Chapter 1: Introducing Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice

In September 2020, my team released Dynamics 365 Customer Voice as an upgrade for Microsoft Forms Pro. Soon after, we noticed that the Net Promoter Score (NPS) started to fall. From the user feedback, we learned that many users were not happy with the data export functionality in the new product. Along with the product upgrade, we switched the data export format from Excel to .csv format, to enable the exporting of larger datasets. Users hated the new .csv format, so based on the feedback, we quickly made a change to go back to exporting data to Excel format and only provided an option for .csv for larger datasets. After we introduced the change, we saw that the NPS score started to go up again.

That story is a real-life example of how collecting feedback can help you identify issues early, and then track your progress in solving them to make customers happy. Despite our best attempts to use data to drive decisions, many of our day-to-day decisions still rely on intuition. While product leaders use their experience to shape their intuition, occasionally the wrong decision is made, and having a feedback measurement system in place is critical to provide an early warning signal to correct your decision.

Our goal at Microsoft is to make it easy for you to collect feedback from your employees and your customers through two products: Microsoft Forms and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. Microsoft Forms is a productivity tool targeted at collecting simple surveys and quizzes. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is an enterprise feedback management system used to collect feedback from employees and customers and integrate the survey data with your existing business application systems. In this chapter, we will review the two products, including their key capabilities and licensing requirements. By the end of this chapter, you will understand the difference between the two products and when to use one over the other.

We will cover the following topics:

• What is Microsoft Forms?
• What is Dynamics 365 Customer Voice?
• Differences between Microsoft Forms and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice
• Licensing requirements