What do customers like best about your goods or services? What percentage are willing to buy from you again? What are critical areas that need to be improved? What are customer priorities when shopping for your product category? In a competitive marketplace where it’s so easy to switch vendors or suppliers, it’s imperative that we gauge levels of customer satisfaction. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Voice of the Customer surveys make it easy to build and brand surveys.
With Voice of the Customer for Dynamics 365, you can create and distribute surveys as part of a workflow or as one-offs. Customers can submit surveys responses from phones, tablets, or computers. Voice of the Customer (VOC) survey results are stored in Dynamics 365 along with other Dynamics 365 data. Standard reports let you evaluate customer feedback and even trigger new processes, such as a sales or service follow up. There’s a ton you can do VOC surveys. Look at this blog as a high-level overview and example of how to get started.
Survey Basics
What is the strategic reasoning behind the survey? How you are going analyze the results? What workflows or action items will be triggered based on those results? Before you start building your survey, think through the following:
- Planning: What information do you want to extract from respondents? Figure out what type of questions you want to include and how to phrase them.
- Design: Consider branding options like color schemes and logos. We’ll look at the doing part below.
- Distributing the survey: Send or place links to your survey in emails, texts or web pages. VOC looks equally good on desktops, phones, and tablets. Surveys may be sent via workflow or as a one-off.
- Analyzing survey data: Look at individual results and aggregated results via charts, dashboards, reports. You have the option of exporting data to Power BI as well, creating visuals for Dynamics 365 users and non-users alike.
Getting Started
For the purpose of this blog, our survey is going to elicit feedback regarding a recent customer service case — a common scenario. Again, we’re talking a basic survey here. There are options for advanced surveys too, but we’re going to keep things simple and give you a taste of what it’s like to create a VOC survey. First, make sure Voice of the Customer solution is installed in your system. VOC is available with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2016 Update and later. If you don’t have it now, look for it on AppSource.
Click on Voice of the Customer > Surveys. Click New.
This is where we’ll establish a framework for our survey, e.g., name, purpose, theme including colors, logo image, single or multiple responses allowed, text including the link to survey, etc.
I uploaded a sample logo and we’ll use the default theme (color scheme) for the blog. Only one response per person will be allowed for our sample survey Our survey will be from a make-believe company called WidgetCo.
Next, in the upper left click on the menu where it says “Survey”. Select “Designer”.
This is where we create our survey questions.
Areas on the left reflect the pages of our survey. On the right, we’ll choose the style and format of the questions. Lots of options. There are over 30 standard question/response types available in VOC, including:
- Short answer or long answer
- Ratings
- Single or multiple responses
- Calendar
- Numerical
- Star ratings, radio buttons, sliders, smiley and not so-smiley faces, checkboxes, dropdowns
- Rankings
- File uploads
- More…
We’ll mix a few in our survey so you get a feel for it. Let’s start with our Welcome page. Keeping it simple…
Too hard to read – right? Don’t worry. We can change the fonts and font sized. Here’s what it looks like in the designer after we’ve increased font size.
You’ll see a summary of questions and edits on the left. Later we’ll preview a WYSIWYG version of the survey so we know what our customer is going to see.
Now let’s get into the meat and potatoes of the survey – the actual questions. This survey includes several types of questions. The questions on page 1 speak to the level of satisfaction with a recent customer service case. Examples of question types on page 1:
Question 1: Single response – emoticons.
Question 2: Numerical.
Question 3: Multiple responses.
You’ll drag and drop elements from the right-hand side of the screen onto your form based on the type of question and the order in which they should appear. Modify the wording of the question and potential responses by pressing the pencil icon in the question block.
Add additional pages by clicking the little page icon under the summary column on the left. Page 2 of our survey requests additional information from our customer – not related to the recent service case but about our products and customer preferences.
Now let’s hit the Review button and see what our survey looks like.
Looks good. Now we test it. I created a Dynamics 365 Email Template for sending survey requests (for a blog Dynamics 365 Email Templates – click here). There’s a Snippet button at the top of your survey form that provides this code. Use it to copy and paste a snippet of code that ties the survey link back to the Contact record in Dynamics 365. This way we can track non-anonymous survey data back to individuals in our system.
Here’s what it looks like in my Gmail inbox:
Here’s what the completed survey response looks like in the system:
The data is also available in System Views…
Dashboards…
Or Reports…
Admittedly, we’re just scratching the surface here. If you’re looking for help upping your survey game, contact us. We’re here to help!
By Mark Abes, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Dyn365Pros, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner, San Diego, Southern California.
