How APi Utilised PowerApps To Gain Better Customer Feedback

APi Group inc. is a global market leading business services provider of life safety and energy speciality services in over 500 locations across the world, with 40 independent construction and infrastructure companies in its consortium. 

As a large organisation, the APi Group wanted to be able to gain insights into how companies that part of the group are performing in the eyes of the customer. They wanted to engage these customers in a discussion collate their feedback, and use it to further develop their services. Crucially, they also wanted to own this process, maintaining and developing the components themselves, negating the need for costly additional third-party subscriptions and maximising current ROI. 

Thanks to Microsoft funding, APi were able to bring in Changing Social. Our expertise helped open up possibilities that the organisation thought were out of reach without a significantly more substantial investment.  

APi already had experience with Microsoft’s Power Apps and Power Automate, which made the discussions and engagement straightforward – Changing Social was there to introduce aspects of the power platform that had not been used before.  

The initial challenge revolved around introducing APi to a new part of the power platform – PowerApps Portals and the use of underlying data source in data verse – and providing a solution that would not only contain all of the data, but also replicate it in SharePoint so it could be more widely accessible to people in the organisation. 

There were also some technical challenges surrounding the portal and how configure it. Using PowerApps Portals, we provided solutions to help the APi Group customise the feedback experience in alignment with their goals and organisational branding. 

As well, the security teams at APi pushed back which caused delays in the implementation as we had to ensure the portal was in the right environment based on security permissions. Once this was overcome, the process ran quite quickly.  

APi asked Changing Social to support the building out of different PowerApps via the Power Platform. The first was to help employees to log a request that would be sent to customers via mobile. The other was a light touch administration app to enable APi to check up on survey results and follow up on any unreturned forms.  

The survey itself was created in the PowerApps portal as a web page which could be customised depending on what was needed, and customers could then fill it in. The resulting data was then shared to SharePoint lists, so all members of APi could gain valuable insights from the customer feedback and use it to adapt and make improvements.  

We helped set up specific parameters to identify the customer, as well as a workflow to automatically send the request for feedback out with either the link or template for the survey. We also ensured that the right security was put into place via Power Automate to ensure APi could clearly identify who the customer was when sending out the feedback forms. 

Overall, it took around 5 months to implement the new processes and going forward, APi now have a completely self-contained and owned end to end process for feedback, including data source, which they can customise.