Lightning Tools Lightning Forms vs. Qualaroo Insights

We've used lightning forms on literally dozens of our SharePoint sites now and it's just excellent, especially because it doesn't interfere with our ability to governance and administer the sites

It makes it easy to move from design to development. We collect highly targeted feedback without organizing a meeting to discuss every iteration, saving time and effort. The comments are open-ended and unorganized. But with survey Nudges, we can ask additional questions about design UI/UX.

• Simple user interface - users of the forms intuitively aware of how/where to input information. This is in part due to being able to show or hide different questions or areas of the form, and making them required or not, based on previous answers.
• Low/simple code - building complex forms with automation and multiple dependencies or lookups is relatively easy once you get started. You have the power of JavaScript to use and do some quite clever things if you can get to grips with it - a lot of solutions are only a Google away.
• As it is based on SharePoint, it integrates perfectly with the rest of the M365 suite. Things like PowerAutomate enhance its functionality even further.

• It helped to develop a more focused approach towards customer discovery.
• We can create any survey in minutes and deploy it to collect feedback to understand customers’ expectations and fears. We then channel this data into our optimization strategies.
• We receive hundreds of responses each day, and Qualaroo reduces the feedback analysis time with its inbuilt AI-based analytical tool, helping us close the feedback loop quickly.

• The styling of the form can sometimes be slightly awkward to use depending on what you're looking to do. For instance, if I was looking to highlight fields that users have missed (left empty), I would need to set up a validation for that question and then set a style for that particular field for when it is invalid. When you have a large and complex form with lots of dependencies, this is awkward.
• Support for complex and niche issues is slightly lacking in my experience. I submitted a helpdesk ticket for help with a strange issue I couldn't figure out, which took several weeks to get a response to. Because it is niche, it's more difficult to find an answer by searching the internet. Luckily, knowing there is likely to always be a fix if you find the right place/use the right formula, I manage to resolve the issue with some trial and error.
• It is disappointing that Lightning Forms does not integrate with the MS Lists app. Having the ability to access the form through the list app would add in a lot of useful functionality, including a better experience for users when taking photos to add as attachments.

• They could expand their templates to cover more scenarios (although it has been a long time since we needed their templates - we develop our own questionnaires tailored to our clients’ geographies).
• On the other hand, there are way too many options in the targeting section, but we have gotten used to skipping past them while creating surveys. Perhaps that’s more for companies who target wide audiences. We only collect client feedback, so we don’t really use ‘targeting’ as such.

The micro-survey landscape is evolving very quickly and it seems like there is a new entrant almost every month. I'm generally happy with Qualaroo (we got what we expected) and I like the folks on the Qualaroo team (support is fast and friendly and rarely needed), but there haven't been real improvements to the platform in the last eight months. We will be re-assessing Qualaroo's features and price versus other competitors when our current contract is up.

It is very user friendly both to me who is building the content (with little background knowledge of coding etc., other than what I have picked up from using products like PowerAutomate, PowerBI, a bit of html etc.) and to end users of varying levels of IT proficiency. This has been extremely important as we have used the forms to make relatively large process changes, and need to have our users on board and seeing that it is actually easier than it was before.

We know the value of consumer feedback and believe that users actually want to be a part of the process. With Qualaroo, we have learnt that people like answering certain types of questions, especially if you ask them something about themselves — like what they want most and their motivations behind purchases — they can’t resist typing a response.

I've never experienced an outage where Qualaroo was unavailable. I don't think I've even gotten notices for scheduled down/maintenance time. The platform is always available.

Our developers complain that Qualaroo is just one of several similar site add-ons that slow down our site performance. I'm skeptical that Qualaroo has any measurable impact on our page load times, but don't have any hard evidence either way. The Qualaroo admin interface and reporting mechanisms are all quick and reliable.

Some support has been okay, but in one instance of a fairly complex problem, the support team were not able to provide me with a fix within a few weeks, before I was able to find a workaround myself.

I have only contacted customer support twice, and they have managed to solve my problem every time. There is a slight waiting time between the query and resolution, but other than that I don’t need to contact them time and again to understand things since their help section is sufficient most of the time.

Not available for the Pro edition.

Qualaroo doesn't offer full-blown online training, at least not that I've used or needed. The online help documentation is adequate and Qualaroo-sponsored webinars are informative.

Have your technical team set up the "Identify" feature right out of the gate - this is a "fire and forget" feature. Once it's set up, your data is much more valuable. Also, if there are very specific kinds of page targeting you might imagine doing, have a technical person set up and test at least 2-3 examples of using Qualaroo's regular expression features to achieve this targeting. With a couple good examples in place to work from, it becomes much easier to create your own regular expressions for custom targeting.

We were using Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists and PowerAutomate to attempt to do much of what we are currently doing. Functionality is very limited in comparison. The ability to make questions required based on previous answers was a massive improvement from normal SharePoint List forms and has greatly improved the quality of data. Also just the very visual display and customisation is much better.

We decided to go with Qualaroo because it offered the ability to capture UTM data, as well as sent event information back to Google Analytics. In addition, the services Qualaroo provided was just right - not too many bells and whistles at a fair price point. Overall, Qualaroo was the right fit for us.

Incentivized

Qualaroo's simplicity has its down sides when it comes to scaling. Managing multiple nudges across multiple domains, at least in the Pro edition, is challenging. The active nudges all appear as a single list on the admin home page, automatically grouped by domains. Archived nudges are on a separate tab. It would be helpful to have a folder system to organize nudges. Also, once you have multiple active nudges that are targeted to different sections of your site using regular expressions, it's difficult to keep track of what is appearing where. It's also difficult, if not impossible, to figure out where you may have competing nudges. And there's no ability to assign reporting or configuration access to other members of your team. The Pro edition has a single login, which must be shared if you have multiple staff who want to use Qualaroo.

• We changed the process by which site colleagues report repairs on behalf of customers. Instead of emailing them into a shared inbox, they now report them using a lightning form. We have seen a great improvement in the time taken for our team to log the repair issue from the time is arrives with them.
• We anticipate that streamlining our void property reletting process by using a SharePoint kanban board view with lightning forms (providing a single platform for all things void) will reduce avoidable days vacant and therefore reduce our void loss.

• Qualaroo gives us the insights we need to answer specific questions, connect with our customers, and in general feed ideation during early stages of product discovery.
• The speed with which our product R&D teams can go from 0 to getting usable data is highly valuable to us. We operate and move quickly, so our tools must be self-serve and easy to use in order to be viably added to our team’s development process. Qualaroo is like that, so we have been sticking with it. In less than 5 minutes, teams can go from having almost entirely opinion-backed ideas to having ones that are data-backed by targeted customer feedback. This step in the discovery process makes us more efficient and increases the chance that the experiments we run will yield a positive impact.
• Understanding and anticipating customer needs is the backbone of our product development strategy. All our employees are encouraged to identify and address these needs in some way as part of their jobs. We have an in-house feedback collection process that also runs on Qualaroo to see what our collaborative minds can think of.