Contact Form Best Practices

In this article, we'll close up some thoughts on the benefits of allowing easy customer feedback and then begin discussing why companies are hesitant, and why they should consider reducing that hesitancy. We've already discussed communicating with the customer and learning more about the customer experience, which you can read in the previous articles. Real Feedback Finally, as we've hinted at in the previous articles, not every email you receive is a rant.

Remember that companies spend thousands of dollars on customer satisfaction and market research, because those are often the only (and certainly one of the most effective) ways to learn more about how your company can improve. But it's not the only way. You may receive an email that brings up some excellent points, suggests a feature you can easily implement that will benefit customers, or simply praises some aspect of your service.

Every bit of data can be important, and while there is no substitute for real survey studies, providing an easy way for customers to contact you can potentially help your business more than you may even recognize.

So it's clear that customer feedback can be valuable, but not every company looks to gather this type of feedback. Many make it a considerable challenge to solicit this level of feedback, hiding their "Contact Us" form and finding other ways to avoid allowing customers to contact them. This does make some sense.

Perhaps the most important reason is that customers use these forms to ask very basic, common sense questions that they probably could have figured out on their own. Many companies, like eBay, use in an in depth FAQ sheet to try to avoid customer comments, and only allow the customer to contact the business if they can't find their answer on the FAQ forms. Other companies simply want to avoid the deluge of customer complaints that they expect from enraged, anonymous customers – something that is understandable, but as we discussed in the previous article, may not be advantageous.

Still others simply know that it takes a lot of time and effort to respond to all of these different customers. The latter two are true, but the value of the information that people email still makes feedback more valuable.

But what about the first concern – customers wasting your employee's time for questions that would have initially been easy to answer? We'll discuss this in the next article.