Gather Customer Feedback with a Survey Journey
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Actively retain your customers.
- Build a survey journey using Journey Builder and Service Cloud.
Salesforce Platform
Journey Builder helps you connect with your customer at different points in their journey, but why limit yourself to a single phase of the customer lifecycle? This unit helps you integrate other Salesforce products, specifically Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, into your customer journey to address the full spectrum of customer interactions. Let’s take a look.
Sales and Service Cloud Events require Marketing Cloud Connect implementation. This implementation maps Sales and Service Cloud information to Marketing Cloud Engagement information and permit the necessary updates. Review the Marketing Cloud Connect documentation for more information.
Sales and Service Cloud Events
Journey Builder uses the Salesforce SOAP API to perform three actions in Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.
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Create—The activity creates a new object in Sales Cloud or Service Cloud.
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Find and Update—The activity uses an Account ID value to look up the correct record and update attributes.
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Simple Update—The activity updates information on the specified Account object.
Don’t let the API mention scare you—you don’t actually write code to make these actions happen. Instead, just move an activity to the Journey Builder canvas to perform actions like these examples.
- Create a lead when a Marketing Cloud Engagement contact enters a journey.
- Update a lead based on engagement within a journey.
- Create a CRM contact record when a Marketing Cloud Engagement contact reaches the activity.
- Update a CRM contact record with Marketing Cloud Engagement contact data.
- Update a custom object based on engagement within a journey.
- Create a task when another object, such as a lead or contact, enters a journey.
- Associate a case or task to an account.
- Update a task based on a contact or lead's response in a journey.
- Update a person or business account.
Let’s get back to Leung Chan and Get Cloudy Consulting. Leung is working with her fourth new client in a busy month—a restaurant client who uses Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, in addition to Journey Builder in Marketing Cloud Engagement. This client uses Service Cloud to handle customer feedback and issues. Typically, their customers answer a survey about their latest experience via a code or link on their receipt. When they complete the survey, Journey Builder captures their email address and sends them a thank-you note. Leung includes personalization in the message to prompt more responses. The client’s SMART goal is to have 25 percent of customers respond to the survey in the next 6 months.
Recently, the client decided they were going to use a random split to send a 10 percent off coupon to customers who responded to the survey.
Now, however, the client needs Leung’s help to get fancy. Some of the survey results indicated less-than-satisfied customers, and the client wants to create tasks for their customer service reps to reach out.
Before they build the journey, Leung gathers some important content and information.
- An apology message that references a possible customer service followup
- An account ID for the client’s Service Cloud account
- The owner ID for the lead customer service representative in the Service Cloud account
- The ID value for the reengagement campaign
- A subject line for the new task
- Coupon codes for free meals
Leung plans out a journey that identifies surveys that scored low and automatically refers them to a task in Service Cloud. These tasks are divided among customer service representatives who can contact the customers to learn more about their experience and offer them coupon codes. Here are the steps that Leung takes.
- In Journey Builder, drag a Sales and Service Cloud activity into the journey.
- Click Create New.
- Map fields from Marketing Cloud Engagement attributes to Sales and Service Cloud fields
- Set the Priority field to High.
- Set the Status field to New.
- Set the Assigned to ID field to the owner ID value.
- Set the Related to ID field to the reengagement campaign ID value.
- Set the Subject field to Re-Engagement Opportunity.
- Name the activity Failing Responses and click Save.
The customer service representatives then take the cases and work with the customers regarding their survey responses.
Just as important as addressing customers who’ve had a poor experience is engaging with customers who’ve had a great experience! Remember that satisfied customers aren’t just reliable customers—they can also be messengers that share your good word to their friends and family. As part of your engagement and retention efforts, consider including social media links in your messaging. Or offering rewards for bringing in new customers. With that, here are a few final tips to keep in mind as you build your journeys.
Test and Improve Your Journeys
Marketing Cloud Engagement captures so much information about your customer demographics and behavior. Use this information to your advantage! This information, in addition to the open, clicks, and forwards data from email messages, helps you create more effective journeys.
Plus, testing helps you learn which messages perform better—which is why more advanced journeys include random splits to test different messages.
Set Clear Objectives
Not every customer is on the same journey, and not every customer interacts with you at the same time and place. Create several journeys for your customer, and make sure each one has a singular focus. Things get too complicated if you try to make the same journey handle both a 10 percent increase in subscribers and a 15 percent increase in existing customer retention. Give each journey a single reason to exist and focus on the most important information and calls to action. This strategy keeps you close to your goals and aids in optimization and effectiveness. You can also chain these journeys together later as necessary. It’s just like playing with building blocks, but with a lot more subscribers.
After you establish your initial goal, you can start filling in the details and methods from there. Think of this organization like a pyramid—your goal is at the top, and you build the foundation with content and data that ultimately get you where you want to go.
Personalize Your Messaging
This principle isn’t specific to Journey Builder, but it does apply directly to all the content you include in your journeys. Marketing Cloud Engagement gives you access to a host of tools to insert personalized content into messages and landing pages, so use it! You can tailor content based on age, location, purchasing behavior, and other data points to make the best use of your messaging opportunities.
You can also consider adding social media to your journeys via Advertising Studio. This feature targets your audience (matched by email addresses) with ads designed to bring contacts into specified journeys. This channel represents another opportunity to interact with your contacts. Just create the audience and the content, begin the campaign, then evaluate the results and move to the next level!
Optimize Send Days and Times
Because nobody gets up at exactly the same time and checks their email immediately, you need to pay attention to when and where your customers actually interact with you. If you notice your customers are more likely to act on email messages in the early afternoon, time your sends to occur during that time. For example, you can set a Wait Activity to conduct the send at a specific time.
Marketing Cloud Engagement also offers Einstein Send Time Optimization to help you determine these times and dates. Use AI to evaluate all of your send data and suggest exactly when to send. Contact your Marketing Cloud Engagement account manager for more information on enabling this feature.
Pay attention to the amount of time between sends as well. Nobody needs to be reminded of an email offer the next day (unless, of course, the next day is an expiration date). Give your customers enough time and space to interact with you as a natural part of their customer journey. This principle gives you the best engagement without pressuring the customer unreasonably.
And with that effort, yet another customer journey begins! Remember that as one journey completes, smart marketers already have the next journey planned and ready to go.
Resources