Working with Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice

Welly Lee, James Phillips, Ray Smith

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781801073417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Information Technology
• Index: Computer Science

Work with business scenarios and discover best practices to get the most out of Microsoft Forms and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer VoiceKey Features• Explore step-by-step instructions to integrate surveys with Microsoft 365 apps• Automate surveys and follow-up actions from survey results using Microsoft Forms• Create custom report dashboards and explore advanced analytics for managing insightsBook DescriptionMicrosoft Forms and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice enable organizations to collect and analyze feedback from employees and customers, helping developers to integrate their feedback and business users to collect feedback that will guide them to develop customer-centric solutions. This book takes a hands-on approach to leveraging Microsoft Forms and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice capabilities for common feedback scenarios and covers best practices and tips and tricks to have your solution up and running in no time. You'll start by exploring common scenarios where organizations collect feedback from employees and customers and implement end-to-end solutions with Forms. You'll then discover how to create surveys and get to grips with different configuration options commonly used for each scenario. Throughout the book, you'll also find sample questions and step-by-step instructions for integrating the survey with related technology such as Microsoft Teams, Power Automate, and Power BI for an end-to-end scenario. By the end of this Microsoft book, you'll be able to build and deploy your complete solution using Microsoft Forms and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, allowing you to listen to customers or employees, interpret their feedback, take timely follow-up action, and monitor results.What you will learn• Get up and running with Microsoft Forms and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice services• Explore common feedback scenarios and survey best practices • Understand how to administer Microsoft Forms and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice• Use Microsoft Forms or Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to monitor your survey results• Set up the Microsoft Forms app for Teams for conducting live polls• Automate feedback collection and follow-up actionsWho this book is forThis book is for business users who want to increase customer and employee engagement and collect data for measuring user satisfaction and driving product and process improvements. Beginner-level knowledge of Microsoft products such as Office 365 (including Teams, Outlook, and Excel) is expected. The book also includes advanced topics for citizen developers to automate sending Customer Voice surveys, follow-up actions, and creating custom dashboards using Microsoft Power Platform applications like Power Automate and Power BI.

Section 1: Working with Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice

In this section, you will learn the fundamentals of surveys and how to get started with Microsoft Forms and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice in order to collect feedback from customers and employees.

This section contains the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Introducing Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice
• Chapter 2, Best Practices for Collecting Feedback through Surveys
• Chapter 3, Creating a Survey with Microsoft Forms

Chapter 1: Introducing Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice

In September 2020, my team released Dynamics 365 Customer Voice as an upgrade for Microsoft Forms Pro. Soon after, we noticed that the Net Promoter Score (NPS) started to fall. From the user feedback, we learned that many users were not happy with the data export functionality in the new product. Along with the product upgrade, we switched the data export format from Excel to .csv format, to enable the exporting of larger datasets. Users hated the new .csv format, so based on the feedback, we quickly made a change to go back to exporting data to Excel format and only provided an option for .csv for larger datasets. After we introduced the change, we saw that the NPS score started to go up again.

That story is a real-life example of how collecting feedback can help you identify issues early, and then track your progress in solving them to make customers happy. Despite our best attempts to use data to drive decisions, many of our day-to-day decisions still rely on intuition. While product leaders use their experience to shape their intuition, occasionally the wrong decision is made, and having a feedback measurement system in place is critical to provide an early warning signal to correct your decision.

Our goal at Microsoft is to make it easy for you to collect feedback from your employees and your customers through two products: Microsoft Forms and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. Microsoft Forms is a productivity tool targeted at collecting simple surveys and quizzes. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is an enterprise feedback management system used to collect feedback from employees and customers and integrate the survey data with your existing business application systems. In this chapter, we will review the two products, including their key capabilities and licensing requirements. By the end of this chapter, you will understand the difference between the two products and when to use one over the other.

We will cover the following topics:

• What is Microsoft Forms?
• What is Dynamics 365 Customer Voice?
• Differences between Microsoft Forms and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice
• Licensing requirements

What is Microsoft Forms?

Microsoft Forms (forms.microsoft.com) is an application that enables you to collect simple data from people both inside and outside your organization. Without any training, a user can create a simple survey through an easy-to-use interface and share a direct link to the survey. It uses artificial intelligence throughout the experience to make it easy for anyone to get started. When you create a new survey and type in a survey name, Microsoft Forms provides suggestions of commonly used questions based on the survey title. For example, when creating a new survey with the title Customer feedback survey, you may get a question suggested such as Overall, how satisfied are you with our company? (as shown in Figure 1.1):

Figure 1.1 – Suggested questions for a customer feedback survey

You can select any or all of the suggested questions or use your own questions by first selecting a question type. Based on the survey questions, Microsoft Forms provides suggestions that may be relevant to your questions:

Figure 1.2 – Suggested options on a survey question

You can access a link to the survey and then share it with responders to collect their feedback. The collected information is shown through a built-in report as in the following figure:

Figure 1.3 – Report summary

In addition to viewing the results from the report summary, you can export the data to Excel and then share the results with other people in your organization.

Microsoft Forms is integrated with other Microsoft Office applications (such as Microsoft Teams) to allow the collection of data as part of the application's experience. For example, you can create a poll to display in a Teams channel, and then have the results displayed instantly to all channel members:

Figure 1.4 – Meeting poll in Teams

In addition to adding a poll to a channel, you can create polls prior to a Teams meeting, and then show the poll during the meeting. We will discuss creating a poll for a meeting in Chapter 4, Conducting a More Productive Meeting with Microsoft Forms and Microsoft Teams.

You can also use Microsoft Forms to create a quiz, making it a popular tool for the education sector. When creating a quiz, teachers can include mathematical formulas as part of a question or multiple-choice options to test the students' knowledge, as shown in Figure 1.5:

Figure 1.5 – Example of a quiz in Microsoft Forms

You can mark the correct option to the question and assign points for students who answer it correctly. We will discuss quiz capability in Chapter 5, Post-Training Assessment and Feedback.

With its easy-to-use interface and integration with Microsoft Office applications, Microsoft Forms has become a popular tool for business users and educators to easily collect data from colleagues and students. As Microsoft Forms is intended for simple data collection tool, it lacks more advanced functionalities. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice fills the gap and offer more capabilities for an enterprise feedback management solution.

What is Dynamics 365 Customer Voice?

Microsoft released Microsoft Forms Pro as an advanced version of Microsoft Forms in July 2019 and rebranded it as Dynamics 365 Customer Voice a year later. Customer Voice builds upon Microsoft Forms' simple survey authoring experience and adds the capabilities needed for an enterprise feedback management platform. Organizations using Dynamics 365 as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can benefit from the built-in integration to send survey da...