Survey non Salesforce Contacts sustainably

Advanced Outreach has this capability Andy.  You can use a SFDC trigger to send to the EVENT and configure the outreach to be Event based.  See this article - I think this is what you are looking for.
 https://support.gainsight.com/Product_Documentation/Administration/General_Administration/Events_Framework_Overview

Hi Andrew, Did you get a chance to work on Advanced Outreach and did it solve your use-case?
Please let us know if you need any help here :-) 

Hello! We're looking into potentially surveying our clients' customers (we're B2B but provide a service to consumers via these clients) who aren't contacts in SFDC.

This looks to be possible via Gainsight surveying but could anyone link me to how we could still link these results to the clients' SFDC account?

(And a long shot but if anyone has good insight/articles into data protection and marketing laws for the UK/EU when it comes to surveying, that would be really appreciated!)

no this did not solve the use case because I was not able to upload a list of participants all at once. We have resorted to using CTA email tasks to send these outreaches. 

The event based relies on the contact being someone in the object that the event is being triggered from so this to my knowledge would not work. 

Do you currently have your client's customers accounts in SF? Are you trying to automate or is this a one time or sporadic send? If so you can do a little manual work and get a CSV of all their contacts they want to be surveyed, add a column of that client's customers SF account ID and apply that account ID to each contact in that csv that it applies to (vlookup). Then upload and send via AO. This will attach the survey to the account even if the contact is not in SF. That is the way to bulk send all at once. 

No, we don't have these accounts in SF but I was thinking of exactly that technique: CSV with SF account ID that can be used in a lookup.

It would be a one time/sporadic send so this would work through AO. Thanks!

Same logic applies to attach them to your client's account in SF 🙂

Hi Andy,

We have the ability to send surveys to contacts/users without account id via Advanced Outreach. Steps to be done are as follows - 

• Use Advanced Criteria in AO - Allow participants without valid Account Id to enter this outreach. 
• Choose an account for which you want to map the users/contacts to be associated to in this case. 
• All contacts without valid account id will be mapped to this account and will be available for reporting as you can see in the attached images.

An example for how this will work - 

Lets say you map the Account in Advanced Criteria step mentioned above as Acme(non Gainsight account) for which you want the contacts to be associated in case they don't have a valid account id. Next, you upload a CSV or use a bionic query which gets this with the following records-

Email Id, Account Id,.....Other columns
a@gmail.com, 123,.....Other column values
b@gmail.com, 345,.....Other column values
c@gmail.com, ,.....Other column values(no account id mapping available)
d@gmail.com, , .....Other column values(no account id mapping available)

You upload this CSV into advanced outreach where you have a couple of records a@gmail.com,b@gmail.com with valid accounts. c@gmail.com and d@gmail.com do not have valid accounts , so the field is left blank. 

Map the account id column in CSV to the account id in participant mapping screen. Then configure and publish the AO.

While processing this advanced outreach and sending the survey out - 

• For a and b, we will map the appropriate account id in the outreach.
• For c and d , we will refer the Acme account id and map the responses to this account id mapped.

Does this help?

Thanks
Abhishek S

Good details, but this does not help because if you have multiple contacts that are not in SF that are related to different Accounts you would need the option to somehow apply different IDs to contacts with Accounts. The scenario is a training is completed and we want to send the survey to those participants in the training. We use Webex for our trainings. Do you have a connector with Webex to push a survey out after a training?

Hi Andrew, 
We don't have a direct connector with Webex, but if you can get Webex attendee info into SFDC, then Gainsight can trigger a survey based on that incoming info. 

Based on the different permutations, what would your ideal handling process be for each survey recipient type?

• Contact exists in SFDC and is attached to a valid Account
• Contact exists in SFDC but is not attached to a valid Account
• Contact does not exist in SFDC but is related to an existing Account
• Contact does not exist in SFDC and is not related to an existing Account
• Others?

Hi,

I thought your question was about primarily sending surveys to non salesforce contacts post training is completed .

Associating with an account is for ensuring that you are able to survey your customers and for reporting and for technical reasons. The survey object in Gainsight is a master detail on the Salesforce account object and you cannot have records which do not have salesforce account id mapped. It is for that reason that we introduced the concept of a dummy account to help solve the use cases like you shared.

What we are building is the ability to load companies,contacts(company person is the equivalent object) directly into Gainsight. This will be something which our Survey 2.0 (Beta releasing in April) will be built on. This will ensure that you do not have to depend on Salesforce Accounts or Contacts and directly load them to Gainsight and send AO and surveys with these standard gainsight objects.

We do not have a connector with Webex to push a survey out of the box but I think this is where an event(webhook) API which webex might have can help trigger and send an event(training webinar completed) to Advanced Outreach so that we can listen and send the survey link.

Thanks
Abhishek S

Hmmmm, I wonder if Webex has a webhook to trigger this....