction ratings.
Once we had the mapping done, we grabbed the special survey link and created a new email template in Salesforce, using that new link so that we could send a targeted email that would update the right record. We sent the email, our customer took the survey, we refreshed the lead information in Salesforce, and there was the updated satisfaction information!
Final Thoughts
Setting up the initial Salesforce integration took very little time – even if we needed to reset the Salesforce security token. From there, being able to map all of the survey questions to Salesforce fields in one screen was handy, but so was being able to modify and add questions in my survey and mapping those to the Salesforce fields. It was pretty cool to see a use for the scoring logic other than quizzes, too!
If you’d like a 1:1 demo of the Salesforce integration, contact us to request one. We’d be happy to set it up for you and let you see how it all works live!
