Microsoft Forms - All you need to know!

What are Microsoft Forms?

Microsoft Forms is an online survey creator and part of the Office 365 suite of products. It was released in June 2016 and it allows users to create forms that can be shared online (or internally) that can be filled in, with the responses being sent straight to a back-office system, storage or further processing.

What are some sample Use-Cases for Microsoft Forms?

Educators could utilise the functionality for quizzes, by sending an MS Form out to their students to complete, they could capture the answers for simple storage to be reviewed later, or even automatically marked via back-end processes with results being emailed to the students.

Capturing new leads for your business via a mail shot or your website.

Event organisers could send out invitations via MS Forms, capture the responses and send these to your back-office system for processing, and if someone RSVPs then automatically send a follow-up email requesting details on any dietary requirements.

Carrying out any almost any kind of survey/questionnaire be it online, or on the street by utilising mobile devices.

MS Forms vs. MS Forms Pro

While MS Forms certainly has uses within a large organisation, MS Forms Pro is the enterprise-grade version of the product. There are a few differences;

Forms Pro can be easily integrated to your existing processes with triggers in MS Flow. For example, you could automate the sending of a feedback questionnaire to your customers on closure of a case.

MS Forms Pro surveys can be directly embedded into your website with only a few lines of code.

Forms Pro responses can be stored directly within CDS, allowing the data to be easily combined with other business data and reported on in PowerBi.

Braching logic can be added to MS Forms Pro forms – allowing you to dictate the flow of the form based on user responses.

What are the limitations of Microsoft Forms?

The below limitations apply to both MS Form and MS Forms Pro:

• Limited to 100 questions.
  • MS Forms has a limit of 100 questions per form (at time of writing).
• User can’t save a form for later or update a submitted response.
• Choice questions store only 60 options.
• 4000-character max on textual responses.
• In ranking questions, you can only have between 2 and 10 options per response.
  • If you have a ranking question with 2 options, you’ll only be able to ask 50 questions. If you have one with 10 options, you’ll only be able to ask 20. This of course relates to your overall 100 question limit.
• Likert scales are limited to 20 questions.
  • The Likert doesn't count as one, it counts as one per "statement" in the Likert.

Voice of the Customer

With the introduction of MS Forms and MS Forms Pro, Microsoft have announced the deprecation of Voice of the Customer, however users can continue to create new surveys and collect data until July 1^st, 2020:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/get-started/whats-new/customer-engagement/important-changes-coming

Final Thoughts

Microsoft Forms is an incredibly useful tool in the Microsoft Suite. If you keep the current limitations in mind, there is still clearly a huge number of use-cases and hopefully in time, these limitations will be reduced if not entirely lifted.

This is a much cleaner solution than Voice of the Customer, improving the design, build process and integration options drastically. So while there will be a bit of work required to move your customers to this platform, it will be much easier going forward and will likely open up new opportunities.

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