SurveyMonkey's Natalie Aghdaey on CX, Personalization & CRM Integration

SurveyMonkey, the world’s most popular platform for surveys and forms, recently announced it has updated SurveyMonkey for Salesforce on Salesforce AppExchange, providing customers with new ways to automate beautiful, personalized email surveys with Salesforce. We sat down with Natalie Aghdaey, Manager of Product Marketing, to discuss the key benefits of the enhanced SurveyMonkey for Salesforce integration:

1. What are the key benefits of integrating customer survey data with CRM platforms for personalization and decision-making ?

Integrating survey data with your CRM lets you automatically send personalized surveys at key customer touchpoints, push customer feedback to your CRM in real-time, and better understand customer sentiment at scale.

It’s also a big step toward creating a single source of truth for customer insights. With these Salesforce enhancements in SurveyMonkey, you can combine operational customer data with customer feedback, which paints a more complete picture of their needs and where you can take action. For example, if a customer had to contact your team multiple times to resolve an issue with a recent purchase, you would likely see that experience result in a lower CSAT or NPS score. But, you may not truly understand the drivers of that score without combining feedback data with data from your CRM on factors like where this happened in the customer journey.

2. How can organizations use automation to enhance response rates and extract actionable insights from customer feedback ?

Imagine you receive a survey several weeks after your experience with a brand. You likely don’t remember all the specifics of your interaction and are probably no longer as motivated to engage by providing feedback. Automation allows you to reach out at the right time—when the experience is still at the top of the customer's mind. This helps drive higher response rates.

Automatically bringing survey insights into your source of truth for your business gives your entire company a real-time view of how customers think and feel. It also helps you get more actionable insights by adding context to your survey responses. For example, by marrying data from your CRM with your survey data, you can identify trends in customer segments, like plan type, geography, or tenure.

3. What role does hyper-personalization play in survey engagement, and how can companies implement it effectively ?

Personalization is a main priority for CX professionals, and it’s an area where we see a disconnect between what brands believe they deliver and what consumers actually experience. In recent research from SurveyMonkey, almost 9 out of 10 CX pros say their customers’ experience is personalized, but only about 60% of consumers say they receive personalized services when interacting with companies.

When something is personalized, it becomes more relevant for the customer, which makes them more likely to engage. This extends to survey engagement in a few ways. First, you can personalize a survey by bringing in details about the respondent to streamline the survey-taking experience for them. You can also boost response rates by personalizing your emailed survey invites with information like the customer name and the context of their last interaction with you. Second, you can use data that you’re collecting from your surveys to shape segmented customer experience programs. For example, you might identify your promoters with an NPS survey, and then launch tailored upsell campaigns using that feedback.

4. How can businesses ensure that customer experience metrics like CSAT, NPS, and CES are effectively integrated into their broader customer strategy ?

As you’re setting your CX strategy, it’s important to clearly define the experience that your customers are having today, as well as the experience your brand intends to deliver. To do this, you’ll want to assess the customer experience from a variety of angles, including looking at CX metrics like CSAT, NPS, and CES at key moments. As you’re developing your strategy, get buy-in from leadership early and often. This helps ensure your strategy is aligned with your overall company goals so you’ll have the support to take action based on the feedback you receive.

Another best practice is to start with a customer journey map to understand all the customer touch points and where to ask for feedback. This allows you to holistically assess your survey touchpoints to help minimize survey fatigue by not over-surveying customers. You’ll also want to establish a governance process for measuring progress against your customer strategy, leveraging metrics like CSAT, NPS, and CES.

5. What security and reliability factors should companies consider when selecting third-party survey integrations for their CRM ?

When integrating surveys into your CRM, trust and experience are key. Trust is strengthened with strong encryption, API security, administrator controls, and role-based access. You must ensure that you’re meeting regulations like GDPR or HIPAA to keep your data safe, SOC 2 to stay compliant & following best practices in information security management (e.g., ISO 27001). It’s also critical to comply with location-based regulations and confirm where the survey platform stores data (e.g., EU, US, etc.). The best survey integrations will only enhance your customer insights, without compromising compliance or security.

6. How is the evolution of customer feedback technology shaping business strategies for retention and growth ?

If it’s not already, creating a customer-centric culture should be a major focus area for your business. When that focus is infused across your company strategies, you’ll naturally evaluate new avenues and technologies to improve customer experience.

Because technology is evolving (and improving) at a rapid pace, you need to be flexible in adapting not only to new technology but also to customer needs.

As you consider new feedback technologies, first ask yourself two simple questions:

How would this help us attract new customers?

How would this help us keep existing customers?

Starting with those two questions in mind will help you simplify your approach in deciding whether to spend time and resources on adopting that technology and if it will give you measurable ROI.