When thinking about where to get started with the Power Platform, one very simple and highly valuable scenario is survey and feedback data capture.
- Leveraging Microsoft Forms we can quickly build a survey to capture employee feedback
- Using Power Automate, we can automatically capture each response and add it to a database
- We can also use Power Automate to notify key individuals regarding responses, and even specific response types
- Power BI can be used to analyze and visualize response data that as been added to the data repository
- Power BI can also leverage sentiment analysis through Azure Cognitive Services for deeper analytics
- Power Apps can be used as a more customized form entry app, as a management tool, or even as a survey results dissemination tool to isolate restricted viewing of certain responses
Pulling all of this together is simple so let us dig in. We can start the process by building a Microsoft Form directly in Teams:
We can build the form directly in Teams and this provides a communal location for co-creation of the form:
With the form completed we need to build something to collect response data and there are many options for this based on requirements
- Excel document – Simplest but least versatile
- SharePoint list – Quick and easy to build but lacks massive scale and cannot form relationships for data
- Azure or on-premises SQL databases – Extremely robust but requires infrastructure and deep technical knowledge
- Power Platforms Common Data Service – As versatile as SQL, can leverage data relationships, no infrastructure requirements, does require learning how to use CDS
Regardless of the data repository, the process for capturing responses remains the same. We can create a Power Automate Flow with the trigger “When a response is submitted”
Our Flow will get the details from each response, and then create a new item in the data repository for each response. We created a SharePoint list where each SharePoint column aligns to each question on the survey. From there we build our Flow:
We then use dynamic content from the Flow’s “Get response details” step to populate what will be added to the SharePoint item
With just those steps completed we can save the Flow and see responses start to flow into SharePoint. When someone submits a response in the form, we will get a new row item in our data repository.
If you want to get email address\usernames instead of anonymous for the submitting person, we can change the settings on the Form to require authentication
In Power Automate, we can then send out notifications to Teams and post in channels regarding responses coming in
Which results in
We can elaborate on this process by adding urgent notifications to negative responses and so much more.
Since we have all the responses Flow-ing (Pun intended) into a single data repository, we can build a quick Power BI dashboard and connect it to the data source (In this case a SharePoint list)
Can’t find or connect to the specific data repository you are using? Try Power BI desktop as there are more options available for connecting to data
When using Power BI desktop, once you get your data, simply “Publish” to your Power BI workspace. We can use the same Teams workspace where we are building our Form
Once we have the Survey dataset, we can visualize the data in Power BI by building a new report with visuals aligned to each question, entire survey responses or anything else we want to visualize
Once we save the report, we can view the data and share it with others
Since Power BI is connected to the data repository, as responses Flow in (2nd Flow pun), the report will update automatically based on the Power BI data refresh schedule, which we can change here
We can also embed the Power BI report directly in Teams for easy viewing by the team
Leveraging Azure Cognitive services, we can take the analytics of the data further with sentiment analysis. We can also add additional visuals such as word clouds following instructions here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/text-analytics/tutorials/tutorial-power-bi-key-phrases
At this point we can sit back and watch our handy work in action.
Or we can also build a more custom frontend or management back end for the surveys\feedback using Power Apps:
This provides unlimited control of the look\feel\customization\experience and data validation of survey\response data capture
Using Power Apps low code\no code tooling we can easily customize the survey experience and once complete, once again, embed the now Power App in Teams
Lastly, if we use Power Apps to capture the data, then Power Apps is directly editing the data source, so we don’t need to have Power Automate Flows to move responses data into the data repository. We may want a simple Flow then just for the notifications.
Using a different trigger, we can just notify the team when the data repository has a new item created.
And there you have it! Leveraging the Power Platform, Forms, and Teams to capture and analyze feedback and survey data!
Microsoft