One of the most important ways to stay on top of your users’ needs in Salesforce is to foster an environment of constant feedback. Feedback is critical for any administrator that hopes to drive adoption and ROI from the platform. This is because one of the biggest killers of adoption and usage is the friction that users experience when interacting with your instance. And feedback is critical to addressing this because users will often keep these minor annoyances to themselves.

There are plenty of ways to gather feedback, and we always recommend taking a multi-pronged approach to this. But one great way to gather feedback is through user surveys. And hey, you’re a Salesforce Administrator, what better way to do this than meeting your users where they’re at? Salesforce!

In this article we’re going to cover exactly that: how to build and deliver user surveys directly in Salesforce, using native Salesforce functionality.

Building Your Form

The first thing we’ll need before we can dive into deliverability is the actual survey, or form, we’ll be delivering to our users. And for this, we’re going to be creating a Screen Flow. This is a type of flow in Salesforce that collects data directly from users through screens and their components.

Now we’re not going to get too much in the weeds here, there’s tons of content out there on how to create flows, so feel free to do some Googling if you need a refresher. But we’re going to start by going to Setup > Flows, creating a new flow, and choosing “Screen Flow” as our flow type.

For this example we’ll keep things simple and just add a long-text-area input, “Please Share Your Feedback!” But of course, we could get as fancy as we want, adding specific questions, different input types like picklists or radio buttons, additional questions dependent on previous ones, multiple pages, or even conditional questions based on the user’s profile, role, or title.

But for now, simplicity:

Once we’ve collected all of the user’s feedback, we’ll add a Create Records element to capture this feedback in Salesforce. We could store this wherever we want, even creating a custom “User Survey” object (or we could skip the Create Records element and just have the responses emailed to members of the admin team).

For this example we’re going to have the flow create a case record with the user’s feedback.

With the Create Records element we’ll create a new Case record which will put the user’s feedback into the Description field and create a Subject using a Formula variable: “User Feedback From: FirstName LastName” (since this is a user run Screen Flow, we can capture user data like their name without having to ask for it. Just don’t pretend it’s anonymous!)

We would probably want to also add a success screen, and again, if we wanted to we could add an email alert for the admin team, but we’re going to just stick with this for now. A form like this:

That creates a Case record like this:

Delivering Your Form

When it comes to delivering our form to users, we have tons of options. Let’s go over them, from least to most complex.

Embedded in the Utility Bar

Our first option, and one we can certainly do in conjunction with some of the other delivery options, is simply embedding the form somewhere users can access it whenever they want. We’ll want to socialize this to them and make sure that the form is actually being adopted.

The Utility Bar is a feature in Salesforce that can be overlooked and under utilized, but it’s a great place to embed things you want your users to have access to no matter where they are in the App that they use most often. And this is a great place for a Feedback Survey, because users will be able to pop it open while they’re looking at a report or dashboard, on an Account record, or doing pretty much anything else in their Salesforce App.

To add this survey to the Utility Bar, go to Setup > App Manager, and choose “Edit” next to the App you’d like to add it to (say “Sales” or “CS” or “Marketing”). Go to the “Utility Items” section and click the “Add Utility Item” button:

Choose “Flow”, and then the feedback flow you just created. Now, no matter where in App your users happen to be, they’ll be able to instantly send feedback to the admin team:

This is a great way to make a feedback survey always available to your users, but let's look at some more proactive ways to deliver the survey to them to increase feedback rates.

Email the Survey

It’s a no-brainer in survey deliverability to use the tried-and-true method of emailing it to your users. You can do this somewhat manually in groups, or if you want to get fancy again, build a scheduled flow to send it out to specific user groups on a regular cadence.

But inorder to email it to your users, we need a landing page to link to. So, we’ll embed the survey directly in an App Page. To begin, navigate to Setup > App Builder. Click the “New” button, and select “App Page.”

For this example I’m going to choose “One Region.” Then drag the Flow Component to your App Page builder and select the feedback flow you just created. Save and activate your App Page.

You now have a dedicated page for your User Feedback Survey (that you can access through the App Launcher) that you can link directly to in emails:

As a bonus, similar to the constant availability of the Utility Launched survey, you can add this tab to your user’s Apps to give them another way to have constant access to the survey.

Conditionally Embed the Survey in a Homepage

If we’re supporting our users well, hopefully they all have Homepages that they access daily. Let’s embed the survey there, but let's use conditionality to only display it to them irregularly.

We’re going to navigate again to Setup > App Builder, and this time edit the Homepage we want to add the survey to. I’ll choose the “Admin Homepage.” In the App Builder, we’re again going to add the Flow Component to the page and choose our User Survey Flow:

The kicker is we don’t want this survey to just always be there, we want to surface it to users on a cadence (or randomly), so that they notice it and actually use it. So here, we have it conditionally set to only show for Admins. In other words, most users won’t be able to see it. Now, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or randomly, we can remove that filter and surface it to users for a day or a week, whatever.

Of course, this is also just another place we could park the survey so that it’s always available. But we’ll definitely get more engagement if it’s delivered to them regularly.

Conclusion

So now you know how to create a User Feedback Survey directly in Salesforce, and how to deliver it to your users. Technically, we covered six methods for delivery:

Added to the Utility Bar
Added as a Tab
Embedded on the Homepage
Conditionally surfaced on the Homepage
Emailed directly (whether manually or automated by a flow)

The important thing is to always be fostering an environment of constant feedback. Surfacing issues helps eliminate friction, which helps drive usage and adoption.

Learn more about how RecordWatch can help you measure and drive usage and adoption by proactively tracking your users’ engagement with your instance by clicking here.

How to Leverage User Feedback Surveys in Salesforce with Native Functionality