I recently configured the voice of the customer feature for a demo of CRM Online, here I describe the steps I followed. Hopefully this post will provide the basics you’ll need to know about voice of the customer.
I actually found this surprisingly easy to setup and it should be a useful tool in many companies. I suspect not enough people use this!!
- What is Voice of the Customer?
- Installing Voice of the Customer
- Sending out a survey
- Completing a Survey
What is Voice of the Customer?
Voice of the customer (VoC) is an add-in to CRM online that allows the creation of customer surveys, these surveys could then be sent out following “moments of truth” to gauge the level of customer satisfaction.
A “moment of truth” could be any interaction you have with a customer. It might be when they place an order, register a complain, or simple phone you.
For example, after completing a case you may wish to send out a brief questionnaire on the service you’d just provided. Responses are collected back in CRM and automatically given a score based on satisfaction ratings supplied by the customer.
From the customers point of view you’d be showing that you care about their views. And from your point of view good or bad you get useful actionable insight into the views of your customer.
Installing Voice of the Customer
Voice of the customer is not enabled by default; the first step is to install the Voice of the Customer solution. You do this in your Office 365 CRM admin option.
Next you select the organisation you wish to work with can click “Solutions”.
In the solutions option you simply select the “Voice of the Customer” solution and click install. There will be a pause whilst the installation happens. But eventually you will see, as shown below that it is installed.
Now you are ready to configure it. To do this return to CRM and select the solutions option under settings.
Open the solution and go to the configuration option. The first time you go in here you will need to agree the terms and select “Enable Voice of the Customer”.
Once you have successfully enabled VoC the configuration page will look like this. Notice you have two options, the top one can be used to force processing to happen. (Although if you wait long enough normally you shouldn’t need this option!) And the second option opens the configuration entity. For the purpose of my demo I simply accepted the defaults in the configuration and didn’t change anythine.
Create a Survey
Your first task will be to create a survey, so that you have something to send out. To do this navigate to the surveys option in the newly added “Voice of the Customer” area in CRM.
Within the survey option select “New” and enter a survey. The survey entity has three forms. To create a survey you will need to use two of them! First of all select the “SURVEY” form.
The Survey Form
First of all, you will need to complete the mandatory fields.
| Field | Description |
| Closed Date | This will be the date the survey will be closed. (When this date is reached respondents can no longer complete the survey and will be redirected to the redirect URL.) |
| Restrict Multiple Completions | It might be that you only want someone to respond once, if so set this option to Yes. |
| Anonymous Responses. | You may or may not want anonymous responses. Typically, you will send the customer a link in an email, so you will know who is completing the survey. But you will also see on the survey an anonymous link is created. You could publish this link on your website to collect opinions but they would not be linked to a customer. |
| Theme | I opted for the default theme, but you may wish to control colours etc and create your own theme. |
| Header text | The header of the survey, this defaulted to including my CRM organisation name. Which I changed! |
As I was preparing for a demo of VoC I didn’t test every option! But below I have detailed some useful options I did set.
| Field | Description |
| Use Captcha | Setting this will present a “captcha”, which hopefully will reduce SPAM responses. Possibly most important with the anonymous survey option. |
| Logo | I did add a logo, you’ll probably almost always want to show your company logo on the survey. |
| Show progress bar and page numbers | I set these to yes, if your survey has multiple pages it will give the user a sense of how close to the end they are. |
| Redirect text and redirect url | If someone tries to complete a closed survey then they would be transferred to this url. |
| Custom foot text and customer footer url (Plus privacy policy) | The footer of the survey can have up to two links included. (Custom footer, privacy policy). You define the text you want to see in the link and associated url in these fields. |
| Survey Email text and survey email | A further hyperlink can be included in the survey footer. Clicking it will send an email to the address given. |
| Navigation, next, previous and submit | You can control the wording shown in the survey for moving from page to page and completing the final page. |
| Anonymous link | This is automatically created but I mention it as you might want to copy this link to include on your website, etc. |
The Designer Form
The designer form lets you create the actual survey. Essentially you drag and drop questions onto the form and configure them. It doesn’t function like a normal CRM form at all! But the designer is very intuitive and you’ll have zero problems using it.
When you add some types of controls to the design form a question form may open. (An example is shown below.) Importantly some types of questions are going to contribute (automatically) to scroing of responses. The examepl below was a CSAT and notice that the customer satisfaction option has been set to yes by default. Other question types can contribute to the customer effort score, net promoter scrore etc.
Within the form designer screen, you can use the preview option to view your survey as it is created. Once you are happy use the publish option to make it live.
Sending out a survey
When you are ready you can send out the survey.
In your solution you will probably need to create a workflow that on the completion of a case, opportunity (etc etc), automatically creates a survey activity and then emails its link to the customer. This workflow would be pretty simple to create. It is however also possible to manually create survey activities.
You can manually create a survey activity in the social pane of any entity that supports activities.
Creating an activity is simple enough! Just give it a name (subject), select who you want to send it to. This will generally be the account or contact who you have just completed something for. And then select the survey you would like to send. Once the survey has been saved an “invitation link” will be created. It is this link that is sent to the customer en allow them to complete the survey.
Completing a Survey
When the customer receives the link they can open the survey and complete. Some screens from my very simple test survey are shown below. The first screen being my optional Captcha
And then each page of the survey is shown. Users will be presented with sliders, text boxes, smiley face selection (etc) depending on the type of question selected.
About 15 minutes after the survey has been completed survey results will appear in CRM. If the response was anonymous it can be linked back to an account, contact, case etc. Each response can also show if this respondant to a promotor or detractor. They are also give scores based on answers. Hopefully you can see how this data could then be present on dashboards (etc) to help measure customer satisfaction levels.
Also opening each response will give you a summary of answers each response,
I have only briefly given an explanation of the key features of VoC but hopefully this post has sparked your interest and you now feel able to test it out for yourself. J
Microsoft Dynamics 365 
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