As I revise for the MB2-718 exam (Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service) I’m creating blog posts detailing all aspects of my revision. I hope these posts will aid anyone who is also revising for this exam. In this post I will review Voice of the Customer (VoC).
You can see the skills measured statement below that relates to VoC. As there is an entire section devoted to it I guess we need to know VoC pretty well!
VoC is a fairly large topic! Therefore I will split this post into two sections. In this first section I will cover the basic concepts and how to create a survey. In my next post I will explore some slightly more advanced features. (Including response routings, piping data, alerts, feedback v responses etc.)
What is Voice of the Customer?
Voice of the customer (VoC) is an add-in to Dynamics 365 online that allows the creation of customer surveys. For example you might want to send out a survey following a “moment 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 complaint, or simply 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 Dynamics 365 and automatically given a score based on satisfaction ratings supplied by the customer.
From the customer’s 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 admin center. As shown below simply access the Admin center and select the Dynamics 365 option.
Next you select the applications tab. Here you should see voice of the customer. It will probably be in a “NotConfigured” status. You can use the manage option to configure it.
Note:
These instructions are for VoC v9.0 and later. Earlier versions were installed with another process! For earlier versions you needed to select the instance and then install a solution.
Next you will need to select the instance you wish to use and tick the box to accept the license terms. Once ready click install.
After a short pause you should see that the “NotConfigured” status changes to “Configured”. Now you are ready to user VoC.
Note: With earlier versions before creating a survey you needed to open the solution. Then in its configuration page accept the terms and conditions. Those steps are not required from v9 onwards!
Note: There is no need to publish customizations after installing voice of the customer. Also there is nothing you need to do to enable it for specific entities.
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 Dynamics 365.
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. Often, you will send the customer a link in an invitation to complete the survey email, so you will know who is completing the survey. But if you opt to allow anonymous responses a link will show on the survey form. This link to the anonymous survey can be sent out in an email or accessed in other ways. Such as from an iFrame on your website. |
| 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 my organisation name. Which I changed! |
There are lots of options on the survey form! Below I have detailed just a few useful ones….
| 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 | You can add a logo, you’ll probably almost always want to show your company logo on the survey! |
| Show progress bar and page numbers | 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
Once you have saved your survey you can swap the form to “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 Dynamics 365 form at all! But the designer is very intuitive and you’ll have zero problems using it.
Notice that each survey is split into pages. Each page would be given the survey logo. Also each page can be split into sections. And each section can have a logo.
The first page of a survey is always the welcome page, the last page is always the complete page. These must exist but can be customized. If you enable a Captcha it will show on the welcome page.
Then within each section we can add multiple survey parts or questions.
Tip:
you can see under the survey parts heading that we actually have loads of survey options available. I suggest you experiment with several as part of your exam preparation!
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 scoring of responses. The example 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 score etc.
Note:
For reporting purposes you may want to link survey questions. Questions can be linked form the same or different surveys. Questions can only be linked if first defined as a linked question. (Using the create linked question field.)
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.
Running preview on my quick example survey looked like this ….
After you publish a survey some additional options will show in the command bar, including the ability to stop the survey etc.
Sending out a survey Invitation
When you are ready you can send out the survey. (That is after you have published it!)
In your solution you will probably need to create a workflow that on the completion of a case, opportunity (etc., etc.). You’d need the workflow to automatically create 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) and set it regarding the required entity. Next select who you want to send it to. The “to” field 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 to allow them to complete the survey.
Each voice of the customer solution has daily limits on the number if invitations and the number of survey responses that can be received per day. If you exceed those limits in a 24 hour period, Items will roll over to the next period and be processed at that point. Other limitations include;
- Maximum number of surveys you can publish: 200
- Maximum number of questions on a survey: 250. If you’ve enabled feedback for a survey, the maximum is 40 questions.
- Maximum number of pages per survey: 25
- Maximum number of email invitations that you can send that include piped data in a 24-hour period: 50,000. If you create more email invitations than the specified limit, an error message is displayed. (The limit pre V9.0.781.3 was 2,400.)
Tip:
On the survey you will also find a copy snippet option that can also be used to quickly copy the survey link ready to be included in an email.
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.
Up to 15 minutes after the survey has been completed survey results will appear in Dynamics 365. If the response wasn’t anonymous it can be linked back to an account, contact, case etc. Each response can also show if this respondent is 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.
On the survey we have already looked at two forms, the survey form and the designer form. There is a third form (shown below) called “Dashboard”. Overtime this show a summary of invites and responses for the survey.
I hope this post will have helped with your preparation for any questions on VoC during your MB2-718 exam. In this post I have really only given an introduction. In my next post I will expand on these concepts to cover some of the more advanced concepts connected with VoC.
Don’t forget you will benefit from researching this topic deeper and creating some surveys of your own. In my opinion your exam prep should not rely on just theory!
Microsoft Dynamics 365 