New York, New York / USA - 11 11 2019: Logo of Microsoft on the iPad Air2 in on office desk

How do you handle your year-end customer surveys or employee training quizzes? What about webinar event registrations or team satisfaction surveys?

 

If you’re like many Rhode Island businesses, you most likely use a Word document that is emailed out to people. They have to fill it out and email it back. There’s most likely follow up involved, and inevitably some people will lose the original in their inbox and need it sent again.

 

Then once you get the surveys back, hours can be spent collating all those Word documents into a spreadsheet to analyze the answers.

 

There has to be a faster and better way, right? (There is!) But it’s probably expensive, isn’t it? (It’s not!).

 

There is a little-known app many companies haven’t discovered that can take your surveys and quizzes online and streamline the entire process.

 

Microsoft Forms is a Microsoft app that anyone can use for free with a Microsoft Account (which you can also get for free). The app allows you to:

 

  1. Easily build forms, surveys, and quizzes online (or draft from a template)
  2. Send out your cloud-hosted form via a link
  3. Have participants fill out their answers online on any device
  4. Gather all your form answers in real time and export them to Excel (already collated!)

Microsoft Forms Overview

 

Once you begin using Microsoft Forms, you’ll wonder why you ever did surveys any other way.

 

Here is an overview of how the app works and how you can use it to increase productivity and save you hours of time gathering customer, vendor, and employee feedback.

 

Creating Forms

 

When you first sign into the interface you can choose to create a new form or quiz. You can make one from scratch or use a pre-built template to save time.

 

All images are from Microsoft.

 

Form Building Interface: Question Type

 

The interface is designed to be easy to use. It gives you a choice of several different question styles you can use for your survey or quiz.

 

These include:

 

  • Multiple Choice
  • Text
  • Rating
  • Date
  • Ranking
  • Likert scale (i.e., how much do you agree with a statement)
  • Net Promoter Score®

 

These options allow you to create more professional looking forms than businesses can typically create in a Word document.

 

 

Form Sections

 

For particularly long surveys or employee quizzes, you can create different sections of questions. What this does is give someone a list of questions, and then they can click to continue to the next page to get to another section of questions.

 

Sections also allow you to add photos or videos to your survey.

 

Advanced Features

 

Forms is designed to be a simple app without too many confusing features, but you do have a couple of them that will give you more freedom in how you present your surveys.

 

  • Branching: You can send people to a specific section of a form if they designate a particular answer.

 

  • Question Sub Headers: If you need to give a little more explanation you can add a sub header to your question.

 

Themes for Styling

 

You can add some visual interest to your form by adding a background theme. Choose from some of the preset options within MS Forms or upload your own image, such as a company logo.

 

 

Sending Out Your Survey

 

Once your form is ready, sending it out is simple. You get several options to choose from:

 

  • Copy link to email or text
  • QR code
  • Embed in a webpage
  • Send via email through Forms
  • Send via Facebook or Twitter

 

Recipients will follow the link to your survey or quiz, which is hosted online, and can conveniently fill it out on their desktop or mobile device.

 

Responses Come In Automatically

 

The most time-saving feature of Microsoft Forms is the fact that responses come in automatically. You don’t have to save and open several different Word documents and then try to collate them all. It’s done for you by the app.

 

You can click a button to export your survey results to Excel.

 

 

Ideas for Using Microsoft Forms

 

As mentioned, there are multiple templates within Forms that you can use, and it’s also quite easy to create your own surveys from a blank.

 

Here are several ways that you can use the application to benefit your business activities:

 

  • Customer market survey
  • Event registration
  • Employee phishing awareness quiz
  • Annual customer satisfaction survey
  • Remote working sentiment survey
  • Training course evaluation
  • Company event sign-up
  • Onboarding training quiz
  • Employee cloud use survey

 

Here is an example of a customer feedback template in Forms.

 

 

One additional feature is the ability to send a template of your form to others that allows them to copy it and use it to send out their own survey. This can be helpful if you have a large organization with different departments that may all want to send out a similar employee survey.

Looking for More Productivity Help?

 

Onsite Techs of Rhode Island can help your business with time-saving solutions to improve your workflows and save you money.

 

Contact us today to schedule a consultation at 401-773-7766 or reach out online.

 

 

 

References linked to:

 

https://www.onsitetechsri.com/small-business-services/cloud-spam-filter

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-account-to-use-with-office-and-you-need-one-914e6610-2763-47ac-ab36-602a81068235#:~:text=Microsoft%20accounts,Windows%2C%20or%20the%20Microsoft%20Store.

 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/online-surveys-polls-quizzes

 

https://www.onsitetechsri.com/b/productivity-boosting-apps-that-integrate-with-microsoft-teams-

 

https://forms.microsoft.com

 

https://www.onsitetechsri.com/onsite-techs-ri-contact