Salesforce Service Cloud is one of the most popular case and customer support management solutions on the market today. Customer service teams can provide efficient, omnichannel customer service through Service Cloud and share customer data seamlessly with other Salesforce users.
However, Service Cloud is missing one key feature: the ability to measure customer satisfaction, or calculate a CSAT score.
In this post, we’ll cover the basics of measuring CSAT with Salesforce, from implementation to best practices. But first, let’s discuss why customer satisfaction data belongs in Salesforce in the first place.
The importance of customer satisfaction
Before a company can improve customer experience, it has to measure it effectively. Since customer satisfaction is a big component of any company’s success, CSAT is a valuable customer experience metric.
Companies typically use customer satisfaction surveys to monitor service quality and collect customer feedback after specific experiences. Those experiences might include support interactions, branch visits, purchases, and more. You’ve surely participated in many yourself—over email, in an app, on a website, or in person.
Why you should measure CSAT with Salesforce
Salesforce Service Cloud acts as the source of truth for all things customer experience. Service Cloud houses vital customer data, including case history, that tells that customer’s story.
Service teams can evaluate case history along with other data to get a sense for each customer’s needs and preferences. But in many cases, that process is much harder than it sounds. Customer feedback often hides deep in the trenches of case logs, and agents are forced to report on how they think a customer feels.
CSAT scores give service teams a quicker picture of customer health and happiness. Rather than scraping case logs for hints on customer satisfaction, agents get a clear, customer-reported score supplemented by customer feedback in Salesforce.
Additionally, CSAT scores may vary widely based on specific factors. Mapping survey results to Salesforce helps you to pin down the trends you’d otherwise miss.
Maybe customers on one plan have a higher overall CSAT score than others. Or maybe one customer support agent outperforms the rest. When you integrate CSAT with Salesforce, drawing these connections becomes simple.
Measuring CSAT with Salesforce
GetFeedback makes it easy to create CSAT surveys and map the survey responses directly into Salesforce. With a bit of configuration, you can use native Salesforce reporting to calculate CSAT and create dashboards to display key customer feedback.
GetFeedback Analytics also introduces real-time dashboards that help teams monitor feedback across surveys. This simplifies survey analysis considerably.
For the sake of this post, we’ll discuss how to measure CSAT with Salesforce and GetFeedback specifically. This is just a suggested setup; ultimately, your CSAT program should be customized to fit your organization’s needs.
Here are the basic steps to integrate CSAT with Salesforce.
Step 1: Create your CSAT survey.
It’s best to keep your CSAT survey short, easy, accessible, and professional. You can read all about CSAT survey best practices in our post on measuring customer satisfaction with CSAT.
Most CSAT surveys use a 1-5 scale to reflect various levels of satisfaction: 1 representing Not At All Satisfied and 5 representing Extremely Satisfied. This is how we run our CSAT survey and how we’ll approach CSAT methodology in this post.
You might also choose to include a product-focused question or ask for more details on the CSAT score the customer chose. Both are popular ways of gathering a bit more feedback while you have the customer’s attention.
Lastly, survey design and respondent experience are incredibly important. Today more than ever, people expect beautiful, mobile-optimized experiences; when a site handles poorly on mobile or doesn’t reflect the brand, it’s a very bad look. Make sure you’re sending branded, mobile surveys that represent your company well.
Read more: Designing Surveys That Deliver: 5 Ways to Get Better Results
Free CSAT Survey Template
Get the TemplateStep 2: Create a custom object for your CSAT survey in Salesforce.
There are a few options for mapping survey results to Salesforce. Here they are, in order of popularity:
Create new Salesforce records for each survey response.
Map survey responses to Salesforce fields on existing records.
View survey responses in Salesforce as activity records.
In this post, we’ll just discuss option 1: creating a custom object.
We recommend naming the custom object something simple that represents the survey and the use case, like “Case Closed CSAT.” If you’ll be sending a bunch of different types of surveys, you may want to create multiple custom objects.
Your custom object should contain a field for every survey question/answer you plan to save in Salesforce, as well as the data you’re passing from Salesforce to GetFeedback with merge fields.
Here’s an example of our custom CSAT Survey object:
Custom objects also typically have a “lookup relationship” with a standard object. Most customers running CSAT surveys will build a lookup from the custom survey object to the case object in Salesforce.
You can also have multiple lookups; for example, if you want your survey record to live under a contact object, you can add the contact object as a second lookup relationship to your custom survey object.
Make sure to reference this list of Supported Salesforce Field Data Type Mappings while selecting your fields.
Step 3: Set up your Salesforce survey mappings.
Next up, you’ll return to GetFeedback to create your Salesforce mappings. Within your CSAT survey, navigate to the Salesforce tab and open up the mapping tool. This is where you’ll specify how survey responses map to Salesforce fields.
We built a really easy-to-use, visual mapper so you can dictate how each survey question/answer maps to Salesforce. To start, you’ll select “Create a new” record. Then, choose exactly which record you’d like to send the information to.
The mapper will bring up all object names, custom and standard, that you have in your Salesforce org.
Read more: Mapping “Salesforce Aware” Survey Responses to Salesforce
Step 4: Make your CSAT survey “Salesforce-aware.”
By default, GetFeedback doesn’t know who you send your surveys to. For example, you could create a survey in GetFeedback, grab the default share link, and mass email that link out to your customers.
Because the default survey link is generic and every customer clicks the same one, it would be impossible to attribute responses to specific individuals.
Every record in Salesforce has a unique ID. (All Contacts each have a “ContactID,” all Accounts have an “AccountID,” all Cases have a “CaseID,” and so on.)
Salesforce admins are usually quite familiar with these IDs, and end users would typically see them in the URL when they’re viewing a Salesforce record.
For example, the ContactID for Stephanie Sartz is “003G000001S9UPA” (as seen here).
When distributing a GetFeedback survey, the presence of any Salesforce ID (or a combination of many, as shown below) in the survey URL makes it “Salesforce-aware.”
So if I wanted to send a survey to Stephanie Sartz, I’d simply add her ContactID onto the end of the URL, like this:www.getfeedback.com/r/05TCJ62M?ContactID=003G000001S9UPA
This customized URL allows us to identify where Stephanie’s response should be mapped in Salesforce.
At this point, you’re probably thinking this process seems time-intensive. If you want to send a CSAT survey to many recipients, it’s not reasonable to create a custom survey URL for each and every one of them. That’s where dynamic merge fields come in.
We’ll cover the basics here, but be sure to read up on using merge fields in survey URLs so you’re familiar with all the options.
Using dynamic merge fields in survey URLs
When sending CSAT surveys to many recipients at once, you can use merge fields to pass data from Salesforce to GetFeedback. For example, if I’m creating an automated case closed CSAT workflow, I’ll want each customer response tied to the ContactID, CaseID, and AgentName.
Using Service Cloud’s merge field syntax, that dynamic survey URL would look like this:www.getfeedback.com/r/05TCJ62M?ContactID={!Contact.ID}&CaseID={!Case.ID}&AgentName={!Case.OwnerFullName}
Those variables can also be hidden in a link, like this:Please complete our brief customer satisfaction survey
Instead of building customer-specific survey URLs, merge fields allow you to create one master URL that pulls the right info from Salesforce and then maps each customer’s response back to the appropriate records.
Read more: Getting Started with GetFeedback for Salesforce
Step 5: Distribute your Salesforce-aware survey.
Once your custom object is set up and your Salesforce mappings are in place, you’re ready to distribute your CSAT survey.
Although there are many survey distribution methods that companies employ to collect feedback throughout the customer journey, today we’ll focus on email only. Email is the most effective channel for businesses and the most popular way to distribute surveys.
As described above, you’ll need to append your custom survey URL with merge fields like ContactID, CaseID, and AgentName before distributing it. Once that’s complete, you can focus on your survey email.
Before you settle on a distribution method, be sure to consider the structure of your CSAT program. Do you plan to automate CSAT surveys with a Salesforce workflow? Do you want to manually select recipients? These questions will dictate how you distribute the survey.
Survey email distribution methods
Trigger a CSAT survey with a Salesforce workflow: best for consistent, automated surveying, like after case closures
Send a CSAT survey using a Salesforce report: best for mass, transactional surveying
Create a “Send Customer Survey” button in Salesforce: best for transactional, account-based surveying
Send Salesforce-aware CSAT surveys from GetFeedback: best for mass, transactional surveying
Once you’ve created your CSAT survey email and are ready to distribute, make sure to run a quick test. We suggest sending the survey to yourself, completing it, then viewing Salesforce-aware survey responses in GetFeedback to confirm everything is working properly.
Read more: Distributing “Salesforce Aware” Surveys
Step 6: Create reports and dashboards in Salesforce with CSAT survey results.
(Again, you can also use GetFeedback Analytics dashboards to analyze multiple surveys in one place.)
It’s easy to build basic reports and dashboards in Salesforce using survey data, but you may want to get more granular with your analysis.
For example, you could group customers by CSAT score, as seen here.
You’d simply run a report and calculate overall CSAT score using the following formula:
((CSAT_Survey__c.CSAT__c:AVG)/5)*100
These customer satisfaction segments help us quickly identify unhappy customers so we can reach out to repair those relationships.
If you’d like a bit more visibility, you might consider creating a Customer Satisfaction Dashboard to monitor specific CSAT metrics, like Customer Satisfaction by Agent.
Dashboards are obviously much more engaging that simple reports, and the comprehensive view adds more additional context to your survey data. Suddenly, the feedback tells a bigger story.
Viewing these metrics in one dashboard can reveal relationships you’d normally miss.
For example, fast resolution times may have a bigger impact on customer satisfaction than time to contact support.
From this wider angle, it’s easier to nail down trends and relationships between your data points so you can prioritize process changes and make more informed decisions.
Of course, this hardly scratches the surface. There are countless possibilities for companies when they integrate CSAT with Salesforce.
Ultimately, marrying this customer feedback with other key customer data positions you to take a more proactive approach to customer care—and get company-wide visibility into customer experience.
Wrap-up
Integrating CSAT with Salesforce enables teams to actually take action on the feedback they collect. Much of this action can be automated too.
For example, many customer service teams create workflows using the case closed CSAT survey. If a customer rates an interaction poorly, an alert notifies the customer service manager, or the case is reopened, or their success manager is tasked with a follow-up. Or all of the above.
The options go on and on, but you get the picture—an integrated customer feedback program helps companies close the loop with proactive service. Critical customer feedback isn’t missed or ignored, and teams can take proactive measures to repair damaged relationships and nurture healthy ones.
Contact us if you’re interested in learning more about measuring CSAT with GetFeedback for Salesforce.
