Welly Lee is the author of Working with Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice, we got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about her experience of writing with Packt.
Q: What is/are your specialist tech area(s)?
Welly: Customer experience and customer feedback management
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Welly: I love to travel. A few years ago, I made a pact to myself to visit 50 countries before my 50th birthday and have used my vacation to travel around the world every time I can. Then came 2020 pandemic, when the world was in lockdown, I received an offer to write a book. I have been working on Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice for a few years and during the process, talked to many organizations about their challenges and best practices for listening in to their customers. I thought to spend the time I would otherwise use to travel to write everything I know about customer feedback management to help other organizations to start with their customer experience journey.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Welly: I have been working as business and technology consultants for 10 years before joining Microsoft and developing software products for 15 years. The last 5 years have been focusing on customer relationship management and customer feedback management area. The book draws from my experience working with businesses and building the product described in the book
Q. Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Welly: The products which are the subject of this book (Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice) are constantly evolving. It has been challenging to write about products with moving target. The book draft requires multiple revision and rewrite up until the last moment to make sure I present the latest and best available information to the readers.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Welly: James Phillips, Microsoft president for Digital Transformation Platform group, wrote in the foreword about data and AI driving the business transformation. Customer feedback is a key data for understanding customers and building AI for business decisions. In the near future, customer feedback solution would be more deeply integrated as part of business process and becomes standard data input to the AI based capabilities in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution.
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Welly: Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice have been growing significantly in the last few years and many organizations start using the products. I am leading the product team who built the product. This book contents is based on information directly from people who design and built the product. You will get the first hand information on how and why the product is designed.
Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?
Welly: Readers would be empowered to be able to use Microsoft Forms and Customer Voice to start collecting feedback from employees and customers.
Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Welly: Be brave to try. The book includes steps to use related technology such as Power Automate and Power BI. If you are new to those technologies, it may appear intimidating, but I encourage you to follow along. I described step-by-step instruction on how to use the product and you will be amazed how easy to build automation and dashboard report on your own (without needing to wait for IT to do it for you).
Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
Welly: https://aka.ms/CustomerVoice
Q. Do you belong to any tech community groups?
Welly: https://aka.ms/CustomerVoiceForum
Q. Would you like to share your social handles? If so, please share.
Welly: Welly Lee (@wellyslee) / Twitter
You can find Welly’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here
