Yahoo's Goal of Getting Customer Feedback

Surveys are the best way to get customer feedback. They provide you with real, analyzable data from a random sample that represents a greater population, and that allows you to confidently make business decisions and move your company forward. While surveys represent the best form of feedback, they are certainly not the only form. Comment boxes, customer help lines, one on one interview – all of these provide a medium to receive customer feedback, and all of these mediums are useful in their own way.

If you check Yahoo mail from an iPhone or other mobile device, you're taken to a made-for-mobile web page that allows you to easily check your email without the small text and advertisements you see on the traditional mail website. While this webpage represents just a small fraction of the rest of the Yahoo platform, it is still an aspect of the Yahoo service. So it was interesting to see a recent addition to the mobile email page – a feedback box.

This box was added a few days ago, and Yahoo even had a small pop up notification that explained how to get there and encouraged its use. All you need to do is click on the profile button, and you're taken to three options: Sign Out Options Send Feedback Unlike many other websites, the feedback option is easy to find and easy to use, and anyone that has feedback to send is likely to have no trouble doing so. Yahoo has taken this very small portion of their revenue – one that comparatively few people even use – and has decided it was worth adding a feedback box and encouraging customer feedback.

They are likely going to receive numerous crazy responses and feedback about bugs that have nothing to do with their service (like a slow internet connection) but they've still decided it was worth soliciting feedback from their users. While it's not as valuable as a survey, Yahoo has shown considerable dedication to customer satisfaction with this one change alone. Whether they use the information sent via feedback forms is unknown, but the willingness to accept customer feedback from every product they offer is something that all companies need to consider.

Once you've collected that feedback, you can turn it into research using the Survey Methods software system, and ultimately give yourself a better chance of competing for business in today's economy.