Qualtrics for Salesforce Review

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For some reason I’ve kind of fallen into the world of Survey integration and Salesforce unintentionally, I just always seem to end up with projects where we need to get a large amount of information into Salesforce some how and surveys always seem the most logical option. Most recently I’ve used Timba Surveys , Clicktools and Qualtrics – Of which all are great at different specific tasks.

It turns out Qualtrics are actually a pretty huge global company which I did not realize when I initially found the Salesforce App. They’ve got a pretty neat Infographic on their website that describes just how huge they are and it is pretty impressive! But in a nut shell Qualtrics claim they are the world’s leading enterprise survey technology provider which includes a Salesforce plugin to their software. In this post I’ll be reviewing the App in the context of using it primarily with Salesforce.

Qualtrics for Salesforce

Truthfully there’s not an awful lot to review in terms of the App itself as there are only 9 components installed with it! The main part of the application is the Visualforce page and tab that let you login to the Qualtrics application through Salesforce. This, similar to a lot of other App’s allows you to login through Salesforce for convenience but also gives you the option to login through the Qualtrics website. The picture below is the splash screen you will see once everything is installed and you have logged onto the App. The fun starts when you have created an account! I’m always a bit put off when I have to create yet another account but I have to say it does make sense with Qualtrics and they do not bombard you with promotional emails.

Once you’ve created an account you can see Qualtrics in its full glory. I’m always a bit wary and put off with using a Visualforce page App as usually they are clunky and I would much rather use the actual website instead of a website within a website. With Qualtrics however I found it very easy to use and found no need to venture outside of Salesforce. Below is a capture from a live Qualtrics Environment so you can get a feel for the kind of features it has available and the kind of information that it presents to you when you first login.

As they have essentially just linked us to their own website within the Salesforce environment it is not integrated into Salesforce what so ever and at the moment is pretty useless in terms of mapping. The great thing about Qualtrics is that it is extremely easy to map each Survey to an environment of your choice. It is as simple as entering your normal credentials plus your security token

Creating a Survey

I’m not going to focus too much on the survey creation aspect of things as I’m primarily reviewing how Qualtrics and Salesforce interact with each other. What I will say though is that I was very impressed by the amount of different types of questions you can drag into your survey. Of course you’ve got all the basics like text, multiple choice, drop down etc but you have also got some truly crazy over the top items that might be perfect for some people like sliders, drag and drop question/tests and also graphical questions as well (Choose the image you find most appealing). But in summary, you are not going to be hard pressed to create exactly the kind of survey you want.

The great thing about Qualtrics is that all of these question types can be mapped to Salesforce in some form. I know Timba surveys is very restrictive and can only really map to basic text and number fields which does not include lookup fields.

Qualtrics and Salesforce Response Mapping

You can do quite a lot of interesting stuff when mapping over information to Salesforce which includes embedding data in the survey URL to pre-populate data that may be needed to update records in Salesforce. As a quick example, a previous client of mine wanted to automatically send out a survey to newly entered contacts to try and get more information from them. This of course would be an update to Salesforce on its return and therefore we needed to embed the contact ID to be able to perform the update. I’m going to write another blog post on this as there’s quite a lot of things you can do that took me a while to get my head around.

In terms of creating a basic mapping though? Flawless. It is so so basic to create a basic mapping whether it is inserting, updating or deleting (can’t really think of a use case for this yet) it is so easy. I remember using Clicktools a few years ago and although it was extremely advanced and you could do anything with it, I remember setting it up to update a record was a bit of a pain.

As you can see above you select the Action from a dropdown list and the Object you wish to perform the action on (NB. this doesn’t have a standard list of Salesforce Objects it does actually perform a live fetch to your Org to get even custom objects). After this is setup it is just a matter of mapping the fields within Salesforce to the questions on your survey, that’s it!

After this is done you are pretty much set for a basic survey. You are presented with an anonymous link that you can then start sending out.

Summary

Qualtrics is a very powerful bit of software even when you are not using it with Salesforce. The setup, creation tool and mapping functionality was very intuitive and easy to use, the only reason I needed to look up documentation was for the more advanced features like embedded data which is not immediately obvious. When my client first came to me and told me about their requirements I initially I suggested Clicktools, but when the price was an issue, I looked else where. If you are looking for a survey tool for Salesforce I strongly recommend that you check out Qualtrics.