Omnichannel for customer service gives us two survey options, one being a pre-chat survey the other being a post chat survey. In this post I will complete a review of the new post chat survey capability.

The approach to pre-chat and post-chat surveys is actually quite different! This makes complete sense (to me) as if you think about the chat experience the purpose of each survey is quite different.

Generally speaking pre-chat surveys tend to be focused on two things. The first being capturing details about the customer, so maybe their name or email address. The second purpose would be to capture the nature of their query, for example is this a support issue or is this a sales query. We’d use the pre-chat survey information to try to locate the customer’s contact record or maybe route the chat to the agents best placed to answer the query.

Post-chat surveys play a different role, in these we are typically trying to capture customer feedback. The information gathered might then help us improve the service offered to customers.

Pre-chat surveys use a simple approach of defining a list of questions.

Your post-chat survey could need to be more complex, maybe including images, conditional branches and much more. Plus with post-chat surveys how we’d want to analyse the responses would be more involved. This is why post-chat surveys make use of Forms Pro. You will therefore need access to Forms Pro. If you haven’t used Forms Pro before don’t worry, it is a really easy to use yet powerful tool. You can find out more about Forms Pro here.

You can configure a post-chat survey for pretty much any channel. But I believe only live chat allows the survey to be displayed directly in the chat window. With the other channels a link would be sent and the user can open the survey from that.

You should be aware that the post chat survey option is currently in preview. (August 2020!) Meaning we may find a few “rough” edges and features that aren’t 100%. Having said that I found it worked reasonably well. During this post I will flag any areas that I felt weren’t 100%. But please do not let those comments put you off. This is a cool feature that I highly recommend you trying.

Setup a Post Chat Survey

Setting up a post-chat survey is really easy. As explained above we have two modes of working. With web chat the survey can be embedded into the chat widget. Then with other channels a link can be offered to load the survey in a browser window.

I will create a survey and enable on my chat channel and Teams channel. Therefore demonstrating both options!

Note:
I happen to be using the Teams channel but the link approach will work with other channels. I believe most channels seem to be supported, the only one that didn’t seem to work for me was as a survey on my BOT channel. But maybe that doesn’t matter as the BOT could trigger its own survey if required!

The steps involved in configuring a post-chat survey are as follows;

1. Create a Forms Pro survey
2. Enable survey on chat channel
3. Enable survey on teams channel (Other channels are available!)

Step One – Create a Forms Pro survey

Obviously before you can add a survey into Omnichannel for Customer Service you will need to create a survey using Forms Pro.

I’m not going to cover the detail of that in this post! But I am confident you will find that the process is pretty simple.

Below you can see I created a really simple survey with a couple of questions. This was just a test so I didn’t spend long customizing the look of my survey, obviously you can (and should) add images / themes as required.

In my opinion, If you want to display the survey in your chat widget then keeping it short will work best. This is simply because of the screen space available in the chat widget. But this is just my opinion!

Tip:
When you create your survey ensure you are in the correct environment / CDS instance. As I believe the survey must be within the same CDS instance as the Dynamics 365 organisation you are using for Omnichannel for Customer Service.

Step Two – Enable on chat channel

Enabling the survey on my chat channel involved opening the chat option within the Omnichannel Administration application. Below you can see that in the “Surveys” tab of my chat widget I have enabled both a pre and post chat survey.

Because this is my web chat channel I had the option to insert the chat into my conversation (aka chat widget.). Also noticed that I selected the survey I wanted to use.

Step Two – Enable on Teams channel

Next I wanted to test the alternative approach of sending the survey as a link.

Here I loaded my Teams channel in Omnichannel Administration. Notice that this time I have enabled the survey in a similar way but I have selected the option to send the survey link in the conversation.

When we send the link in the conversation you can also tailor the messages that will be sent along with the link.

User Experience – Teams

First I tested how my survey would operate. With Teams (and other channels) as the conversation ends a link to the survey is sent to the customer.

You can see my test Teams conversation from the customer point of view below. As the survey closed a message and link has been sent to the customer.

As I said at the start, this is currently a preview feature. (August 2020.) So I made one minor observation here, that being the link didn’t feel very “customer friendly”. I’d prefer to have seen a short link or maybe just a hyperlink rather than the full URL. (Maybe one day!)

But clicking the link seamless opened my test survey. As you can see below.

User Experience – Web Chat

Next I tested web chat. Here the experience is different as the survey will open directly in the chat widget.

You can see below that as I tried to close down the chat widget the survey is displayed.

I will point out that this is a preview feature! As for me the process worked very smoothly but if “felt” quite slow at loading the survey initially. But maybe I am being picky and hopefully the performance will improve in the fullness of time.

The final part of my test was to review responses I had collected. I got all my responses, which was great. But I had hoped / expected that the responses would be linked to any contacts associated with the conversations. Unfortunately that didn’t happen, meaning my responses couldn’t be linked back to specific contacts / conversations. But I will repeat this is a preview feature, so I fully expect these teething problems to be resolved.

In summary I think the post chat survey feature is easy to use and provides a great customer experience. During the preview it seems to have a few minor glitches but I still encourage you to try it. Enjoy!