How to Survey Your Salesforce Users for Feedback in 5 Minutes

How do you ask Salesforce users for feedback? The topic came up during the most recent #AdminHour, when I mentioned asking for user input could actually be quick and painless. The response: but how? 

I also have a few new tech tips to help you conduct your surveys:

• If you already have a survey product in place that you administer, that's great! Use that. 
• Whatever tool you use, it may help to reassure staff that their responses will be kept confidential, if not anonymous (there's a difference - read more). 
• If you just need a survey tool for this purpose, pick one that's user friendly and mobile responsive, with results that are easy to interpret and ideally compare over time.
• If you need help picking a tool, check out the amazing App Advice & Consumer Reports group in the Power of Us Hub. In the left-hand column, there's a link to a google doc with detailed reviews of just about every survey tool out there (aka online forms).
• Personally, I use Get Feedback, which given that I use Campaign Monitor for email, gives me 100 responses for free per month, which meets my needs (as of this writing it's unclear if this deal is still available, sorry!). Please note for this type of survey I intentionally do not want the data to connect to Salesforce, since I want to keep it confidential.

So, by popular demand, I'm reprinting this blog post from 2015:
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If you’re a busy nonprofit Salesforce administrator, developer, or consultant like me, you may be more comfortable creating new fields and planning what Dreamforce sessions to attend instead of consistently and thoroughly prioritizing user feedback.

But listening to users is at the heart of what we do.

Why?

Salesforce is easy to customize to meet the needs of our organizations. In order to do that, we need to know the needs of our colleagues, and actively measure whether we are meeting those needs.
A five question survey that takes less than five minutes to fill out, that you send out about every five months, will give you a great baseline of ‘customer satisfaction’ and allow you to track trends over time.
Here’s my proposal for questions (all are on a 1 to 5 scale, with a 1 being ‘not at all’, 3 being Neutral, and 5 being ‘definitely’):

1. Salesforce makes my job easier.

2. I understand how to use Salesforce to do my job.

3. I log in to Salesforce X times per work week on average to do my job (including accessing contacts). Note: In this case, the 1 to 5 scale is used to indicate how many days per work week the user logs in to Salesforce.

4. I have access to the reports, dashboards, and other data I need in Salesforce to make decisions for my job (or I know how to build my own custom reports).

5. My team uses Salesforce to inform our work and decisions.

BONUS: I know how to access support resources when I have Salesforce questions.

These questions can be asked in a Google Form or your preferred survey format. I have had the most success keeping surveys open for about two weeks (making the deadline clear in all communications) and sending several email reminders to encourage completion.

How do you solicit feedback from staff? How often do you ask for structured or unstructured input? What questions work best for you? Inquiring minds want to know!