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? Would it be helpful if you could capture feedback from a passenger on the 5 PM train home, or the person who walked into your store looking for a laptop but left without making a purchase? And who better to capture that feedback than your frontline staff who work directly with your customers?
Your frontline workers — retail associates, service technicians, flight crew members, guest services staff — are the backbone of your organization and the voice of your customer. With almost 80% of the global workforce comprised of frontline workers, that is a huge untapped resource that can be leveraged to glean insights that help grow your business.
The Associate Insights App template for Microsoft Teams helps you empower your employees to capture customer opinion and sentiment quickly and securely. Built using Microsoft’s low-code/no-code Power Platform, this app offers an easy way for your frontline staff to capture customer feedback. The collected data can be shared with your executives and 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 the Teams app bar using Setup policies or set it up to show as a tab in your store Team. This gives your workers easy access to the app. Built with frontline 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.
The app uses SharePoint as the backend. While the out-of-box experience is more retail-store centric, it’s easy to update the labels by modifying the configuration list to fit other scenarios — like capturing passenger feedback in transportation or patient feedback for a healthcare organization. Since this is built on Microsoft’s 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.
The app draws its inspiration from the “Nightly Notes” App in use at 85+ Microsoft retail stores across the US to capture customer feedback and sentiment. Built by the 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 3,500+ retail associates with customers.
“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. Train them appropriately on data collection and overcommunicate on insights collected and actions taken.
As with all other Teams 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.
Test drive the app template on GitHub and check out the full catalog of production-ready app templates at Microsoft Learn. Ready to implement this or other Teams solutions for your organization? Contact WheelHouse IT today.
