3 ways to use surveys in your CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has become the go-to for building relationships with prospects and clients.

Whether you use your CRM to manage contact information and data, to automate and personalize campaigns for nurturing leads, or to keep an open dialogue between you and existing customers, what you’re able to accomplish is ultimately dependent upon how much you know about the people in your database.

When you want to know more about your customers and leads, surveys can be the perfect way to get the data you need to really take advantage of your CRM.

CRM and survey software bring out the best in each other. By combining the data and automated capabilities of CRM with the marketing research capabilities of surveys, you can build and marketing and sales strategies that are more focused without losing your ability to scale.

Here are the 3 smart ways to use surveys to enhance your sales funnel and improve customer loyalty:

It never hurts to learn more about the makeup of your customers and what brings leads to your company’s doorstep. You can use surveys to ask about basic qualifying information, like company size, budget, and title. But you can also ask about areas of interest, and topics that indicate whether someone is a prime sales target.

Adding survey data to your CRM system will allow you to keep contact information fresh while improving your ability to segment your customers into different categories for more targeted marketing.

You can ask your leads for this information directly by emailing them “help us serve you better” surveys focused solely on gathering contact info, pain points, and objectives. Or you can add questions like these into feedback surveys following transactions, webinars, or trainings. Either way, integrating surveys with your CRM automates the gathering of information while dynamically populating the data from surveys into your sales records.

Talk about a win-win!

To know what makes customers tick—and to catch any dissatisfaction before it’s too late—timely feedback surveys can have a huge impact. In fact, research we performed shows that 83% of companies who see themselves as successful actively measure customer satisfaction. By integrating your CRM software with online surveys, you can automate feedback surveys at each major event in the customer/business relationship.

Think about sending your feedback surveys during the following customer touchpoints:

When you look at multiple points in the customer journey, you’ll be able to pinpoint your business strengths and weaknesses at each step you take with the customer. This step will allow you to create customized improvement plans for sales, marketing, customer success, and support teams. You’ll also be able to set performance baselines and benchmarks for customer satisfaction across your organization.

Take a smarter, automated approach to customer care. If a customer gives you a negative rating, an automated “we’re sorry” message can save your rep’s time and make the customer feel like they’re being heard.

Or if a customer fills out a survey and indicates they’ve got a big budget, an automated response can be sent on behalf of sales for a scalable way to identify opportunities.

Bottom line, when you have more data you can put your CRM to work to make sure your customers feel like you’re with them every step of the way.

When it comes time to integrate surveys into your CRM, the Net Promoter ® Score (NPS) can be a great way to quantify your efforts and identify outreach opportunities. NPS is a single survey question that will identify a company’s most happy and most frustrated customers, classifying them as promoters, passives, and detractors.

By sending NPS surveys through your CRM software, you’ll be able to set up automatic notifications to your support team whenever a detractor is registered. If a promoter is identified, your CRM can automatically request the customer post a positive review and redirect the happy customer to the review site of your choice. And you’ll get great data to help you understand how your business is doing. In addition to setting internal benchmarks, the ubiquity of NPS surveys mean that industry benchmark data—which lets you compare your results against companies like yours—is also available.

Every company’s needs are different, but we’re sure you’ll be able to find great ways to combine your CRM and survey initiatives to effectively gain information, identify opportunities, and improve your overall customer relationships. CRMs and survey research are truly a dynamic duo. With both in your corner, you’ll have both the information and the tools to keep your business moving in the right direction.

NPS®, Net Promoter® & Net Promoter® Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.

Salesforce, Sales Cloud, and others are trademarks of salesforce.com, inc., and are used here with permission.