Get Feedback From Your Users - Approvals vs. Email with Options

what's up guys if you know me welcome back if you don't my name is Matt and today we're going to talk about asking for feedback from your employees and automating responses to do that frequently there are two ways to do it in power automate we're going to cover both of them and talk about the pros and cons of each so the first step we're going to show you is going into Power automate and using the steps send an email with options email is still a really great tool for communication and everybody uses it day to day and we want to give a couple examples if you're just looking to get a response from someone back that's not important about the tracking data behind who responded to it or what time they responded you just want to customize a response option and get the answer really quickly from them and maybe store in a list somewhere since we do want to actually record some of these responses today in a list I have my SharePoint list set up there's a company outing ideas list here that users could go into and submit a company outing at their business so we're going to go ahead and add that you see that there's a title for maybe the suggestion or the outing idea the day that they want it to happen and maybe a cost for that so this is just a suggestion for a company outing maybe from an employee or somebody at the organization so when a user puts in these things we can just say that we want to go to the zoo it's going to cost some money that's not really important how much any of that's not a proponent of the request and we're going to pick a date and that's going to kick off our first flow so I'm going to show you the flow next in power automate so I have a flow in here called company event responses and again these flows have the same exact trigger so when an item is created in a list in this case so once a user has submitted an idea to this list it kicks off an email with options you see it populates there right in my email already but this is how it's configured here so it's going to be sent to me it's got a subject line that I can put in some data from the list or the suggestion that the User submitted and it has user options so it can be a basic approve or deny if they're looking for an approval type situation but I can add as much as I want here as far as options go again if it's uh if it needs to go to a holding pattern or a parking lot type scenario and I don't know exactly what call to make about this suggestion you can do a variety of feedback by just putting additional options in here that will show up in that email and you can really customize the body of this email put in more content from the list if the user provided something like the cost of the event or the date really anything that exists in that list can be injected into the email here to help the user respond to that request once the email has been sent we can actually create an item in a response list that I also have added to the SharePoint list so depending on the response and the option that that user selects I can actually tie that to the title or another field in that response list and update that item with how the response was recorded and this is essentially where our recorded responses go so we can take a quick look at this email here in my Outlook this is my custom email that I created some of the formatting will look different between Outlook application and the browser of Outlook online it looks really good in the browser application I think but here are my options to approve or deny their links that will update the rest of the flow and the flow is waiting for me to respond to this email so I think it waits up to about 30 days so again if you're not really worried about these getting left in people's inboxes and they're going to respond to them very quickly this shouldn't be an issue since you have a month to respond to them so once I've responded and I approve of this idea at the business I actually get a little thank you message and a confirmation that the response has been registered somewhere if we go back into the response list here on my SharePoint site we can see that the zoo outing has just been approved so the response itself doesn't get tracked anywhere in Outlook or anything like that it actually needs to be configured in the flow to put it somewhere back into SharePoint or another connection so in fact there is a template in here that's named after the send email with options that you could search for in power automate or you feel free to pause the video at any time and recreate any of these steps if you need to so the second option that we want to show in this video to accomplish getting feedback from users is using approvals within power automate we can do this by using the start and wait for approval step in the flow this step is pretty beefed up and comes in handy when you want to track and monitor approvals that you've been sent or completed or assigned if your request needs to go to more than one person or in a certain sequence or order it can be really useful for that if your responders want to include certain comments when they're replying to these requests they can do that or maybe reassign it to somebody else and you can trust your users to manage their own approval task assignments in Office 365 then this is a really good step to use so a little bit more about the approval connector this step is actually creating a formalized approval that lives in your Office 365 environment it's an actual thing and not just an email to respond to so we're going to use the same setup as before we have two lists which are the company outing ideas list and the response list that the response will end up getting stored into so we're just going to throw another idea in here and we'll kick off another trigger for this flow it's configured almost the exact same way or at least has the same flow structure as the send an email with options approval it starts with the same trigger when an item is created that's connected to our list for ideas and then we actually search for an approvals step called start and wait for unapproval it's very similar to the send an email with options but it's actually creating an approval that will end up sending a similar type of email we have a couple different approval types here the one I have set up is everyone must approve which means anybody that's in the assigned to field has to respond to this before it goes on to the next step there's a variety of options you can select here you can just say no matter how many people are in the assigned to field I just want the first response that I get just to expedite the process or custom responses again these are defaulted to approve or deny but you could actually add other response types into that but I recommend starting out of the box and doing simple yes no approved deny when you uh decide to start using this approval step so you can assign it to as many people as you need to again either in a group or in a sequenced order and you can modify the email body or the details of the approval that will end up being in the email the same way as we did with the previous steps so the title links to the item certain data about the item can all go in this approval item one thing I want to point out here is that there is a requester field that is optional on the approval step so if you want to indicate who is sending this approval you will be able to put in a certain name there if it's an individual or a group and same as before the final step we have the outcome data of that approval going back into the new item or the new response item that will add to the responses list along with the rest of the data so let's look at what this approval email looks like in our Outlook I have a new one here from the one we just submitted it's a little bit larger than the other one but you can see all that custom email data is in there from the item so I can review this item I can check the the link to the item and I can choose to either approve or reject it and these are a little bit more dynamic in the email so I can add my own comments those are optional if I want to whether or not I'm approving or rejecting it so we'll go ahead and approve this one and it records when we when it was submitted and just some of the comments from my approval response so you're probably wondering where is this approval in Office 365 we can go and take a look at that now even though you are answering the approval from the email it actually something is going on behind the scenes so we have an approvals tab up here in the power automate world so whether or not you're actually authoring your own flows you do have an approvals list where all of these things reside and you can approve or reject them from right within power automate here it has some useful tabs to say what's outstanding or what do I need to respond to right now based off of the approvals that have been sent to me I can look at approvals that I've sent to other people if I'm creating the flows and asking for feedback or responses and then a history also just to see what I've responded to over the course of my time at the company so if you're not using power automate there's another way you can get to your approvals you can actually go to teams and within teams you can add the app for approvals it's not automatically they're on the sidebar but you can click to activate it to add it to your sidebar and that app will show you the rest of their approvals and a little bit cleaner away a little bit more colorful along with some other approvals that you Styles you may be sent so clearly there's a pretty a big difference between the email responses and starting approval steps in power automate whereas sending an email doesn't really create anything tangible in the environment it's just a way for users to Quick get an email and respond to it but if they lose that email if they forget about it it's really hard to go look for in Outlook whereas the start and wait for an approval gives them an actual task we find that a lot of users that end up using approvals in the Office 365 space love that they have all that content and data already there and tracked so they don't really need to worry about it and SharePoint so it just depends on whether you prefer to use lists or approvals right out of the box to monitor this type of content so all of this is adding up to the ultimate question when do we use one over the other so you guys have already seen that each email looks a little bit different in Outlook has the same type of content depending on how you configure it but they have different looks and feels so that's the first thing you've seen that you can do a lot more with the response with the approval step than you can with the sending email with options step sending an email with options step is a lot more limiting because the users can only respond to it directly from that email whereas in the the approval step the users can go to a variety of places to go find those and answer them all right well that's all I have to show you guys today I'm going to sign off thanks for tuning in put in any questions or comments you have down below don't forget to subscribe and like and follow us for more content

Channel: Bulb Digital

Views: 7,018

Keywords: Approvals in power automate, Employee feedback, Power automate tutorial, feedback, power automate, power automate approval

Id: 8zRdDqHxgE0

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 10 2022