Several people have recently asked me if they could use VOC to send surveys to application users. The answer to that question is “yes, sort of.”

When you send a non-anonymous survey invitation, you copy an HTML snippet to a Dynamics 365 email template, and when the system generates the email, it replaces the snippet with a client-specific URL that includes the ID of the customer. That’s how Voice of the Customer knows which customer record to link the response.

These invitation templates only work with contact and account records, not users or other records. If you try to put an invitation snippet in an email template sent to users, you will fail (trust me, I’ve tried).

Workaround 1

One workaround is the possible solution I suggested at the end of tip 951. Create contacts for system users, then create a lookup field for contact on the user record, linking the user to his or her contact record.

This then creates a trail you can follow with workflow or other system processes to send a survey invitation email to the contact related to a system user. For example, say you want to automatically survey the requesting user when an internal case is closed, you could have a workflow fire on the resolution of the case and trigger an email send to the originating user’s related contact record.

Workaround 2

Another school of thought is don’t use Voice of the Customer to survey users. It’s called Voice of the Customer for a reason–it’s designed to get customer satisfaction feedback from external customers. VOC fills an important gap by providing an interface that external parties can use to provide feedback into Dynamics 365. Users, by definition, have access to Dynamics 365, and any of the D365 user interfaces can be used for capturing input from users. Instead of using VOC for user surveys, you can use the feedback entity, create a custom user feedback entity, or use a dialog (yeah, they are going away at some point in the future, but still very viable for the foreseeable future). With any of these approaches, you can still send an invitation link to the feedback form via a workflow and you can also create additional relationships to other entities (which is not currently available via Voice of the Customer).