Extending Your CRM System to Get Customer Insights

Imagine that you are the VP of Marketing of a mid-sized organization. It has been a year since you implemented your SaaS (News - Alert)-based CRM system. The VP of Sales is pleased with his ability to track the sales pipeline and manage the funnel. Your marketing program manager is generating higher quality leads. Even your customer support manager is happy with a streamlined case management process in place. But there is still a key piece missing: you still don’t have a way to communicate with your customers and seamlessly incorporate their feedback into your CRM system. This includes asking them questions such as: How satisfied are they with your products and services? What was the quality of the last interaction between them and your service representative? How do they rate your sales representatives? Why did you win or lose deals? Answers to these questions are critical – they will help you better understand the issues that affect your customer relationships so you can better address the R in CRM. So how do you build this missing piece into your CRM system?

Online Surveys

Online surveys are a good way to elicit feedback from customers. There are many economical, easy-to-use online survey products in the market that help you rapidly and easily create surveys and send them to your customers. These products also have built-in analysis tools, allowing you to quickly analyze responses. But there is a catch. The use of online customer surveys creates yet another information silo – you now have one more isolated source of information about your customers. Your one option is to analyze the individual responses, summarize them and manually input the summary of survey responses into your CRM system, so insights are easily accessible to various stakeholders and more likely to be used (rather than sitting in a PowerPoint and gathering dust). However, what if you or a stakeholder wanted to see the specific customer feedback behind the analysis? You would have to manually go searching for data within your survey responses. But there is another way – what if you could do surveys from within your CRM system and have the data come back automatically into your CRM system? Furthermore, what if you didn’t have to spend a bundle integrating a survey tool with your CRM system? There are now extremely affordable online survey solutions available that are fully integrated with CRM systems such as Salesforce.com (News - Alert), to help a mid-sized company gain better insights from their customers. 

Online Surveys from within CRM system

Such online survey products are tightly integrated with CRM systems, so that they appear as a tab in the CRM system. Using this tab, you can create an online survey in minutes and then map the survey questions and responses into your CRM system using the survey tool’s point and click mapping tools.  The entire process of creating a survey, mapping the fields, and sending out the survey can take less than 30 minutes from start to finish for a marketing or sales operations manager. Solutions such as Salesforce.com allow you to add custom fields within minutes to a lead or a customer record, so the relevant data from your survey responses is automatically loaded into current or newly added fields in your CRM system. 

Using this type of tool can bring customer’s unique insights back into your CRM system. But, how will such a powerful tool be used? Imagine some of the following use cases for online surveys integrated into your CRM system

Once per year you can send customer satisfaction surveys from within your CRM system and then map the customers’ key responses including overall satisfaction rating, willingness to be a reference, top 5 issues and what they like about your products and services back into your CRM system’s account record.  Once this data is within your CRM system, you can not only compute and track the overall customer satisfaction index through your CRM system’s reports and dashboards, you can also segment the index by customer types or geography to gain better insights. In addition, the key information needed to improve any customer’s satisfaction is visible to all stakeholders.

You can now more easily evaluate why you win (or lose) deals. As soon as you change an opportunity status in your CRM system to a won or lost status, the system can trigger a survey to the designated customer contact to collect data for win/loss analysis.  Because the responses are automatically mapped into your CRM system, you can quickly find out what aspects of your products, messages or sales interactions are helping or hurting you and proactively address these issues.

Your customers often have valuable ideas on how to improve your product, message or campaign.  But how do you tap into those ideas and make them real?   Online surveys can be sent from your customer contact record and bring responses back into custom fields to help you capture all the ideas. Once they are in your system, you can review and prioritize them to get them into the development funnel. Since the information is in the CRM system, you also can notify customers as soon as their idea is implemented with a thank you email to strengthen your relationship with them.

Every time you close a customer service case, the CRM system can automatically send a survey to the customer and bring the response back into the CRM system. This can help you determine which service representatives are performing well from the customer’s perspective, providing a basis for rewards or incentives, as well as indentifying issues that can further help improve service levels. Dashboards and reports can be generated from the data within the CRM system.

As you create new marketing campaigns, you want to selectively target the accounts in your lead funnel, so that you can move the right leads forward, while keeping your overall marketing costs down. But most lead records have incomplete information, making it challenging for you to target the right recipients of the campaign. Now imagine that every time you send a survey after a marketing event, you ask your customers for some demographic information that you can use for segmentation and map the responses back into your lead or opportunity record. With integrated online surveys, you can quickly fill in the gaps in lead and opportunity records in your CRM system and use it for more targeted campaigns in the future.

Some online survey vendors have tightly integrated their solutions with CRM products such as Salesforce.com. Integrated products, available for just over a thousand dollars a year, enable mid-sized companies to use surveys to gain better insights from their customers and bring that information back into their CRM system, so that it can be shared with various stakeholders via dashboards and reports. You get the benefit of deep customer insights without creating information silos.

Anil Gupta is responsible for Zoomerang for Salesforce, an online survey product that is integrated with Salesforce.com. He can be reached at [email protected]