If you work for, or do business with a company that values customer happiness and success, it's likely you either send and/or receive surveys asking for feedback.

At HubSpot, we're no different, and we do quite a bit of surveying to not only gauge customer happiness, but to also measure support performance and evaluate the success of various internal programs and initiatives.

With the numerous surveying tools available on the AppExchange, getting set up is relatively easy, but it's how you choose to map your results back to Salesforce that can really take your data to the next level.

Items to consider:

1.) Is the relationship between Salesforce record and survey(s) 1:1 or 1:Many?

This is important to consider for your data mapping / survey object relationship. If every record in Salesforce will receive no more than 1 survey, it may be enough to simply add fields on that object to capture all of your data. A typical case closed survey is a good example of this.

If the relationship is many surveys for a single Salesforce record, you'd be best served by creating a custom Survey Response object (or something similar) to capture your data. Sending quarterly customer satisfaction surveys is a good example of this. You can create a 'Customer Satisfaction Survey' object, where a new record will be created every time a survey is completed.

2.) Standard or Custom Objects?

While there are many Surveying tools on the AppExchange (many of which are free), not all of them integrate with custom objects in Salesforce. This is obviously important to consider when evaluating vendors.

Implementation:

If you can create Workflow Rules and Email Alerts, you can set up automated surveys. 

Most survey tools will automatically generate for you a URL specific to your survey. In most cases- you'll be able to append Salesforce fields to the URL to map to the correct record in Salesforce.com

Example: 

http://hubspot.force.com/caseclosed/TakeSurvey?id=zab70000002auSW&cId={!Contact.Id}&caId={!Case.Id} 

Once embedded in an Email Template- Salesforce will be smart enough to replace Contact.Id and Case.Id with the corresponding Record IDs, just as it does for normal merge fields. When someone then clicks on that link and fills out the survey- their response will get sucked back into Salesforce, as will their Contact and Case Id, which you can populate in a lookup field so you can do all sorts of reporting.

You can then set up a simple Workflow rule and Email alert as follows:

How do you survey your customer base?