Since its inception, Salesforce has focused on giving organizations a holistic view of their customer data. The platform’s robust offerings and ease of integration have long set it apart from competitors, and the numbers prove it—the software giant saw $10.48 billion in total revenue in fiscal 2018.

But most modern CRMs, including Salesforce, lack one large piece: customer surveys. If you’re going to house your customer data somewhere, why isn’t there an easy way to sync customer feedback to that system?

CRM integration is especially critical for Net Promoter Score (NPS). The NPS survey measures long-term customer satisfaction and customer loyalty—two fundamentals for modern organizations.

Below we’ll explain why NPS data belongs in your CRM, and how you can put it there using GetFeedback for Salesforce.

Measuring NPS with Salesforce

Your CRM is where your customer information lives. It’s where you manage your customer relationships and interactions. So when you implement a Net Promoter Score program at your organization, it only makes sense for that customer feedback to live alongside the rest of your customer data.

Maintaining two sets of customer info always ends in clutter and confusion. The data becomes more of a barrier to results than a catalyst for progress. Employees will typically take the path of least resistance—they won’t open up a second program to check a user’s NPS before reaching out to them. Plus, having two record systems makes it tougher to give upper management a real-time view of customer health.

When you integrate NPS with Salesforce, you can filter and supplement reporting with additional customer data. What did they buy? Where are they located? Have they talked to support? Who is their account manager?

These additional layers of data provide insights on which areas need improvement and which show promise.

How to integrate NPS with Salesforce

GetFeedback makes it easy to create NPS surveys and map the survey responses directly into Salesforce. With a bit of configuration, you can use native Salesforce reporting to calculate NPS and create dashboards to display key customer feedback. (GetFeedback Analytics also introduces real-time dashboards that help teams monitor feedback across surveys.)

For the sake of this post, we’ll discuss how to measure NPS with Salesforce using GetFeedback specifically. This is just a suggested setup; ultimately, your NPS program should be customized to fit your organization’s needs.

Here are the basic steps to integrate and measure NPS with Salesforce:

1. Create a custom object in Salesforce called “NPS Survey.” It should contain the following fields:

• Survey Name (Text)

• Contact (Simple Lookup filed – Contact)

• Email (Email)

• Net Promoter Score (Number)

• Comments (Long Text)

• NPS Response URL (Text, URL)

• NPS Grouping (Formula, result: Text)

• Promoter (Formula, result: Number)

• Passive (Formula, result: Number)

• Detractor (Formula, result: Number)

2. NPS Grouping is a formula that categorizes survey respondents as Promoters, Passives, or Detractors based on their Net Promoter Score. You can decide whether you’d like to display images or text in this field. Some organizations prefer to use stars, hearts, or other images to make it quick and easy for employees to identify a customer’s grouping. (Flaticon has a ton of icons and images you can check out.)

NPS Grouping with images:

IF(NOT(ISBLANK(Net_Promoter_Score__c)),(IF(Net_Promoter_Score__c < 7, IMAGE("/servlet/servlet.FileDownload?file=015o0000001blTH", "Detractor"),IF(Net_Promoter_Score__c > 8,IMAGE("/servlet/servlet.FileDownload?file=015o0000001blTN", "Promoter"),IMAGE("/servlet/servlet.FileDownload?file=015o0000001blTM", "Passive")))), "")

NPS Grouping without images:

IF(Net_Promoter_Score__c < 7, "Detractor", IF(Net_Promoter_Score__c > 8, "Promoter", "Passive"))

3. The Promoter, Passive and Detractor fields allow you to total the number of responses you’ve received for each NPS grouping. You need these grouping totals in order to calculate your Net Promoter Score in Salesforce. These fields don’t need to be visible on the page layout.

• Promoter: IF(Net_Promoter_Score__c > 8, 1, 0)

• Passive: IF(AND(Net_Promoter_Score__c > 6, Net_Promoter_Score__c < 9), 1, 0)

• Detractor: IF(Net_Promoter_Score__c < 7, 1, 0)

4. Next, you’ll need to create a custom report type in Salesforce for your NPS object.

5. To actually calculate your Net Promoter Score, you’ll use a Salesforce report. Create a new summary report with your newly created NPS report type. You can choose to summarize NPS by Survey Name, or filter the report to just show specific Surveys.

6. Finally, to actually calculate NPS, you’ll need to write a summary formula in your report to calculate your score.

NPS calculation formula:

(NPS_Survey__c.Promoter__c:SUM/RowCount*100) - (NPS_Survey__c.Detractor__c:SUM/RowCount*100)

Now that Salesforce is set up to receive your NPS survey results, the rest is easy. You just need to map your response data to the corresponding Salesforce fields. Here’s an example:

Make sure your NPS surveys are “Salesforce-aware” when you distribute them. This will ensure they’re associated with the proper records in Salesforce when you receive responses. The Contact ID is typically the main Salesforce field that needs to be passed over as a merge field so the whole process works.

Improve customer experience

You’ve just integrated NPS with Salesforce. Once responses are collected and synced, what do you do with the data?

First off, you can streamline processes to improve customer experience. If you receive an NPS response from a Detractor, you can use native Salesforce functionality to automatically create a support case or notify the account owner. This kicks the recovery process into gear immediately.

You can do something similar for Promoters. They’ve already said they’d refer you. Why not take them up on it? Maybe your marketing team would like to reach out for a testimonial, or your customer success team wants to learn more about their experience so they can replicate it. You can build workflows that create tasks for team members or trigger notifications when customers rate you positively.

How can your customers help you get more customers? It’s really the key question in a low-cost customer acquisition model. If you listen to them, your customers will tell you what’s working and what’s not. By integrating NPS with Salesforce, you can put that feedback to use, creating a systematic process for driving customer loyalty.