Design, distribute, and analyze surveys with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is Microsoft’s premier solution for customer feedback management. Customer Voice provides organizations with effective solutions to build and analyze customer surveys and identify metrics they need to improve the experience of their customers. Customer Voice has gone through a few changes in identity recently, so there may be some confusion regarding its name and functionality. It helps to get some perspective on what the previous iterations were, though these are all essentially the same system.

Originally, Microsoft’s enterprise survey system was known as Dynamics 365 Voice of the Customer. It was designed to give companies full control over every aspect of running surveys, from planning to reviewing and insight gathering. In July 2019, Microsoft announced that it would be deprecating Voice of the Customer in July 2020.

Going forward, companies were told to use Microsoft Forms Pro for their survey needs. Forms Pro was released on general availability at the same time. It was built on Microsoft Forms and made to integrate with Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform applications. With AI-assisted survey creation and insight generation, it was the new main survey manager for Microsoft products.

However, shortly after the deprecation of Voice of the Customer in July 2020, Forms Pro was renamed to Dynamics 365 Customer Voice and given additional functionality.

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is now Microsoft’s go-to for survey management solution for the foreseeable future. Customer Voice includes the capabilities of Forms Pro and builds upon it with new features being added monthly.

Capabilities

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice makes tracking important customer metrics and feedback very manageable. As part of Dynamics 365, it integrates seamlessly with the data in other Dynamics 365 applications like Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales. Customer Voice also introduced additional project management capabilities. Projects in the application can contain multiple surveys that share similar measurements or settings to make the management easier. There are several templates for different features within Customer Voice from survey questions to report customizations as well. The templates allow for quality surveys to be quickly crafted, and they can be easily edited for better personalization.

Projects in Customer Voice are similar to file folders in that they and contain multiple surveys and are best utilized by keeping similar surveys grouped together. When creating a new project, there are a variety of templates provided. These range from customer feedback to support to new user onboardings. If using a template, it will start off with a premade survey that can be used, modified, or deleted as preferred. While these premade surveys may not exactly fit what is needed, they can serve as a great reference for question ideas and formatting.

When working in a project, the left-hand navigation can be used to switch between surveys, add new surveys, and view reports for surveys. Add a new survey by clicking the blue New survey link. New surveys give a blank canvas with which every piece of the survey can be personally built. The big, blue Add new button is how new questions or sections are created. Adding section dividers is useful for grouping similar questions together. The different types of questions are multiple choice, text entry, star/number ratings, date picker, option ranking, Likert, and net promoter score.

For reference, Likert is used for questions similar to: “How strongly do you agree with the following statements?” Then option ranges can be set. Net promoter score questions can help to ask how likely the person would be to recommend the company or product to someone else.

By clicking on a question, each piece of information in it can be customized and extra options set such as selecting more than one option in multiple choice.

Surveys can be customized to include satisfaction metrics. These help to gauge the effectiveness of a company’s efforts to provide a positive customer experience. These metrics include Net Promoter Score, Sentiment, and Customer Satisfaction. Satisfaction metrics can be mapped to the questions included within a survey. Once mapped, the responses to the survey can be easily analyzed into understandable metrics.

They can be viewed through a dashboard that becomes available after the survey has started receiving responses. Further customization for the surveys can be accomplished by applying branching rules. These will lead respondents down different question paths depending on the answers given to previous questions.

To share surveys, use the Send button at the top of the survey designer. In this share screen, there are a few options that can be selected. The survey can be sent through a simple, customizable email. Recipients can be bulk imported via a .csv file. Embed codes can also be generated to place the survey directly on a website. For direct links, there is a survey URL and QR code that can be copied and pasted.

One of the best features for sharing surveys, however, comes from Customer Voice’s integration with Power Automate. Using the automation option, flows can be created to automatically send the survey out based on a variety of triggers such as after a lead is qualified or an order is fulfilled.

Customer  Voice is able to work seamlessly with Dynamics 365 applications and the Power Platform because data from the surveys is stored in Microsoft Dataverse (formerly known as Common Data Service) As an example, this allows Dynamics 365 Marketing to distribute Customer Voice surveys as part of customer journeys. When adding a Send an email tile to a customer journey, an email element can be added to include a customer Voice survey.

From there, If/then tiles can be created to trigger actions based on how respondents interacted with the survey, including by answer. This is done by linking to the Dataverse entities that hold the relevant data. Data from surveys can be used easily within data analysis and visualization platforms such as Power BI or Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to help build a more complete understanding of customer personas.

The graphic below shows the entities linked to Customer Voice surveys in the Dataverse: