Advanced Contact Form Strategies

The previous article series has all been about making contact forms as visible and easily accessible as possible. To recap, any type of feedback is useful feedback, even when the content of the email or contact itself isn't useful, and there are numerous advantages to allowing customers to contact you for any reason – including to lay into your company with expletives or to ask an easy/obvious question that is covered in the FAQ – because the simple act of allowing that type of customer contact has benefits of its own. Many customers will also contact you with feature requests, information about purchases, and other questions that could benefit your company, and you want all of these people to contact you – the harder you make it for them to find and use your contact forms, the more likely they avoid contacting you and either move their business or vent elsewhere.

Are there downsides? Certainly. You will need to hire someone – or multiple someones – to handle all of the feedback you receive.

You'll need to train them not only to respond to customer comments, but also to keep track of what might potentially be interesting feedback that could help your company improve. You'll need to integrate it into the research process, and you'll need to figure out how to successfully turn any and all emails into revenue. It's a considerable process.

But as we've discussed, feedback is always valuable. This is the one area where the customer is always right – even when they're wrong, they may be providing you with information that you would not have known any other way. If you didn't solicit feedback through contact forms or phone calls or survey research, the chances of your company ever learning this information becomes increasingly slim.

Numerous companies do everything in their power to avoid angry emails, a flood of silly/common sense questions, and customer service work. But generating feedback is always useful, and promoting your contact forms on your website and allowing anyone and everyone to contact you for any reason has some very high upside. If you really want to dedicate yourself to the customer, find ways to convince them to utilize these contact forms often. You'll find that over time you learn a great deal about their experience, and if you use trained employees to handle all of the emails you receive, your business will be better for it.