I just returned from Salesforce.com’s annual user conference in San Francisco. It’s astounding to me how much this conference has grown and changed over the years; the speakers, the sessions, the parties and rock concerts, the partner expo, and the much anticipated product announcements. I have to admit there are times when I miss the familial feel of old days, but it’s also been really exciting to watch Dreamforce become the “must attend” event of the year for over 45,000 people.

Rather than trying to recap everything I saw and learned this year, I’ve decided to focus on one area that is near and dear to my heart, data. My favorite session at this year’s conference was the “Roadmap Sneak Peak: The Future of Analytics in Salesforce” led by Mr. Thomas Tobin, Director of Product Management at Salesforce.com and data guru extraordinaire. This session moved quickly and was packed with information. I did my best to take notes and keep up. As with any roadmap there are likely to be changes, but I’d like to share with you some of the features introduced that I’m most excited about.

Exception reporting – Partially addressed with custom reports but not fully. Have you ever been asked to run a report of all accounts without an opportunity? How about leads with no scheduled activity in the next 30 days? Salesforce feels our pain.

Custom Reports (one parent, many children) – I love this. At ReadyTalk we have several custom objects tied to our contact, or customer records. Currently I have to run multiple reports to see all of their relationships with us. Now I’ll be able to look at individual web and audio usage, along with their customer survey responses, and see if their participating of any of our product pilot programs. All in one report!

Joined reports – No more dumping multiple reports into excel to show metrics on a single data point. In the not too distant future we’ll be able to run those reports right in Salesforce and group them by a common field, like account owner, or opportunity close date. Nice.

Some other cool enhancements we have to look forward to include “bucketing” or creating custom report fields without having to add them permanently to a record object. Dynamic Dashboards will allow us to filter multiple dashboard components by a single filter field. And how about uploading external data sets into Salesforce as a single reporting source for all companywide metrics. Salesforce as a Business Intelligence tool? Bring it!

Any administrator who loves the reporting and dashboard features of Salesforce, but also knows their shortcomings, had to walk away from this session with a smile. I know I did. In fact it may have been the first time that the entire development team was on hand for a breakout, and received a standing ovation from the crowd when introduced. Well done guys. See you all at Dreamforce 2012!

As an audio and web conferencing provider, ReadyTalk employees have multiple touch points with our customers on a daily basis. Surveying our customers lets us know how we’re doing, and what we can do to improve our customer’s experience. We see customer feedback as vital to growing and improving our business. We regularly review feedback from areas where we currently gather data, as well as explore new areas where we may want to measure performance in the future. We recently finished our first annual customer survey at ReadyTalk. Questions for this survey were designed specifically to measure how we’re doing in relation to our internal corporate values.

Several items were addressed in the process of putting together our annual customer survey. We reviewed everything from question content and presentation, to survey vendors to ensure a successful campaign. Selecting a survey vendor was a key part of my involvement in the process. In my role as Manager of CRM Optimization, I focus on improving how we view and use data within our CRM system to drive both new business, and keep our current customers happy. Having the survey data fully integrated with our Salesforce.com instance was our primary selection criteria. We also looked at ease of use, time of deliverability, cost and scalability. As a growing company we needed an affordable surveying solution that would also scale to meet our future initiatives. By addressing all of our requirements up front, we were able to find a vendor that fit all of our needs, and then some.

In the end, ReadyTalk’s first annual customer survey was a great success. Since we kept the survey short without compromising relevance, we had a very high response rate. We also offered a small incentive for completing the survey which we believe also helped to boost the number of responses. We received invaluable feedback from both our audio and web conferencing customers regarding our support teams, existing services and future feature requests. The results set the benchmark as we look to improve our scores in 2010. And since all of this was integrated with our CRM system, we were able to follow-up with customers, aggregate responses, and measure areas where we can improve our services in the future. The ReadyTalk Management team loved the ability to simply click on a Dashboard to get to the information they needed. Our Sales and Support teams were thrilled to be able to see real time responses from their customers, and our Marketing team is now hard at work leveraging customer referrals and market potential for our future customers.

How is your company using surveys to measure your customer’s experience? And what are you doing to optimize your results? We’d love to hear your success stories.