For your business to succeed, you need to gather the right data to provide you with the best insights into your products and services—and then use this data to make improvements. This includes decisions on how your upcoming product or service will be released to meet your customers’ needs. One common way of gathering this kind of data is by creating surveys and sending them to your target audience.
Surveys are one of the best ways to get information about how customers feel about your products or services. There are various tools you can use to build surveys some of which are free and others that require a subscription. For businesses using Office 365, you can use the Microsoft 365 Forms Application, to conduct surveys.
With Microsoft Forms, you can design quizzes and surveys to get an insight into how your clients feel about your products and business and share their opinions or thoughts.
It also comes with an analytics tool that helps you analyze the various responses that are posted.
Office 365 plans that come with the Microsoft 360 survey tool
Almost every Microsoft 365 plan includes Microsoft Forms as part of the subscription. Some of these plans include Office 365 Enterprise1, 2, and 3; Office 365 Business Essentials, and the Office 365 Business Premium plan. Even, if you have a personal Microsoft account, you can access the Microsoft 365 survey app and build your own surveys.
Recently Microsoft released the most recent and advanced version of MS Office Forms known as ‘Microsoft Forms Pro’. These solutions come with additional features such as animated workflows, integration with Dynamics 365, application of company branding ad so on. All these features are aimed at enhancing the overall quality of the survey.
How to record data with Microsoft 365 forms?
The Office 365 survey forms you create will determine how data will be recorded and quantified. Microsoft Forms is usually the quickest solution you can use for data input, to create a template document, request services, begin a workflow, and so on. Different platforms have come up with interfaces similar to Microsoft forms, but none of these solutions come close to MS Office Forms in terms of efficiency and simplicity. This is why the Microsoft 360 survey tool is one of the most popular survey solutions globally.
How the Microsoft 360 survey tool works
Initially, the office 365 Microsoft Forms app was developed to be used as an education app. While it is still used for this purpose (and doing well I might add), the app is also doing extremely well in other applications. A Microsoft Form has a very simple design that allows for a more straightforward way of collecting data.
The Microsoft 365 Forms application can be used for both internal and external purposes. Internally, you can collect information about ongoing projects, campaigns, or tasks. Externally, you can design questionnaires that can enable you to obtain feedback on your products or services. The responses you obtain can be exported to tools like Excel for analysis for additional insights into the data.
How to create a Microsoft form?
We have seen that using Microsoft forms is one of the best ways you can understand how your customers and various stakeholders feel about your products or services depending on the opinions they share. So, how can you create these forms?
Step 1. The first step to creating a Microsoft Form is opening your web browser. From there visit forms.microsoft.com to get started.
Step 2. In order to access the Microsoft 365 forms app, you must first sign in to your Microsoft account or create a new one if you don’t have one.
Step 3. As soon as you sign in to your account, the ‘My Forms’ icon will appear on the homepage. Click here and select the ‘New form’ option to begin the process of creating a form.
Step 4. Once you have opened a new form, you will be required to give it a name depending on the type of survey or questionnaire you need to run. The form also comes with a subtitle field that you can fill in with any additional details you may have about the survey. However, it is not a must to complete the subtitle part. If you choose to complete it, you can provide information that can help your audience understand why you are carrying out the survey. The name field will take a maximum of 90 characters and the subtitle part should not exceed 1000 characters.
Step 5. This is where you add questions to your newly created form. Doing so is simple as you navigate to the ‘Add Question’ option and select it. From there you can choose one of the many question formats from the options available for your survey. The questions can be multiple choice, text format, rating questions, and so on. You will select the option that best suits your survey.
Step 6. Once you have added all the questions you want, this is the time you go through the survey to make sure you did not miss anything and everything is the way you wanted it to be. To do this, click on the ‘Preview’ option at the top of the page.
Step 7. Today people may use various devices so access to the internet such as phones and most of your audience probably uses these devices. It is important to check out how your survey will appear on browsers across various devices. For instance, you can click on the ‘Mobile’ button on the top right to see what your survey looks like on mobile browsers. Once you are happy that your format has not been affected, you can then proceed to submit the survey.
Reports after a survey
A survey will be no good if you cannot analyze the responses of your audience. The Office 365 Microsoft Forms app enables you to analyze individual survey responses as well as summary survey details with the aid of its in-built analytics tools. You can even export the data to Excel if you want to conduct some additional analysis.
To see the survey summary, open the form and select the ‘Responses’ option and a summary of the survey will pop up.
The Microsoft Forms tool is simple to use, easily accessible from various browsers, allows you to gather a limitless number of responses, and allows easy sharing of the created forms making it the best tool for conducting a survey.