Overview of D365 Customer Voice

If you have been involved in managing customer feedback within the Microsoft ecosystem, chances are you have probably worked with either Microsoft Forms or before that, D365 Voice of the Customer. Some time last year, Microsoft quietly replaced Microsoft Forms Premium with what is now known as D365 Customer Voice, the latest evolution of their enterprise grade survey platform.

Peeking beneath the hood, D365 Customer Voice is much more than a simple change of name and one of the main improvements which makes it "enterprise grade" is that survey responses are now stored in Dataverse. In doing so, it opens up the door to seamless integration across the entire D365 ecosystem through model driven PowerApps and Power Automate. Imaging being able to automatically send out a feedback survey at the completion of a service and then associating the response back to the work order in Field Service or the customer. All of this again, without writing a single line of code.

Naturally, I was very keen to understand what new capabilities D365 Customer Voice brings to the table and what better way to do that than to create a brand new survey to survey our imaginary customers after their scheduled car service.

Licensing

So before we begin, let's "try" to understand the licensing construct for D365 Customer Voice. According to Microsoft here, licensing comes in two main flavours depending if you are already have certain D365 products.

1. For organisations with D365 licensed products such as Sales Enterprise or Customer Service Enterprise, you get 2,000 responses per month included with top-ups available in 1,000 increments at $100
2. For anyone else, you will need to pre-purchase a D365 Customer Voice license at $200 per month. A license will offer you 2,000 responses per month with top-ups available in 1,000 increments at $100

Creating Our Project

Once you have provisioned a license (or trial) and have signed into D365 Customer Voice, the first step is to create a Project. A project is a container for one or more surveys and allows you can quickly share and combine surveys within that project for management and reporting on satisfaction metrics such as NPS, CSAT and sentiment.

First, click on the + New project button

One of the great things about D365 Customer Voice is that it comes prebuilt with ready to use project templates which can act as quick starters or inspiration for your own surveys. In my case, I want to start from scratch so will start off with a Blank project.

D365 Customer Voice now leverages Dataverse as the backend. In the next screen select the environment to connect your project to. If you have multiple environments, you can browse and search for it. Click Create

Your project will now be created and you will land on the designer screen of your first empty survey.

Creating your survey

At this stage, it looks pretty bland but fear not as we will bling it up shortly after. But before we do, let's rename our survey to something more descriptive.

Next to your survey, click on the ellipsis and then Rename

Give your survey a meaningful name and click Rename.

If we now click on the header of the survey, you can see that various customisation options are available to you.

You can opt for a prebuilt style and theme.

To make things simple, we have the ability to use the WYSIWYG editor to set the font, size, colour and positioning of the survey title and description. This makes life a lot easier for end users who don't necessarily have the HTML or CSS skills to jazz up their forms.

Through the use of a background image (which you can also now upload directly to your survey) and some simple styling, we can transform our survey to something that looks fairly professional.

Once our header is out of the way, let's build out the rest of the survey. If you have used MS Forms, most of this would be quite familiar to you. You can choose from a variety of question types from textboxes and date pickers through to a Likert scale.

Let's start off with a date picker field where the customer can select when their service took place. Similar to the survey heading, we are also able to format the headings and subtitles of question.

Next, we will add a choice field to allow the customer to select the type of service they had done. You can choose from radio buttons or in the case below, a drop down.

And what's a customer feedback survey without a Likert scale.

At the end of the survey, we will add a question to ask whether the customer would like to subscribe to our newsletter.

If the customer selects 'Yes', then we would like to display an additional question to ask them for their email, otherwise, the customer wouldn't need to. To achieve this, we will set the question to not be visible as a default. We will look at how to dynamically make the question visible again a little later on when we look at branching.

An important aspect of surveys are restriction which allows you to specify validation criteria against each field. In this instance, we can utilise the Email restriction which forces the customer to enter a value that is consistent with an email pattern but for other scenarios like restricting to a specific domain e.g. @outlook.com, we can also utilise regular expressions.

Once we have added all our questions into our survey, let's look at some some of the other more advanced customisation features available through D365 Customer Voice.

Satisfaction metrics

Satisfaction metrics are defined allows organisations to measure the effectiveness of the experiences they provide to their customers. In short, it allows you to track the level of satisfaction against up to 10 metrics per project. There are three types of metrics which can be tracked including:

• NPS - used to measure customer loyalty against a scale of 0 through to 10. Responders are categorised as either Detractors (0-6), Passives (7-8) or Promoters (9-10).
• Sentiment - used to identify customer sentiment as either positive, negative or neutral based on a text based response.
• CSAT - used to measure the level of satisfaction customers have with a product or service against a scale of 0 through to 5.

Let's start off with creating a satisfaction metric to track the sentiment based on the general comments received from our responders.

We will also add a CSAT metric to track one of our statements in our Likert scale which is how our customers would rate their overall experience.

Branching

D365 customer voice allows us to create branching rules to customise the flow and user journey of our surveys. Branching rules allows us to do things such as show/hide certain questions and even navigate to another question or survey. We will create a branching rule to make prompt our customer to provide their email address when they have answered 'Yes' to subscribe to our newsletter.

Branching rules are quite simple to implement. Simply specific the condition which what needs to happen to trigger this rule. In our case, we will set the condition to when a responder selects 'Yes' to subscribing to our newsletter.

Next, specify what action or behaviour will occur when the condition is met. In our case, we want to show our email question in the form (which was set to hidden by default earlier).

Personalisation

Personalisation is a powerful feature which allows you to personalise or tailor a survey with dynamic information specific to the responder like their first and last name. Whilst this may seem simple, personalising a survey can improve response rates by capturing the responder's attention.

Let's add the First Name and Last Name into our survey. Back in your designer, click on the header and you will notice a Variables drop down. You will see a number of default variables like First Name and Last Name but it is possible to also add your own depending on your needs. In our case, let's add First Name and Last Name.

Our header should look something like this with variables being represented by double curly braces.

Languages

D365 Customer Voice also supports up to 86 languages to appear in your surveys. This is done through the download of a language template file that contains a list of your text labels. You can then provide the translations and upload it back into your survey.

Branding

The branding selection provides a few additional levers for customising the look and feel of your survey including themes, fonts and the uploading of background images.

Formatting

The formatting section provides the ability to show/hide progress bars, question numbers and even shuffle questions around.

Distributing your surveys

So once your survey is ready, let's look at how to distribute our surveys to our customers. In the Send tab, we can see a number of different options to do so.

• Automation - the use of Power Automate to automate the sending of your surveys to your customers. This opens up endless opportunities as you can pretty much send a survey with any triggered flow within the Microsoft and connected 3rd party ecosystem.
• Email - manually send an email to a responder from within D365 Customer Voice
• Embed code - get a JavaScript snippet to embed the survey within an existing webpage
• Link - get a link directly to the survey and useful for adding a click through or even adding as a tab in MS Teams
• QR Code - generate a QR Code which you can distribute electronically or physically around locations

In addition to the above distribution modes, there are a number of additional settings which we can tailor the way our responders will access and respond to our surveys. One of the key ones for me is whether we would like to enable anonymous responses or whether only people within my organisation can respond to our surveys. This is particularly important in terms of data security as well as the outreach of our surveys.

Email

Let's explore the Email option first as that is the most straight forward. Clicking Email will open up an email editor in addition to a prebuilt template. You can create your own templates if you want with your own company colours and styling.

Again, we can add variables into our email to personalise the email to our customer. In this instance, we have added our customer's First Name into the email subject to grab their attention.

Once we click on Send, we can see an email come into our Inbox with our personalised subject line.

Clicking on the link takes us to the survey with our personalised header.

Automation

Let's also explore the Automation distribution mode. Click on the Automation option gives us a number of possible template starters. Clicking on any of these will take you to the Power Automate designer for further customisation.

If we navigate to Power Automate, there is a D365 Customer Voice connector which contains two actions. In actual fact, you can utilise the connector and either of these actions in your own flows for sending the survey to your responders.

Using these actions, we are able to specify the responder's email address, the type of survey and any personalised variables we would like to send the survey to. Pretty standard stuff from Power Automate.

Capturing Responses

So once our surveys are distributed to our responders, how do we capture their responses? This again is done through Power Automate but before we get to the flow, let's create a SharePoint list which will act as our storage mechanism.

In Power Automate, we will build out our flow which will be triggered when a responder completes our survey. Interestingly, we reuse the action from the MS Forms connector but this is expected given the move from MS Forms Premium to D365 Customer Voice.

The flow itself is pretty straight forward in that we will get the response details by passing in the Response Id and then using Create Item action to create a list item in our SharePoint list.

Let's be a little creative here and also post an adaptive card to MS Teams. Adaptive card takes in a JSON input which you can then embed the dynamic content from your form response. If you are new to adaptive cards, there is a great visual designer here which you can use to help build your JSON for you.

So let's complete our survey.

We can see our list item created in SharePoint.

As well as our adaptive card posted in MS Teams.

If we navigate back to our D365 Customer Voice app, we can see our two satisfaction metrics coming through. In my opinion, whilst useful, this needs a bit of work as its only visual and doesn't provide any drill down capabilities to gain context into the values. However, I am sure over time. the functionality in this area will improve and until then, you can always use Power BI to report on the data from Dataverse.

Closing Thoughts

D365 Customer Voice enables organisations to quickly and easily create, distribute and measure survey responses. The ability to create visually appealing surveys without writing code and to then distribute surveys and capture responses using the Power Automate low code platform makes it a versatile tool and a truly enterprise grade survey platform.