Want the “contact us” on your website to automatically create leads in CRM? 

Want to allow customers to use a web form to submit cases or trouble tickets? 

Want employees to be able to enter referrals without needing a CRM license?

It has been possible to do all of these things for a while – but the available options always carried with them an additional cost, or complex setup. 

How to Add New Lead Records to Dynamics 365

Today I’ll show you how to use Office 365 Forms, Microsoft Flow, and Dynamics CRM to easily create a form that adds a new lead record to Dynamics 365. For my example, I’ll use leads – but this can work for cases or anything else in CRM too.

1. Create a Microsoft Form in Office 365

First, use Microsoft Forms to create a lead capture form. With Dynamics 365 open, click the “checkerboard” menu icon in the upper-left.  If you don’t see forms, then click the "All Apps" link at the bottom of the menu. Select "Forms."

It’s very easy to create a form, so I won’t go into detail here. Below you can see a simple form that I created so that attendees to a workshop my boss is presenting can request a copy of an eBook.

Since you’ll want others to be able to access your form, make sure you click the “Share” button and select “Anyone with the link can respond.”  Copy the link and paste it into OneNote – you’ll need it later.

By the way, if you want to embed the form in a web page, you can click the “embed” link to get embeddable code.

2. Check the Dynamics 365 CRM Fields

Does your Microsoft Form include some new fields that aren’t in Dynamics 365, yet? If so, you’ll need to edit the lead entity to add them. In most cases you shouldn’t need to do this, but it’s worth considering before you proceed to the next step.

3. Create the Flow

The bad news: this is the hard part.

The good news: it’s not that hard!

1. Use the Office 365 menu and navigate to flow.
2. Click the “Create from blank” button.
3. Use the search box to search for “Forms” and then click the “Microsoft Forms” icon.
4. Click the trigger “Microsoft Forms – When a new response is submitted”.
5. Now select the form that you created in step #1, above.
   
   
6. Click the “New step” button to … you guessed it … add a new step!
7. Now click the ellipses (the “…” on the right-side of the steps that can be added) and select “Add an Apply to each”.
8. Click in the field titled “Select an output from previous steps” and then select “List of response notifications”.
   
   
9. Click “Add an action” and search for, then click “Microsoft Forms” again.
10. Select “Microsoft Forms – Get response details” again.
11. For Form Id, you’ll choose the same form as before.
12. For Response Id, choose …you guessed it … Response Id.
    
    
13. Click “Add an action” again, and search for, then click “Dynamics 365”.
14. Select “Dynamics 365 – Create a new record (Preview)”.  Note that some features are in preview mode at the time of this writing. Adjust your selection if features are out of preview mode.
15. Organization Name – click the drop-down and select your organization (or, better yet, a sandbox where you are testing this).
16. Entity Name – for this exercise, choose Leads.
17. What you see next will vary depending upon how you have configured your lead form. Below I’ve shared a screen shot of how it looks in our CRM once I’m done with it. Note that, as you click in each field name, a list of fields from the Microsoft Form pops up, allowing easy mapping.  Note 2 that option set fields appear to still require that you know the value and not just the label that you want (so you’ll need to open Dynamics 365 to get those values).
    
    
18. Click to save the flow.
19. Click Done!

You’re cookin’ with gas! Here’s what your completed flow should look like.

Give it a try by filling out your form and checking CRM to see if the record was created.

The Missing Links

So, why wouldn’t you use this method to convert web leads to Dynamics 365 leads?  What do some of the other solutions add that this doesn’t?

• You can’t detect duplicates. Other solutions (such as ClickDimensions) can check to see if a lead with the same email address already exists and, if so, it doesn’t create a new record.
• You can’t link to an existing record. If you create a case using this method, the Microsoft Form can be linked to an existing account. A PowerApp could be a better solution for this.

Even with those limitations, the method described in this article is a very fast and easy way to create leads, cases and other records in Dynamics 365 by using Microsoft Forms and Microsoft Flow.  If you’re a small business, or you have a quick and dirty project, this approach can be a cost-effective solution.

Looking for other clever solutions to your Dynamics 365 challenges?  Contact C5 Insight, we’d love to hear from you!