eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Microsoft has released a preview edition of its Microsoft Forms Pro enterprise survey and analytics tool, which provides wide-ranging capabilities for enterprise users to build insightful opinion surveys aimed at employees or customers.
The completed surveys, which can be created to get input on workplace, product or consumer issues and more, can collect data that can then be scoured by business analytics engines to give enterprises information to make their processes and experiences better, wrote Welly Lee, principal group program manager for Dynamics 365, in a recent post on the Dynamics 365 Blog.
“Microsoft Forms Pro extends the capabilities of the features you know and love from Microsoft Forms in Office 365, and public preview is available to anyone with a Microsoft work account, including Microsoft Office 365 commercial customers and Microsoft Dynamics 365 customers,” wrote Lee.
The preview version of Microsoft Forms Pro, which is part of the Dynamics 365 product family, gives enterprises the ability to collect feedback from customers in real time at every stage of their relationship with a company while also helping businesses gain insights into employee experiences to improve organizational health, wrote Lee. Forms Pro can also help business users gain a holistic view into their operations to improve processes and build products customers want, he added.
After creating a survey with the application, it can be distributed to respondents via email or it can be embedded on a web page or in Microsoft PowerApps. Survey creators can also use Microsoft Flow to automate the distribution of a survey by creating a flow that automatically collects feedback after a customer’s support experience, according to Lee. “You can also embed surveys on your website or PowerApps custom application to collect contextual information on everything from sales leads, customer service or event feedback.”
For survey creators, Microsoft Forms Pro integrates and works with the same tools they already use, including Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, wrote Lee. Survey data is automatically stored in Microsoft Common Data Service (CDS), so survey results can be combined with other business data to build Power BI reports without having to export and import data between other platforms and systems.
The surveys created using Forms Pro give business users the opportunity to gather and manage intelligent and deep insights while taking the pulse of their workforce and customers, wrote Lee.
“Microsoft Forms Pro includes AI-powered insights to analyze the survey and automatically identify data correlations, as well as detect sentiment from free-text comments so you can quickly understand how people think and feel about your company, brand, and products,” he wrote.
The preview edition of Forms Pro is easy to set up and configure and is available for installation and evaluation by Microsoft customers.
Built on the existing Microsoft Forms platform, Forms Pro gives business users the ability to collect feedback from customers and employees and then correlate it with business transactions to deliver valuable insights found in the combined data, according to recent release notes.
Forms Pro includes an easy-to-use survey designer that features built-in question suggestions that can help business users create effective surveys and increase survey response rates.
Survey designers are given branching capabilities that can control what questions to show or hide based on the responses to previous questions, according to the release notes. New questions are suggested automatically based on the title and existing questions as soon as a user starts typing a survey question.