An Advanced Guide To Conduct Successful Surveys Through CRM

 

Business Growth and How to achieve it?

It is a burning question for all the business owners and especially the e-store owners.

To increase the reach of any business online, an in-depth analysis of your business offerings is important. It helps you to understand your customer needs and how your products/services are helping them. Based on that analysis you can prepare and strategize the next phrase to yield better results.

In a more simple language, business growth.

There is one proven way to achieve effective and stable business growth.

Understand how your marketing efforts affect your overall business in terms of revenue and growth. To do so, your marketing team needs to create a big picture based on previous sales, audience, product returns, marketing campaigns, and other data to give you an idea of what’s working and what’s not. However, this solely provides information regarding how your business is performing.

The main task is to understand the data and figure out the customers’ perspective towards your offerings. With this data, you will be able to figure what they like and might want in the near future. But the data in the hands of your marketing people is incomplete without the surveys.

Surveys are an important aspect to know your customers.

This guide will explain how you can conduct successful online surveys through your CRM. Yes! Through CRM.

This Article Includes:

• What is an Online Survey?
• How Surveys Help Businesses?
• Understanding Why the Blend of Surveys+CRM is a Blockbuster Hit!
• Step-by-Step Guide to How to Conduct Successful Online Surveys through CRM
  • Step 1: Choosing an Extension
  • Step 2: Defining the Purpose
  • Step 3: Creating and Sending Surveys
• Benefits of Conducting Surveys
• Survey Tips

Let’s start by diving deep into the concept of online surveys and how they help the businesses.

What is an Online Survey?

A Survey is basically a set of questions you ask to your targeted audience. Surveys are a great way to do market research and collect the necessary data in order to make objective decisions on reliable information. The surveys can be conducted in various forms: online surveys, website surveys, phone surveys, paper surveys, etc. And in the advanced guide, we are going to talk about all the aspects of an online survey.

Online surveys are sent to the targeted audience to complete over the internet. They usually contain web forms with an integrated database where you can store the answers and generate an audience analysis using statistical software. Online surveys are basically conducted by business owners with an intention to know their customers’ opinions and preferences.

We have cleared the concept. Now let’s see how they help the businesses grow sustainably.

How Surveys Help Businesses?

As a business owner, you might have thousands of questions regarding the customer’s behavior. Like why they leave your website? Is your product fulfilling the needs of the customers? There are numerous questions like these when answered might solve 80% of your business-related confusions. Because there is a   and thought process behind the customer’s action. If a customer comes to visit your website for a particular service or product for multiple times and doesn’t feel satisfied, he will eventually check out your competitors and take their business to them.

So, it becomes critical to find out what caused the customer to leave the website and which elements weren’t satisfactory. In these cases, gathering insightful feedbacks using surveys from customers will help you to improve your product and its features. Additionally, surveys help to bring quality to the current relationships as well as expand to new opportunities. You can understand the individual customer’s behavior and offer them custom-tailored services according to the findings. After all, studying your customers and their behavior will help you create a detailed customer-centric business roadmap which is the recipe for success!

Surveys surely add a great deal of value to your business but what makes them a blockbuster hit?

Understanding Why the Blend of Surveys+CRM is a Blockbuster Hit!

A Survey is not a newfound technique. Every business, organization, Govt. body conduct them frequently. But before the magical invention of the internet, they used to conduct surveys offline. On Paper. And manually add the information in the database & analyze the same. It used to be a tedious task which took months & months.

But with the online surveys, this process getting shorter & effective day-by-day.

And when you integrate your Survey with the CRM, the process becomes more effective. Because when conducting CRM integrated surveys, you already have a ready database of your customers with all the required details. You just have to filter out the required fields and targeted audience from the database.

When using the combination of CRM and Survey extension, one of the major benefit is that you can directly send and receive feedbacks in the CRM itself. This makes your analysis more transparent and helps you to have a deeper idea about your consumers and their perspective of your products.

Before we start our guide on how to conduct successful online surveys through CRM, finding the Suitable CRM Survey Extension is the first and foremost step. Read how you can find the perfect extension for your CRM.

Step 1: Choosing an Extension

One of the things to keep in mind is that if you choose to go with any available extension in the market, you will have to spend some extra costs to leverage extension functionalities. For example, some small things such as sending emails, automation capabilities, etc. might not be available with most of the extensions.

So, the first thing to look out for while choosing a CRM survey extension is that it should not require any type of third-party integration. Other things to keep in mind while making a decision about CRM survey plugin are:

• Should be easy to install
• Comes with user-friendly interface
• Lets you brand the surveys with your brand identity
• Should have advanced features like Data piping, skip logic, survey automation, etc.
• Should provide detailed analytical reports along with statistical data
• Comes with a customizable theme to go with your brand color scheme

The list is endless but the above-mentioned things should be on your checklist while investing in a CRM survey tool.

After choosing and installing the Survey extension with CRM, follow these steps exclusively crafted to prepare a Survey which generates maximum responses.

Step 2: Defining the Purpose

The first step might take a while and it should as you will be investing a lot of resources. But once you choose the right extension, the next step is to create a vision and define the purpose of your surveys.

When conducting an online Survey, it is important to define purpose. Because there are a number of ways to conduct surveys and multiple types depending on the purpose.

Whether it’s collecting feedbacks of trainees or customers, measuring how often people use Instagram in a day, the average screen time of users, and so on, the type, structure & the targeted audience will differ based on your reason.

So, here is your role matters the most. As a business owner, salesperson or as a marketer, define the agenda behind the survey and they start designing the survey accordingly.

The surveys having a well-thought idea behind them always get a better response rate.

If you are new to conducting surveys then below are some of the types of go-to surveys to help understand this step more clearly:

 

• Customer Feedback Survey

Surveys help you to get one step closer to understand what your customers think. Let’s just not get into the discussion of what customers actually want! That calls for another article but let’s talk about customer feedback surveys first. These type of surveys provide a way to discover the customer’s perspective towards your products, services, and certain improvement areas.

You must have come across questions like “How did you find our website?”, “How our product helped to solve your issue?” while filling up the surveys and those fall into the category of customer feedback surveys. These type of questions can help your marketing teams to determine the most valuable platform in terms of traffic, what are the ways your product is being used, how your support team is performing, and many more.

 

• Net Promoter Survey/Customer Satisfaction Surveys

 

Your customers are the best marketers. To leverage this word-of-mouth technique, net promoter surveys are the best to understand your customer’s views on your products & find out who are your promoters.

This type of survey contains a rating scale. Therefore, based on your customers’ rating you can determine their behavior towards your products/services and further you can bifurcate them into the categories of detractors, passives or promoters.

Such surveys have questions like “Would you recommend our services to your customers?” which will probably serve your purpose behind such a Survey campaign.

These surveys are also conducted with a purpose to understand the customer satisfaction level.

 

• Market Research Survey

 

Marketing insights play a significant role. You need to have a solid understanding of current trends in the industry. Running a survey outside your company bubble would render precise information regarding the current market affairs.

Prepare your questionnaire which includes questions like “What problems motivate you to purchase our products?”, “What is your budget for our services?”

Such questions would help to gather specific data of your industry.

There are many other types of surveys on which we intend to write an article. You can leave your views on the same in the comment box. But first, let’s proceed ahead with the next step in conducting a successful survey.

Step 3: Creating and Sending Surveys

After knowing all the nitty-gritty information from defining your purpose and choosing the appropriate survey type, let’s get into how to create your survey the right way.

• Choose a Survey Template

It is advisable to start some research for a survey template. You can create your own customized template as well. For example, a CRM survey extension named Survey rocket, exclusive for SugarCRM and SuiteCRM, lets you create as many survey templates as you want. You can create various types of surveys depending on your business needs and of course the purpose. Make sure to do some research before hitting the road.

• Add Your Brand Identity

Once you have locked the template for your survey, the next thing on your checklist should be to add your brand identity .i.e your logo at the top of your survey. The response rate increases once they see a known brand name on the survey. Also, make sure your survey color scheme matches with your brand color scheme.

• Select the Type of Questions

Depending on the type of your survey, the questions within will differ. For example, a customer satisfaction survey will have rating scales, a market research survey might have multiple choice & some open-ended questions, and so on. So, again you will have to see your survey from the respondent’s perspective and decide which question type is suitable for your survey.

• Use GDPR Compliant Survey Forms

With the integrated CRM survey software, you can leverage the ready-made forms which follow the GDPR policy. We all are aware of its importance. Through GDPR friendly forms you can get your customer’s consent through survey responses and can update those records accordingly.

• Enable Scoring

For example, if your survey is based on an online quiz or a test, it is important to enable scoring in surveys to calculate the live scores and determine the next actions. With some survey modules for CRM, you can use this functionality and set the scoring values based on the answer choices.

• Data Piping

You can make the most out of the CRM surveys with this facility. Data piping fetches the available data from CRM and then pre-fills the selected fields in the Survey, making it easier for the respondents. Best known as forward Data Piping, it saves you & your respondent from all the hassle to fill each module every time!

Another feature is also known as backward data piping. If there is pre-filled information available in the survey, the responder can make changes in that information. And the survey extension updates the changes and pipes back the information in the CRM.

With the Data piping automation feature, it becomes easier to customize the survey experience user-to-user. You can pipe CRM data into specific CRM survey modules or questions.

• Skip Logic

Skip logic makes your survey personalized based on the response. The simple example is when you ask responders multi-choice questions like are they male or female. The next question would be based on their answer. This way your users would be able to answer only those questions which are relevant to them.

This way you can conveniently send surveys which are customizable for different groups group.

• Apply Custom SMTP

The advanced CRM survey modules provide the facility to send surveys through your own SMTP server. You can configure your own SMTP account to that survey module. This makes your IP address secure as the email bounce rate reduces and avoids spam filters as well. Plus, your survey lands directly into the inbox.

• Apply Survey Automation

Once your survey is designed & set to go out to your targeted audience, it is time to make your surveys smarter & intuitive with Survey Automation. It automates many of the manual actions. Such as you can leverage the amalgamation of a specific condition and action to send surveys to the chosen responders. You can define the overall workflow of the survey with defined conditions and can distribute it overall which eliminates the small & tedious tasks.

• Sharable Surveys

Now you are ready with a smart survey, but how you share them also make a huge difference in the response rate you get.

Advanced CRM survey modules will allow you to create shareable surveys, open polls, email survey links, and other ways to help you reach a wider audience. Because there would be certain cases where a particular user is not available in your CRM but would want to or have to attend your survey. In such cases, Sharable surveys help. You can generate a link for the surveys using any CRM survey extension.

This way, anyone who is not your CRM user can also take the survey by directly opening the survey submission page through the link, helping you widen your research & collecting more data for accurate decision making.

• Reporting

After you send a Survey, it is important to analyze it thoroughly to get to know that how many numbers of customers replied and what are their thoughts on the questions you asked. If you have conducted a survey using a well-known CRM Survey module, you get to analyze and manage your survey data with various type of reports.

For example, with Status reports, you can check how many surveys are under which status. Secondly, there comes a question wise report that helps you to understand the psychology of responders based on their answers.

• Advanced Reporting

Apart from the basic analytics report features, CRM survey software should provide you with in-depth statistical reports which gives a deep insight about the buyer’s point of views and helps you to analyze the Surveys in a better way.

Trend analytics report caters the information about ongoing trends in your industry. You can also analyze the questions which gained more responses from your targeted audience. Additionally, based on the response rate you can have a different chart view. Advanced reporting feature also provides deep insights on each individual and their average spent time on your survey.

And that’s the end of it.

A perfect step-by-step recipe towards creating and conducting a successful survey from your CRM.

But we wanted to add some more knowledge to this advanced guide with our next section.

 

Benefits of Conducting Surveys:

Now that you have all the required information about how you can conduct a successful CRM survey let’s go through some of the important benefits of surveys to your business and some added tips.

• With the CRM Survey plugin, you get to use the CRM customer data in the best way possible. Because your CRM is like a treasure box which contains all of your customers, leads and sales data. After you integrate the Survey module with it, you can utilize it to the fullest.
• Working an eCommerce business, we all have that chunk of customer data who are potential future buyers, comes to visit our store but end up not buy anything. In such a case, Surveys can come to the rescue and you can convert those customers as well by knowing their needs and feedbacks. For example, asking about “What is the missing functionality you would like to have in our products?’ will pretty much solve your dilemma.
• Sending Survey Polls after some days of the product purchase would give you some deep insights about how your customers felt using it. Probably you will be able to solve their queries, complains before they raise them.
• One of the major benefits of CRM Surveys is that it keeps everyone in the loop! Since all the team members have access to CRM, they can analyze and examine the feedbacks in order to improve their process which eventually gives a new roadmap to your business services and products.

 

Survey Tips:

• Keep Surveys Short: Do you recall a moment when you left the Survey only on the first glance because of its length? Everybody needs to have a survey which is short and less time-consuming.
• Keep Questions Simple: You can not assume that with each question you ask would make your responders comfortable.  So, it is advisable to avoid using jargons and other difficult words. Moreover, keep in mind when asking a sensitive question that the question is framed in a proper manner.
• Use Closed Questions: Closed questions tend to give you more response rate. For example, the question with specific choices (Yes, No) makes it easier to respond and analyze.
• Include Rating Scale Questions: Using the rating scale questions in your survey makes it easy for you to analyze a certain set of variables.
• Offer Incentives: Your responders like to get something in return for their time spent on Surveys. Offer incentives as it boosts your Survey response rate.

And now we are done with our advanced guide on conducting surveys!

So, ready to conduct surveys?

If you use Sugar or SuiteCRM then we have the perfect CRM survey extension for you! You can get started by clicking on the button below.

AppJetty has an all-inclusive and no investment partnership program for our tool, Survey Rocket. Affiliate with us through this program and expand your business. Interested? Learn more about the program from here.