A Simple Way to Start Collecting Customer and Staff Feedback (Using Tools You Probably Already Own)
06 Jul 2026
Published in: Member News
A practical guide for Black Country businesses on using Microsoft Forms.
If your business uses Microsoft 365, there is a good chance you already have a tool sitting unused that could save you time and money on customer surveys, staff feedback, and event sign-ups: Microsoft Forms.
Many of you will pay for separate survey tools, or worse, rely on email replies that are awkward to collate, when a straightforward alternative is already included in their existing Microsoft licence. Forms lets you build a survey, quiz, or poll in a few minutes, share it with a simple link, and see the results come in as a live chart, without any technical background needed.
Why it is worth five minutes of your time
The most common reason businesses do not use tools like this is not cost, since Forms is free with most Microsoft 365 plans, but simply not knowing it is there. Once you do, the uses are genuinely broad: customer satisfaction surveys after a job is complete, a quick staff pulse-check, event booking forms for a Chamber networking session, or even a simple quiz for onboarding new starters.
Anyone you send the form to can fill it in from their phone or laptop, in a browser, without needing a Microsoft account themselves. That matters if you are surveying customers rather than colleagues, since it removes the biggest barrier to getting responses.
Getting started, step by step
You do not need any technical background to get your first form live. Here is the short version:
- Go to forms.office.com and sign in with your Microsoft 365 account.
- Select New Form for a survey or poll, or New Quiz if you want to mark answers as correct or incorrect.
- Give it a title, then select Add ( + ) to start adding questions. Choice, text, and rating questions cover most use cases.
- Select Preview to check how it looks on both desktop and mobile before you send it anywhere.
- Select Collect responses to get a shareable link, a QR code for events, or an option to embed it on your website.
That is genuinely all it takes to get a working form in front of people. The rest is just refining your questions once you see how people respond, something our Microsoft 365 training courses can help with if you would like guidance beyond the basics.
A few tips that make the biggest difference
Having worked with plenty of local businesses on this, a handful of habits separate a form that gets completed from one that gets abandoned halfway through:
- Keep it short. Every extra question you mark as required increases the chance someone gives up.
- Use choice questions rather than open text wherever you can. They are quicker for the person answering and much easier for you to analyse afterwards.
- Check your sharing settings before sending anything to customers outside your organisation. It is the single most common reason a form "does not work" when it has actually been built correctly.
- Test it yourself first. Submit a practice response before sending it out properly.
If you want to go further, including tips on analysing your results and avoiding the mistakes that catch most beginners out, we have put together a fuller guide covering the whole process in more depth, which you can find here.
The bottom line
You do not need to buy new software or book expensive training to start collecting useful feedback from customers and staff. If your business already has Microsoft 365, the tool is sitting there, ready to use, and getting started takes less time than it took to read this article.
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