Microsoft’s Voice of the Customer Add-On: An Overview

The core benefit of using a CRM to work with current and potential customers is its ability to automate your marketing, sales, and other business processes. But what if you could actually use it to gather intelligence about your audience, and create more targeted outreach as a result?

Traditionally, CRM and survey software are separate tools. Even if you offer your customers the ability to provide feedback about their buyers’ journey and sales experience, that feedback will likely be collected in an external solution, with little connection to the customer record within your CRM.

Microsoft’s Voice of the Customer looks to change that disconnect. By integrating with your Dynamics CRM solution, it can help you not just gain information about your audience, but put that insight into action immediately using your CRM features. Keep reading for a more in-depth overview of the add-on.

Understanding the Core Features

At its core, Microsoft’s Voice of the Customer add-on is a survey tool. What makes it different from most others, of course, is that it’s directly integrated within a CRM. In fact, Dynamics users can build a survey, set up auto responses and workflows, and view both individual responses and analytics all within the CRM.

The result is a more integrated survey experience, on both ends. Members of your audience will easily identify the survey not as a stand-alone communication, but as part of an overall communication plan in which they’re participating. On the backend, users can more easily build surveys that make sense within the communication plan, both in terms of time frame and in terms of branding.

Flexible Surveys to Elevate Communication

A core reason why this add-on can be so beneficial is its flexibility in creating surveys. The branding is completely customizable, complete with a progress bar across the top of each question page. These pages are designed responsively, automatically adjusting to the audience’s screen size. Meanwhile, each survey can be personalized with data piped directly in from the attached CRM.

That flexibility, of course, doesn’t end at the survey design. Users can build up to 200 individual surveys, helping to create a response mechanism for every need. Each survey can include up to 250 questions, to be distributed to up to 10,000 potential respondents at any given time.

Customizable Post-Survey Response and Analysis

Building the survey, as described by this tutorial, is relatively straightforward within Dynamics. The tool’s true strength comes in what happens once your audience answers the questions you send them.

For starters, responses to non-anonymous surveys are captured directly on each respondent’s CRM record. Next time a sales agent looks to gain information about that lead or customer, the responses can act as valuable feedback on that contact’s experience and preferences.

In addition, installing the Voice of the Customer Add-on automatically creates a new section of dashboards within Dynamics that allows for effective survey reporting. Here, you can gain a quick overview of the total number of respondents, response rates, and responses to your individual questionnaires.

Finally, Microsoft lets Dynamics users set up customized, automated actions based on survey responses. The most obvious is an automated response email, thanking the prospect for answering the questions. But in reality, the add-on’s capabilities go far beyond that.

In fact, responses do individual questions can be used as rules to set up workflows. Based on a lead or customer’s response, they can be re-routed to a sales agent or receive more individualized communication going forward. This customizability is perhaps the most powerful feature of the tool.

3 Use Cases for Business Success

The potential use cases for this type of survey add-on are almost infinite. Here are just a few that you can build easily, and put to work toward improving your marketing and sales efforts immediately:

1. Gathering additional lead information

Lead nurturing is a crucial part of today’s marketing efforts. But of course, especially as your leads move forward in the sales funnel, they don’t appreciate mass emails promoting your product. Instead, they’re looking for messages that answer their individual questions and address their needs.

Short of 1-on-1 outreach, that prospect is difficult to achieve. But through a survey distributed within your lead nurturing workflow, you can ask for relevant information (such as business challenges) that can then be used for further segmentation and targeting. For example, you can ask about company size, and branch off different workflows based on the sizes of companies you’re working to attract.

2. Direct Communication Feedback

In the course of the buyers’ journey, your leads and potential customers may hear from you, even before the sales pitch. How can you make sure that when they do, you provide them with everything they need to nudge them closer toward conversion?

As showcased in this video, Microsoft Voice of the Customer can help you easily solve that problem. You can set up a survey to send each time a sales agent reports an interaction, asking for feedback of the conversation. Over time, you can use that information to improve your interactions and better serve your potential customers.

3. Gaining post-sale satisfaction insights

Of course, we have to mention the most natural survey use, which is easily possible using this add-on: customer satisfaction feedback. Set up a survey to send when a lead becomes a customer, and you can use it to learn significant insights into the new customers’ satisfaction with the sales process. Delay it for a few days or weeks, and you can learn more about both satisfaction with the product and Net Promoter Score.

A Tool to Enhance Customer Relationships

At its core, a successful CRM helps your company both automate its business processes and improve its relationships with current and potential customers. Microsoft’s Voice of the Customer Add-On, as it turns out, accomplishes both. After an initial installation, you can begin to take advantage of the many benefits that this simple integration can bring to your marketing and sales efforts.