On July 1th, Microsoft announced the
general availability of Microsoft Forms Pro. Microsoft Forms Pro is an enterprise survey tool built on top of Microsoft Forms and the Common Data Service (CDS). Forms Pro allows you to design surveys in a user-friendly manner, distribute these surveys to your target audience and afterwards analyze the results using the built-in dashboards or using Power BI. Microsoft Forms Pro has been part of the
Microsoft Forms Pro April 2019 release.
Forms Pro has been built on top of the
Common Data Service (CDS) which allows for a deep integration with Dynamics 365 for Sales & Customer Service. (For background on CDS and Dynamics – read
Making sense of XRM,PowerApps and some other acronyms (CDS,CDM, etc..)).
The goal of Forms Pro is to capture customer's (or employees) feedback about their experiences with and expectations for your products or services. By analyzing the response and taking appropriate action, you can increase customer loyalty, decrease customer churn and improve the way that your organizations interacts with customers, etc …
The goal of this blog post is to highlight some of the features I have been using on the project I’m currently working on – for more extensive information I can highly recommend the
blog posts by Megan Walker on the subject (see list at bottom of only few out of the 20+ posts) as well as her
Youtube FormsPro play list. Another option is to listen to
Episode 58 of the CRM MVP podcast
Getting started
To get started you need to install Forms Pro from AppSource (the Forms Pro solutions are already installed on a Dynamics 365 CE instance but are hidden by default) which will enable the forms editing and management environment. When you open it for the first time (
https://forms.office.com/FormsPro/Pages/DesignPage.aspx) – it will show you a sample survey which is created in the default CDS instance.
If you want to create your surveys in a specific CDS (or Dynamics 365 instance) – you need to select this instance in the top right corner.
Creating a survey
I really like the survey design environment which is very easy to use. You can quickly add different types of questions – choice, text/long text, rating, date, Likert, Net Promotor Score, … with the ability to also format the questions (basic options such as bold,italic, font type/size, etc…). Some question types you will have additional features e.g. render choice questions as dropdown or choice options, for ratings using stars or numbers and ability to use 1-5 options, …
You can personalize your surveys by inserting placeholders/parameters but also by adding conditional branching rules in your surveys for the different questions – e.g. if a low NPS rating is given, you might want to ask extra feedback. You can hide questions and then make them visible using the conditional rules. For more details see
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/forms-pro/create-branching-rule
Theming your surveys is quite easy with the ability to change colors and add images (for background and header) as required – at the moment there is no support (yet) to add custom CSS.
Distributing the survey
There are many ways of distributing your survey, manually send it, embed it in a web page, using your own distribution channel (e.g. SMS or other marketing platform) or using a QR code. But
Forms Pro also comes with Microsoft Flow integration which provides Flow templates to send Survey invitation on common business transactions like sending out a survey when a customer case has been closed, asking feedback after a purchase, etc …. You can customize these Flow templates or create from scratch depending on business needs.
Viewing and analyzing survey responses
On the overview tab, you are able to see summary data about your survey like number of invites, number of responses received, Net Promotor Score (NPS) etc… You are also able to drill into the details of the question responses etc and export the data to Excel from here. Another interesting functionality is Survey Insights which uses AI and machine learning to find correlations between question answers and calculation of a sentiment score for text-based questions.
Summary
Forms Pro is a new product but it builds on top of both Microsoft Forms and the CDS platform of which a lot of functionality is leveraged. Although the foundational functionalities are very strong, there are still some gaps and rough edges that you will encounter during an implementation. But having worked with the Forms Pro product team in the previous months reassures me that the product team is open to feedback and are working hard on improving the product. Customers who are currently using the Voice of the Customer module should plan a migration path since (source:
Replace your Voice of the Customer Surveys with Microsoft Forms Pro) If you think that some functionality is missing I highly recommend you to use the
Forms Pro Suggestion box on UserVoice .
In a next blog post, I will delve a little deeper into some of the gotchas and share some tips and tricks when implementing Forms Pro.
References
Blog posts by Megan Walker on Forms Pro:
