Development Of Survey Application Blog

Client

A USA based largest equipment rental company, with multiple rental locations throughout the United States and Canada. They have large variety of customers.

Challenges

As our Client is a large organization and has more than 10,000 employees, servicing over 300 Districts areas. They needed an advanced more sophisticated application to manage the feedbacks of their employees and managers and currently they are using Cloud based CRM –Salesforce.com for managing -customer accounts, sales opportunities, reviewing rental rate targets, monthly monitoring of branch and districts results and employees/managers feedbacks. In addition to they also doing Branch audits for assuring financial integrity of branch operations and financial results with the help of this Salesforce.com tool.

They wanted us to develop a “Custom Survey Application” in Salesforce.com using apex and visual force to manage feedbacks of employees and managers on the large scale in the organization. Employees and Managers fill-up a survey for each other. When Survey is complete they may compare their responses. Surveys are of three types: - Tier 1 (Long), Tier 2 (Medium), Tier 3(Short), Questions are arranged according to tiers. This filter is given because user may not want to give feedback on all the questions.

  • Tier 1:- Tier 1 contains all the questions.
  • Tier 2:- In Tier 2 questions will be lesser than Tier-1.
  • Tier 3:- Tier 3 contains least number of questions.

When Employee or Manager Initiate the survey they select other user and Tier type. According to filter they give feedback on given questions for other user, and other user is notified via mail for the same. Then other user fills their part of survey by selecting appropriate survey in the available list of survey for them. List of available survey is always related to logged-in user either as an Employee or as a manager. District manager can also view list of all the survey within their district, they can also delete uncompleted survey.

The big challenge in this project was to manage survey for all the available profiles and 1000s of users. And to migrate previously filled survey record (Survey based on old application) in new system, because objects structure of system were changed to meet the new requirements.

With the old survey application it was too hard to manage the feedbacks of employees and the managers. In the old survey application only one object was involved to track everything. Questions are not dynamic, they are used as fields. Responses are the values of these questions fields. Standard Pages with minimum functionality were used to control the application.

Solutions

We have developed this custom survey application using the apex and visual force pages on Salesofrce.com. We have designed the Object Structure of this application in such away so that the app can take the dynamic numbers of questions and responses. We have built visual force pages to take survey inputs from both employees and managers with some validations as per the client’s requirement. After submission of survey form by one user, the other user will be notified immediately via email to fill-up their part of survey. We have used apex to construct this mail functionality.

Both New Survey record and migrated survey Records are listed on Survey List Page that is also built using Visual force. All the conditions for view and update are same for all records. To Update or view survey, click on related link is given on the list page.

We have provided a way to view Survey details and it has dynamic behavior for Survey questions and Sections. For Migrated survey records it will show migrated questions and related Sections. This page is also built using the Visual force and functionality is controlling by an apex controller class. List of available survey is always related to logged-in user either as an Employee or as a manager. We have also used the Apex Data Loader to migrate the survey data of old survey app to new survey app.

We have also worked on the analytics side on this project and built a custom report in the Salesforce to display the survey count against each user, segregated by the month with Grand Total.

Results

  • This survey application is helping in improving the efficiency and productivity.
  • Through this application the employees above in the role hierarchies can view submitted surveys of their subordinates. Top officials or the managers above in the role hierarchies can utilize the feedback of their subordinates for strategy making in the large interest of the organization.
  • Through mail notification, now it is easy to coordinate the participation in the surveys and ride along for e.g. Manager is taking a Survey with his subordinate employee means taking survey ride along with his employee. If he has submitted his part, the related subordinate will be notified via an automated mail immediately to fill their survey part.
  • With this additional layer of Visual force pages on top of Salesforce, the entering of data on the survey forms are much easier with proper validation and require little to no training.