Replace your Voice of the Customer surveys with Microsoft Forms Pro
Introduction
With the deprecation of Voice of the Customer, we recommend you start using Microsoft Forms Pro for getting your customer feedback. Forms Pro provides seamless integration for surveys within Microsoft Business Applications, including Dynamics 365 and Office 365.
You can use Forms Pro to send surveys to Dynamics 365 contacts. You can do this either manually or automatically based on business events in Dynamics 365. For example, you can send a survey when an order is fulfilled or when a customer case is resolved.
Like Voice of Customer, Forms Pro saves survey responses directly to Dynamics 365. The responses automatically appear on the activity timeline of the contact and the relevant record, such as case or order.
While Forms Pro provides similar built-in integration capabilities like that of Voice of Customer, we are leveraging the authoring experience from Office Forms to make it simpler for any business users to use, test, and send the survey. The simple user experience may significantly improve your productivity when creating a survey. Panduit Corp. recently used Forms Pro and reported that “Using Microsoft FormsPro at Panduit significantly reduced the survey build time from days to minutes, and provided us a simple framework to translate survey questions in different languages.” – Anil Adkoli, Panduit Corp. The new Forms Pro survey has a different survey design and architecture. For this reason, you need to recreate the Voice of the Customer survey using Forms Pro. This blog provides some guidance and tips on how to switch from Voice of the Customer to Forms Pro.
Survey creation
Surveys from Voice of the Customer cannot be migrated automatically to Forms Pro so you would need to recreate the surveys in Forms Pro. Similar to Voice of the Customer, Forms Pro also supports a survey designer to create the survey, apply themes, add questions, and add pages to the survey. The survey designing experience of Forms Pro is much more simplified and intuitive. Please note that not all of the question types of Voice of the Customer are supported in Forms Pro. The below table provides information on the list of question types supported in Forms Pro and how they map to the Voice of the Customer question types.
| Forms Pro question type | Equivalent Voice of the Customer question type |
| Choice | Single response, Multiple response |
| Text | Short answer, Long Answer, Numerical response |
| Rating | Rating |
| Date | Date |
| Ranking | Ranking |
| Likert | Single rating in columns |
| Net Promoter Score | Net promoter score |
Users can configure the question properties like making it mandatory or defining restrictions in the designer. Unlike Voice of the Customer, Forms Pro does not support the creation of multiple groups of questions in a single page.
Forms Pro also supports advanced features like branching logic, piping custom data in surveys, and branding the survey. More details about survey creation can be found here: Create a survey
Survey distribution
Voice of the Customer supports two ways for surveys distribution: automated and ad-hoc. Forms Pro can also help you achieve both scenarios.
Automated survey distribution
For scenarios like sending a survey email when a case is resolved in Dynamics 365, Voice of the Customer supports automated sending of survey email using CRM workflows which triggers on Dynamics 365 events. If you are using Voice of the Customer for such a scenario, you can achieve the same using Forms Pro. Forms Pro has integration with Microsoft Flow, which will enable you to send automated survey emails on Dynamics 365 events.
You should recreate the same survey in Forms Pro and then configure a Flow which will send automated survey emails. You can define the same trigger that you are using in CRM workflows in Microsoft Flow. Once you have configured and tested the survey, you can stop the Voice of the Customer CRM workflow and start collecting feedback using Forms Pro.
Similar to Voice of the Customer, Dynamics 365 associates survey invitations and corresponding responses with Dynamics 365 contacts. Also, the survey invitations and responses are activities that can be linked to any out-of-the-box or custom entity through the Regarding field.
Ad-hoc survey distribution
If you use Voice of the Customer surveys to send the survey emails to a contact or a contact group in Dynamics 365, you can do the same in Forms Pro. Forms Pro provides in-app email distribution system which allows you to compose your own email and send it directly to your contacts in Dynamics 365.
Similar to Voice of the Customer, Forms Pro personalizes the links created, and it can help you track the responders to your surveys. You can also create personalized survey links automatically and use your own distribution channels to send the survey invitation.
More details about survey distribution can be found here: Send a survey to get responses
Survey response
Like Voice of the Customer, Dynamics 365 stores the survey invitations and responses in entities associated with your business data. Forms Pro has its own entities where it stores the survey invite and response data.
Similar to Voice of the Customer, Dynamics 365 associates survey invitations and corresponding responses with Dynamics 365 contacts. Also, the survey invitations and responses are activities that can be linked to any out-of-the-box or custom entity through the Regarding field.
Please note that the entity model in Forms Pro is similar to Voice of the Customer. For this reason, you should be able to perform all the follow up actions on these entities as you would have configured in Voice of the Customer. More information about Forms Pro entities can be found here: Entity Reference for Microsoft Forms Pro
You can view the individual survey responses in Forms Pro. The rich Power BI Embedded experience for survey analysis is one of the advantages of Forms Pro. It provides out-of-the-box chart view for the question responses. It also does sentiment analysis and gathers other meaningful insights out of the survey response data. More details about analyzing responses can be found here: Analyze responses and invitations
Transitioning survey from Voice of the Customer to Forms Pro
If you have an older survey which is now closed, there is no need to transfer it to Forms Pro. For the running surveys that are expected to be live after July 2020, you should transition it to Forms Pro. You should create a new survey and start sending invitations using Forms Pro. When transitioning from Voice of the Customer to Forms Pro, you need to consider the overlapping period between the Voice of the Customer survey and the replacement Forms Pro survey. You should ensure that the old Voice of the Customer surveys are not closed until you no longer expect responses from the invitations sent for the Voice of the Customer survey.
During the transition period, you must include survey responses from both Voice of the Customer and Forms Pro while creating a report. After the transition period, you can create the report from Forms Pro survey responses only.
Enabling Forms Pro in your Dynamics 365 organization
You can enable Forms Pro in your Dynamics 365 organization by installing the Forms Pro application from the Mirosoft AppSource. You must have the System Administrator role to install it.
Once the application is installed, the Forms Pro entities will appear in the organization. To create surveys in this organization, you must have the Survey Owner role. More details about working with environments can be found here: Work with environments
