Salesforce Surveys

Hi @Jennifer Dewey

Yes, there is a workaround, although Salesforce’s standard Survey functionality has limitations when it comes to including Case fields in invitation emails.

You can explore this approach:

1. Create a custom lookup field to the Case on the Survey Invitation object, if your org supports the required field configuration.
2. Populate that lookup when the Survey Invitation record is created through Flow.
3. Use a custom email template to include the required Case fields through the lookup relationship.
4. Trigger the email from a record-triggered Flow or email alert instead of relying on the standard Send Survey action to send the invitation email.

The main challenge is obtaining and including the correct unique survey invitation URL in the custom email. Make sure the invitation record and its link are generated correctly before sending.

Please note that this approach needs testing in your org, particularly around generating the invitation URL and preserving the survey's invitation tracking. Also, standard survey invitation templates have restrictions on supported merge fields, so don't assume a Case lookup will work with the standard Survey email template.

For reference, Salesforce documents the limitations here: 

Survey considerations:

Configure merge field variables:

If you find this answer helpful, please select it as the Best Answer. 

Thanks, 

Deepak Sachdeva 

Nubys Technology Pvt. Ltd. 

Hey Lucia, 

On your first question, yes. Survey, SurveyQuestion, SurveyResponse, and related objects are standard Salesforce sObjects, so you can create/manage them programmatically (Apex, API, Data Loader) or manually through Setup and record pages, entirely independent of Experience Cloud. Digital Experiences is only required for a specific distribution scenario (see below), not for object creation/management itself. 

On your second question, this depends on who's answering: 

- Internal Salesforce-licensed users (with a real user account, not external/unauthenticated respondents): yes, you can capture responses without a public link at all. Assign the required Survey Creator/Manager permission set, build the survey, and send it directly via a Survey Invitation tied to an internal record (e.g., embed it in an email alert, a Flow screen, or just have users navigate to the survey record and respond in-app). No Experience Cloud site is needed for this path. 

- External or unauthenticated respondents (customers, non-licensed users, guest access): this is where a Digital Experience site IS required. Per Salesforce's own documentation, to create surveys available to external unauthenticated users, you select an Experience Cloud site as part of survey setup, that's a hard requirement for that specific use case, not optional. 

So for a purely internal use case among licensed users, you can skip Digital Experiences entirely. If "internal" in your case means something broader (contractors, non-licensed staff, etc. without a full Salesforce user), you'd hit the Experience Cloud requirement. 

One limitation worth flagging: Salesforce's native Survey builder has real constraints on complex branching logic and advanced analytics compared to dedicated survey tools, if your internal use case needs intricate conditional logic, that's worth testing early before committing. 

Reference:

@Abhishek Mahajan

Wow, unbelievable.  At this to this list of 20 year old product gaps Salesforce still hasn't fixed. Unreal you have to change to Classic just to update an Owner field! 

Now, that bug is fixed (in flow), on to the next error after updating the owner: 

"The object of the following record can't be associated with survey subjects: 0VkWF0000005svp0AA" 

I'm guessing this now has something to do with permissions as per this post: 

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/trailblazer-community/feed/0D54V00007T4GypSAF

FYI, sending Surveys was working fine by doing Get Records and Create Records, retrieving everything, and sending using the SendEmail component in flow.  Then when we changed to the "new" Send Survey Invitation core action, now all of sudden there are all these new issues.  It's like completely inconsistent behavior and works fine without all these Send Survey Invtitation errors if you just send the survey link manually using SendEmail instead! 

And yes, as of Spring '26 you still have to create a legacy Aura (Build Your Own Site) as Surveys are still not supported in LWR Sites, confirmed by SF support.

Hi Bob, I'm not sure if you were able to generate the report as needed. From what I see, transpose functionality isn't easily available in Salesforce reports, and even advanced tools like Tableau have some limitations in this area. https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=001472187&type=1

It might be best to export the data and use Excel to achieve the desired format. Alternatively, you could create a custom object and implement batch logic to create new records as needed.