Contact Form Feedback Value

Almost every company with a website has an option to contact company representatives. If there is a bug, or a question about using a service, or a customer service complaint, it is in the company's best interests to try to provide some type of feedback, comment or question option.

But most websites also make that contact option extremely difficult to find. Why? Because the reality is that customers are a little crazy, and because of the anonymity of the Internet, they tend to leave very hateful, long winded, arguably useless comments and rants that presumably neither help your business nor are very entertaining to read.

Yet if you think about it further, you'll realize that it may be in your company's best interests to try to make contacting your company much easier, and that there may even be a variety of different benefits to creating an easily accessible customer feedback option.

Employees and business owners take a great deal of pride in their products services, and reading an email where someone rants about their experience with numerous expletives written at a 1 st grade reading level is not very pleasant. But unpleasant is certainly not the same thing as useless, and these feedback avenues may provide benefits that your company hasn't considered. Some of these include: Understanding the Customer Lens We often discuss how important it is to develop a customer mindset within your company and really imagine what it is like to be a customer.

While these rants may not have a great deal of value, there may be hidden information within the rants that can help you develop your own customer satisfaction ideas further. Let's use an example: Say you have one of the fastest shipping speeds in the industry, offering 2 day shipping at an affordable price.

But every once in a while you receive a hate filled email from a customer that is angry their product didn't arrive as promised. You find that all of these customers made their orders at 11:59 at night on a Monday and expected it to reach them in "2 days" by Wednesday – an impossible task since the item cannot even be truly shipped until Tuesday. The customer is in the wrong, but now you know that customers can be upset over this issue, and you can create code in your program that notifies buyers when their item will arrive before they make their purchase, to reduce problems with miscommunication.

You've learned something about the customer experience through this hate filled email, providing your company with value. We'll continue this topic in the next article.