If you call Customer Voice still Forms Pro or not, have you ever looked into the Databases sitting behind Customer Voice?
Forms vs Customer Voice
Table of Contents
In this post I will refer to the Forms as Forms and Customer Voice as what we used to know as Forms Pro.
One of the strong points of Customer Voice above Forms is that we can get to the database that holds the forms/surveys that we create in Customer Voice. Especially when you work with Power Automate it is so much better to query Dataverse rather then having to only get the responses from the When a response is submitted trigger. when I use Power Automate I don’t think twice about using Customer Voice instead of Forms.
And I’ve not even mentioned the so much better branching option in Customer Voice.
Looking at the database we have quite a few tables.
- Customer Voice Alert
- Customer Voice alert rule
- Customer Voice file response
- Customer Voice localized survey email template
- Customer Voice project
- Customer Voice satisfaction metric
- Customer Voice survey
- Customer Voice survey email template
- Customer Voice survey invite
- Customer Voice survey question
- Customer Voice survey question response
- Customer Voice survey reminder
- Customer Voice survey response
- Customer Voice unsubscribed recipient
Ok, that is a lot of tables. But there is no branching table…
Customer Voice Project
The first table to look at is Customer Voice Project. This table holds the project that bundles multiple forms together. This can also be a good reason too look at Customer Voice rather than Forms as it is so much easier to bundle your forms.
This is also where you can find relationships like Owning Team. How often do people want a team to own a form rather than a specific user?
Customer Voice Survey
In the Customer Voice Survey Table we find the base information like the name of the survey and the description
Customer Voice survey question
In the Customer Voice survey questions we find the details on the questions themselves. Especially within flows this table is worth a lot. Quite a few times in the last few years I’ve been asked to generate PDF reports from the responses that look like the original forms. And without the questions you only get ugly numbers related to answers. what the questions are is something that you would have to hard code into the reports.
Using the Dataverse tables is so much better. all the question lines are directly available in a single table.
When you use this table in a Canvas app note that there are two spaces between survey and questions
It’s a bit of an ugly, but I guess this is difficult to fix.
When I looked through this table I was hoping to find something related to the branching.
But unfortunately, I couldn’t find the branching details here.
Customer Voice survey question responses
So far I’ve looked at the data that you create when you create a survey. The Customer Voice survey question responses has all the details related to the answers that are given when people fill in your forms/survey.
Being able to find the question related to the answers is so good, compared to the basic Forms solution when you use the free version.
Some more thoughts …
Have you ever thought of using the data created by customer voice in Power Apps? Create your Power App that displays all the questions within an app rather than a form? Using the look and feel that you want? Well you could!
Or maybe we could take this thought a bit further and use Model-Driven apps to present all your survey data.
Or how about using Power BI? Imagine the reports you could generate from the responses submitted by your clients?
This is a great article Pieter. Thanks so much. I have a question. I have updated on of my survey questions in “Customer Voice survey question” dataverese table using a canvas Power Apps, but the changes I made are not getting reflected in the actual survey in https://customervoice.microsoft.com. Do you think I need to do anything extra for this to happen?
Updating the survey through a power app is a nice idea. But I don’t think that that would be a supported way of doing things. It would potentially avoid licensing users.
Thanks so much Pieter for your reply. I think, then I misundertood from your sub heading in this article – “Some more thoughts …” Have you ever thought of using the data created by customer voice in Power Apps? Create your Power App that displays all the questions within an app rather than a form? Using the look and feel that you want? Well you could!
In that comment I was more thinking about using the data submitted rather than creating survey configurations there.