MB2-714 (Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Customer Service): Voice of the Customer

This is my final post in preparing for the MB2-714 exam (Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Customer Service), this time I am going to look at what you’ll need to know about the voice of the customer.
First of all, I will be very open and state that I haven’t used voice of the customer yet! L What I list here is everything I have learnt so far and what I believe is needed for the MB2-714 exam. (These are essentially my own revision notes!)
Summary

The voice of the customer is all about customer surveys that help you collect and report on customer satisfaction levels. (And shape customer engagement accordingly.)
The surveys are mobile friendly with an adaptive UI and touch-friendly controls. Adaptive UI meaning the survey will automatically adjust to best fit the screen size being used be that a phone, tablet or laptop.
Tools exist to help surveys be created that comply to company branding etc.
Responses collected are associated with relevant records, such as cases. Enabling the customer’s “voice” to be heard in context of the activity you performed for them. Surveys can be service focused but the voice of the customer supports other CRM entities. You could have sales related surveys to measure customer satisfaction with the sales process. (Including potentially helping identify new upsell / cross sell opportunities.) Or surveys might relate to marketing to help test new offerings or ask a variety of questions about customer need, maybe using targeted focus groups.
Analysis can be done by looking at individual responses or by aggregating the data to establish trends or gaps in the products and services being provided.
To create and publish voice of the customer surveys you’ll need an Enterprise CRM license. Although anyone with a Pro license can view the responses and feedback.
Voice of the customer is available for CRM online and on premise.
Surveys are always hosted online in Azure. Meaning an Azure subscription is required.
Capabilities

• Create and send surveys directly from CRM.
• Responses collected and analysed from CRM. (Without going to an external application.)
• Responses can be linked to system and custom entities
• Drag and drop designer
• Theme editor to brand surveys (controls navigation / section header colours etc. and you can edit CSS is required.)
• Rules can be defined to show / hide sections or questions based on the feedback already captured
• Controls include text boxes and enhanced controls like stars to rate performance or smiles to rate satisfaction. Or flags etc. (And even allow customers to upload documents.)
• Field validation exists using pattern matching to check correctness of format
• Rates customers with a net promotor score (Indicates if passive, detractor or promotor)

Distribution of Surveys

Several options exist for distribution of surveys;

• A unique personalized survey can be shared via email
  • with a unique url that “pipes” the responses back into CRM and tracks against relevant records
  • Great for feedback on recent service resolution etc.
  • Can update CRM information, for example capturing a phone number could update the customer record directly
• Generic survey link
  • Use when you want the feedback but don’t need to know who sent it
  • A generic survey link is shared, responses are captured anonymously
  • Could also be used for lead capture, with CRM lead records automatically created based on the responses
• Iframe surveys
  • Iframes can be embedded into websites
  • With survey responses relating to the content being viewed

Once surveys are defined they can be automatically sent based on events, for example you can have a standard workflow that sends a survey on case resolution. The email then contains a link to start the survey.
Survey Definition

Each survey is split into multiple sections on the survey definition form, a brief description of the sections is given here;
Summary

The survey definition defines things like a name / description for the survey and a date of when the survey should close. You can also decide if a customer may respond multiple times and if anonymous responses are allowed. Social sharing is also allowed on specific questions.
Runtime

Surveys can have multiple translations supporting multiple languages.
A survey has a theme and custom logo and other UI items such as progress bars, titles etc.
Links exist to take customers to information such as privacy statements.
Invitations and Actions
Contains thinks like link for an anonymous survey, links to “snippets” to invite users to take the survey and the invite text, details to enable the survey to run in an iframe.
Survey Designer

Drag and drop design to build the survey using a rich content text editor.
Includes a welcome page, survey content pages and closing / thankyou page. (So at least three pages.)
Components can be dragged onto the page to build the survey parts.
Within the designer it is possible to publish, test and preview the survey.
Theme Design

Themes can be applied to a survey, the theme designer lets you define colours for the headers, sections and progress bars within the survey.
Capturing Responses

All survey responses are stored as CRM records and can be associated with out of the box (system) or custom entities. As the responses are standard CRM records you can leverage all of the reporting capabilities inherent in CRM, including views, charts, dashboards, export to Excel etc.
The survey response entity

In most cases the survey responses will be captured in the out of the box survey response entity.

• can be used as a single out of the box entity to store responses across surveys.
• Can be extended to capture details from responses by adding custom fields.
• Used for surveys with limited shelf-left
• Use for surveys that are prone to change
• Best used for surveys when the responses are to only reported on at an aggregated level
• Individual responses can still be viewed but not reported on

Feedback Custom Entities

• Needs to be enabled, not enabled by default
• Creates a new custom entity for each time the survey is published
• Custom entity maps to survey questions so that all response can be converted into CRM records
• Best used for surveys that seldom change and are long running
• Ideal when most of the questions are measurable / reportable

I hope this helps and as soon as I get an Enterprise license and Azure subscription I hope to test Voice of the Customer for myself. When I am sure I will blog about it. For now, I hope I have covered enough detail for the MB2-714 exam. J
You can find my complete collection of posts for MB2-714 here.