Automate Customer Surveys and Questionnaires with SugarCRM Cases

The SugarCRM Case module can be leveraged for many functional purposes, but most often we encounter our users using it for customer facing support. The feature set can be particularly useful if you do not have a 3rd party help-desk or ticketing system (i.e. ZenDesk, Uservoice, Desk.com, etc.). One feature that everyone seems to agree is valuable in most 3rd party platforms is the ability to solicit feedback from a client or user following a support engagement.

 

In this article I'm going to cover implementing a very cool and useful Automated Campaign that we'll combine with our Landing Page Builder to produce a sweet follow up questionnaire/survey to your contact when a support case is closed.

 

Step 1. Building our Survey

 

The first step is to build our survey using the Landing Page Builder. If this is your first time building a landing page or form using LeadFWD, I'd recommend you start with this article first.

 

Navigate to Pages & Forms -- Create New Page or Form

 

1. Select a Template Layout

 

2. Click Create Landing Page

 

Specify a title for Landing Page / Survey, a form title and if applicable you can define parameters to help aid in your SEO program.

 

Specify an action to occur when your survey is completed (in our case, we'll just show a simple confirmation message).

 

Choose a label for your submit button (you can always upload an image too)

 

Your survey can be mapped to any Marketing or CRM List that you choose. Although since we'll be targeting the Cases module, it would be best to map our survey to the CRM List that maintains our SugarCRM Account records. Accounts in your CRM are the record type that are assigned to a Case.

 

Select your desired font.

 

Next, we'll begin adding form fields to our survey. Each field can be optionally mapped to a custom field in your CRM. I'd recommend mapping the name and email address fields. Those are required fields and we can auto-fill them with your Accounts values when they arrive on your survey (via an email click-thru), if the fields are mapped an data is available in your CRM.

 

The most ideal fields to use on a survey are those that allow for multiple input options: Radio Button List, Checkbox List and Drop Menus.

 

You can expand the content and design of your page using our embedded Content Editor. When you're complete you might have something that looks like this:

 

Step 2. Build our Automated Campaign (Send Email)

 

Once our survey is ready to go, we'll proceed to the Automated Campaigns Wizard to create a new campaign that will drive our automated-email alert, which will contain a link to our survey.

 

Navigate to Campaigns -- Create Campaign -- Automated Campaign

 

If this is your first time creating an Automated Campaign, I'd recommend you check out this article as well.

 

Since 'Cases' are assigned to Accounts in SugarCRM, that's the CRM List (module) that we're going to target.

 

We'll choose to base our first condition block on support case data from SugarCRM

 

We'll choose to base the logic of our condition on the 'Status' field in the SugarCRM Case module and we'll specify that when that field changes to 'Closed', those Accounts are to be included in our campaign. Then, we'll click on Save Changes.

 

Once our condition is successfully saved, we can move on to add our first action.

 

We'll choose Send Email, since we want to automatically deploy an email when a Case is set to closed, requesting that the Account complete our survey.

 

You'll have the option to either select an existing campaign message or to build an entirely new message for this Send Email action. We opted to build a new (as an example)

 

Image Buttons attract more attention than text links

 

I used an image as a hyperlink to our landing page / survey URL so that the CTA (call-to-action) would be obvious to the Account receiving the message.

 

Grab a recipients attention with personalization

 

I also personalized the message with the First Name of the recipient as well as the full name of the sales agent assigned to the Account record, in the closing signature.

 

Once you've completed building and testing your email message, its time to save this 'Send Email' action and proceed to ending the campaign.

 

Once you click End Campaign, you can return to the Automated Campaign Manager to activate the campaign.

 

As you can see, this was a fairly straight-forward effort to add more 'Zen-like' features to the SugarCRM Case module. This might even inspire some additional brainstorming, like following this model for SugarCRM Calls that are held or evening reminding accounts when a case requires their input.