Can I use Voice of the Customer surveys to keep client contact data up to date in CRM

Yes you can, with the help of a workflow.

Let’s say you send a survey to clients and want them to let you know if their address or phone number have changed. You could create a survey containing fields for street, city, postal code, and phone number, then create a workflow to update the contact record with the data provided.

Here’s a “no code” way to do this. First thing you need to know is survey responses are stored in an entity called Survey Response. Answers to questions are stored in the Question Response entity, which is a child of Survey Response. When a customer responds to a survey, the customer is referenced in the Account or Contact lookup field in the Survey Response entity, and all of the customer’s answers are stored in related Question Response records.

So you could create a workflow that runs on create of Question Answer.

First step, do a check condition step to see if the related survey response is from a contact. If it isn’t, stop the workflow.

The first challenge we are going to hit is that since the answer doesn’t have a direct relationship with contact, we can’t easily update the Contact record from a question response workflow. One way to resolve this is to add a relationship between question response and contact, and if the response is related to a contact, update the contact field on the question response to link it to the contact.

Next, check condition to validate which field should be updated.

You may also want to check to see if the response contains data, so you don’t overwrite data with blanks. Then update that field of the contact record.

Add a conditional branch for each additional question that you want to update the contact record.

Warnings and considerations

This is just a simple example of how you can use VOC surveys to update customer information. While this is possible, I would think twice before using this approach in production.

• It’s not efficient.
• Depending on your volume of responses, having a workflow fire on each one (and even if the response doesn’t meet the check condition, the workflow is still running for each create) might cause performance issues.
• Having clients update their contact information can be convenient, but it can also be risky. Somebody might update their email address to be noemail@yahoo.com or put all zeros in their phone number.
• A more efficient way to do this might be to use a batch job with KingswaySoft rather than having a workflow fire for each question.
• Better options might be to use a ClickDimensions form or Dynamics 365 portal.