Empower your employees to capture customer feedback in Microsoft Teams
Published May 11 2020 08:00 AM 20K Views
Microsoft

Use the insights for course correction & future innovation

 

 

Customer feedback is vital to ensure you and your organization are building products and services that meet the right need. It helps organizations build and refine product strategy and focus their energies on innovation that addresses a need or a challenge. The importance of customer feedback cannot be overstated and yet there aren’t many businesses that capture this feedback systematically.

 

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could capture actionable feedback in real time when the customer was in your store and understand what they liked or didn’t like? Would it be helpful if you could capture feedback from a passenger that rode the 5 PM train to get home or the person that walked into your store looking for a laptop but left without making a purchase? And who better to capture that feedback than your Firstline staff that works directly with your customers? Your Firstline workers – retail associates in your organization, service technicians, flight crew members, guest services etc. – are the backbone of your organization and the voice of your customer. With almost 80% of the global workforce comprised of Firstline workers, that is a huge untapped resource that can be leveraged to glean insights that can help grow your business.

 

The new Associate Insights App template for Microsoft Teams helps you empower your employees to capture customer opinion & sentiment quickly and securely. Built using our low-code/no-code Power Platform, this app offers an easy way for your Firstline staff to capture customer feedback. The collected data can be shared with your Executives & strategy teams for product or service improvements so you can focus on the right thing – delighting your customers and providing them with an exceptional experience.

 

As a Teams Admin, you can pin this app for everyone to Teams App bar using Setup policies or set it up to show as a Tab in your store Team. This gives your workers an easy access to the app. Built with your Firstline workers in mind, the app has a mobile friendly layout. Once they complete their customer transaction or at the end of their shift, the app allows them to capture key customer feedback quickly.

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The app uses SharePoint as the backend. While the out-of-box experience is more retail-store centric, it is easy to update the labels by updating the configuration list to fit other scenarios like capturing passenger feedback in a transportation industry or patient feedback for a healthcare organization. Since this is built using our low-code/no-code Power Platform, it lends itself well to branding or functional changes.

 

All feedback collected is stored in SharePoint lists which can be exported for further analysis. A Power BI dashboard, included as part of the solution, helps you slice and dice the data and gain valuable insights.

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The App draws its inspiration from the “Nightly Notes” App in use at 85+ Microsoft’s retail stores across US to capture customer feedback and sentiment. Built by Voice of Customer and Operations team at Microsoft Stores, it provides an opportunity to gain deep customer insights by tapping into the direct connection of 3500+ retail associates with our customers. A big shoutout to Gopal Ravi and Jeff Gvillo, from the Microsoft Store team, for bringing this app to life.

 

“Prior to this app, the process of capturing customer feedback was email-based. This app has allowed us to identify customer trends and sentiments in a scalable way and provide a feedback loop to our HQ team to act quickly.”

- Gopal Ravi, Business Analyst, Microsoft Store Team

 

Keep in mind that the process is only as good as the data collected. And remember to close the loop with your staff. The process works only if your staff knows that the feedback is being acted upon. So, work with your staff and train them appropriately on data collection and overcommunicate on insights collected and actions taken.

 

As with all the other app templates, this is an open-source production-ready app template that can be deployed as-is quickly or rebranded and adapted to meet your business needs easily.

 

Test drive the app template here and check out the full catalog of production ready app templates here.

 

We would love to hear how you plan to leverage this app within your organization and look forward to your feedback!

 

 

 

1 Comment
Steel Contributor

Is Microsoft actually practicing what you preach? Are you responding to customer feedback? UserVoice feels like a site whose purpose is not to provide feedback, but where users with concerns can be hidden so they are out of sight of potential customers.

Top UI request for over 3 years was for a compact chat mode. It's still open. We were told you were "working on it" for most of those three years. Users (including me) have prototyped compact chat layouts in hours. A fully-working version was created by another user in a single weekend using only CSS changes - no code required at all. We were told that designs had been made, that they had been tested, that things were progressing. And then you were forced to admit that in reality nothing had happened, and could we clarify what it was that we wanted? You then delivered a single change which was the precise opposite of what we wanted, and we were back to square 1. Worse, square 0.

This story is played out again and again. Compact mode. Options. Customization. Accessibility. Basic UI principles. All ignored. Multiple simple, useful, popular changes ignored over and over again. For years.

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‎Jan 26 2021 12:12 PM
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