Working with Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice book review

Working with Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice:
Efficiently gather and manage customer feedback, insights, and experiences by
Welly Lee

I have used Customer Voice and its predecessors Forms Pro and Voice of the Customer for a few years, and these are important tools to capture feedback from customer and well as understanding more broadly what customers think about my clients and their products.

Customer Voice is more than just about creating surveys, there are end-to-end orchestrations that you can perform with surveys as part of customer journeys. The goal should be to combine survey data with other transactional and profile data to build up a complete picture of your customers and then decide how to best interact with them.

The book is very much aimed at the business user, not the technologist. If you have never used Microsoft Forms or Customer Voice before, don’t worry and like many of the recent business products from Microsoft, you can create something quickly and easily. Welly takes you through the step-by-step process to create surveys and as you go through the book, he leads you through more of the features and capabilities of the tools.

The book starts off describing both Microsoft Forms and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice and shows the differences between these two similar products from Microsoft.
There is some really great advice on how to structure your surveys and how to choose the best question types. Welly has a concise description of Net Promoter Score (NPS), which I think I will reuse myself it is so good. I think we all have received surveys which we abandon after page 4 with no end in sight. You can create long surveys with Forms and Customer Voice, but you should really read the chapter on best practice as it applies not just to these products but all surveys in general. Welly also gives links to resources on building great questionnaires. I love the GitHub repository holding Power BI report templates for Customer Voice.

The first half of the book looks at Microsoft Forms and its capabilities. If you are a Microsoft watcher, you will have seen how important Microsoft Teams is and the book shows how you can use Microsoft Forms during and after Microsoft Teams meetings with polls and feedback.

As a trainer, I use both Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice to gather post course feedback. I have used many different tools over the years to create interaction with my students which is even more important in a virtual world. Welly shows how to use Microsoft Forms for quizzes.

The book then looks at a couple of other use cases for Customer Voice in more detail, employee, and customer feedback. It looks surveys, templates, how to send surveys, and  how to analyse and report on the responses. Welly also looks at how to use Customer Voice surveys with web applications, chatbots, and other technologies. I found this section particularly insightful.

The next chapter of the book looks at automation. Once you start capturing feedback, you need to automate the handling of responses including storing the responses in a way that you and others can access them such as SharePoint. This is where the Power Platform with Power Automate combines with Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice. There are connectors that trigger a cloud flow. This is something I use. For community events I run, I use Customer Voice as the sign-up form, which triggers a Power Automate cloud flow. The cloud flow adds the data to an Excel sheet in OneDrive for Business shared with other event team members, send a notification email to the respondent, and adds them to the Microsoft Team that I have created for the event. This has saved me hours of effort and the experience for the attendee is very professional.

The final section of the book concerns administration and licensing. It includes a necessary review of the settings to implement company policy and security.

Summary, if you are involved in marketing, product development, or support and need to gather customer feedback then you should read this book even if not a user of Customer Voice or Microsoft Forms as it will give you some great tips on starting on the customer listening journey.

You can purchase direct from Packt https://www.packtpub.com/product/working-with-microsoft-forms-and-customer-voice/9781801070171 or from Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Working-Microsoft-Forms-Customer-Voice/dp/1801070172