How to set up Salesforce Surveys

Salesforce Surveys was released in Spring ’18 and, since then, has been further enhanced with more features. Still, resources on how to set up and work with surveys are still quite scarce.

In this blog post we will walk you through the setup process for Salesforce Surveys and call out some of the gotchas so you can start making use of this super handy feature.

What are Salesforce Surveys?

Salesforce Surveys enable organizations to create engaging surveys to collect feedback and information from users or customers.

Organizations can select different types of questions to gather relevant data for their use case. After each question, administrators can customise the type of responses that can be collected. Data collected by the surveys are stored in Salesforce and this data can be used to measure your internal KPI’s and gain insights using reports or dashboards.

Let’s now take a look at how we’d approach setting up Salesforce Surveys in our Salesforce instance.

How to enable Salesforce Surveys

The first step is to enable surveys from the setup menu.

Select Setup
Enter Survey in the Quick Find search
Select Survey
Select Survey Settings
Select Enable Surveys

Important note:

Two sample surveys are added to your Salesforce instance when Surveys are enabled
To send surveys to your customers, a default community is needed to send out public survey invitations

Setting up permissions to create or send Surveys

Standard profiles:

To be able to create or send a survey, users need to be assigned one of the following four standard profiles:

Standard user
System administrator
Contract manager
Marketing user

Note:

The assigned profile must have the View Setup and Configuration permission enabled
Create, Read, Edit and Delete permissions are needed on the Asset object to be able to insert images in survey pages

Custom profiles:

For users with custom profiles that need to be able to create and send surveys, the following object permissions are required:

For users within the company to be able to respond to surveys they would need the following permissions:

For guest users to be able to respond to surveys they would need the following permissions on Guest User Profile of the default community:

Surveys may contain sensitive information which the survey participant may only need to share with the survey owner. In these cases, administrators can configure the survey sharing settings to ensure the creator can see all the responses, but the participant cannot.

Select Setup
Enter Sharing in the Quick Find search
Select Sharing Settings
Select Edit
Select Private from the dropdown list for Survey
Select Private from the dropdown list for Survey Invitation
Select Save

Survey Sharing Settings

Creating your Survey

Now we are ready to build our first survey 🙌

Step 1

Select App Launcher
Search for Surveys

Step 2

Select the New button

Step 3

Select Name in the top left corner
Enter the Survey name

Step 4

Select the Branding tab
Enable Auto-Progress
Upload an image for the background

Step 5

Optionally change the following in this section
Content card opacity: 0.7
Question/Answer colours
Start, Next and Finish button colour choices

Step 6

Select the Pages tab
Add information to the following pages
Welcome Page
Thank You Page
Select the Save button

Adding Questions

Now we are ready to add the main content of the survey – the questions!

Step 1

Select Add Page

Step 2

Select Add Question

Step 3

Select Rating
Add question text

Step 4

Select Cog and Required (optional)

Repeat steps 1-4 until you have added all questions you need. Final Survey pages will look something like this:

Survey Logic

Administrators can personalize the participants’ experience by either adding page branching or question logic.

For example in our survey, if the participant scores a 5 for the first then we would like to skip to the 3rd page of the survey.

We can do this by following these steps:

Step 1

Select Page Branching

Step 2

Enter the following conditions for the branching logic
Go to a Page: Based on conditions
Select Page: Consultancy Feedback
Select condition: All conditions are met
Select Questions: How successful was the overall project?
Select Operator: equals Response: 5

Step 3

Select Create Rule
Select Save Logic

Rules can be added for question logic also. A good example use case would be when a participant selects a score below a certain value, then you might want display a text prompting them for the reason behind the low score. Display logic can be found on the questions on a survey page.

Now that we have added our branching logic we can activate our survey!

Activating your survey

We have completed the build of our survey and have finished adding questions and page branching logic. Before we can send out the survey, though, we must first activate it.

The survey can be activated by selecting the Activate button followed by the Got It button.

We have now successfully activated our survey! Now to send it to our participants!

Sending your survey

To be able to send out the survey we must go to the Send tab of the survey.

For this scenario, I’ll be sending the participant an email.

Complete the following steps:

Select Send Email
Select Content from dropdown
Select Next button
Add a recipient address
Select Next button
Select Send button

We now have sent out a survey to a customer to be completed.

Analyzing Survey Responses

To analyze your Survey Responses you have to go to the Analyze tab. Here you can see responses for all the completed surveys. Survey responses can be exported if needed.

Final thoughts

In summary, Salesforce Surveys have come a long way since its inception, but now we have a well-rounded feature that should be explored and used for business cases.

We have implemented surveys to be automatically sent to customers upon the closure of cases using automation, a great way to capture customer service feedback. If you need help with implementing surveys or thinking of potential use cases feel free to reach out to us at Candybox CRM and have an open discussion.