Comments on: Creative Places to Ask for Feedback

By: Jacob - abc

Jacob - abc — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:27:46 +0000

We have a page on our site asking customers to report broken links.

http://www.window-cleaning-supply.com/fake

No one’s reported any yet.

By: Julie - Fine Tooth Comb

Julie - Fine Tooth Comb — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:29:50 +0000

Talking Ava has a good point. What about offering a coupon code for those who complete the survey? That might be a good incentive.

By: Talking Ava

Talking Ava — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 05:48:33 +0000

These are great collection of feedback forms! Although with everyone in a hurry, and unless the products/business did something terribly wrong, I wonder how many actually participates in site surveys?

By: Kimberly Cole

Kimberly Cole — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 23:25:49 +0000

I agree that surveys allow you to organize your feedback more easily, but I feel like you’re missing out on a lot of comments if you do it that way. Like you said, people get discouraged. In the William Sonoma survey, for example, right off the bat if people don’t feel like their feedback fits into one of the categories in the ‘Choose a topic for your comment…” scroll down bar, they’re likely to give up.

By: Rick

Rick — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 22:50:59 +0000

Interesting read. A few things to point out that are pretty major differences between most surveys and opt-in feedback:

1. Invitation surveys most commonly randomly sample the invitees, or focus on specific paths. A lot of visitors never get the invite, leaving them with no opportunity to dialogue with the brand and/or site (whether or not they have a problem).

2. As you pointed out, there’s a pretty substantial difference in the customer experience between some of the examples you show above and a 30+ question survey.

3. Page-specific feedback maps the comments and ratings on a 1-1 basis with the actual page. That’s where it becomes actionable. I’m not anti-survey, but they can be VERY hard to use to pinpoint problems on specific pages without a bunch of additional tools (and research). Placing the feedback icon (floating/embedded/etc – however you do it) on every page lets anyone submit feedback where they had a problem.

4. Many of the examples you showed above do not remove the user from the page where they were “doing something”, and most don’t take more than a few seconds to complete and submit. That’s a major factor when considering conversion funnels and the like.

By: Christian, Baymard Institute

Christian, Baymard Institute — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:12:21 +0000

Great idea to ask for feedback on 404 pages, as Jessica also mentions.
But if you do have a survey, doing it like the williams-sonoma.com (/opinionlab) example above with a small scrollbar within the page isn’t the best idea from a usability perspective, as user often have a hard time figuring these partial scrollbars out.

Of cause collecting the feedback is only half of the task, listening to it and action upon it is even more important.

By: Maksym Pshennikov

Maksym Pshennikov — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:52:37 +0000

To get feedback I suggest to use BetaEasy – customer feedback and beta management service. It allows to add “Feedback” button on the website and gather all customers feedback in one place. Also this service can be easily integrated with any website/software/web application regardless of programming language and shopping cart type. And it’s free! Link: http://www.betaeasy.com

To create surveys SurveyGizmo is the best one (imho).

By: Jessica Ojeda

Jessica Ojeda — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 11:38:46 +0000

wow! I love the idea of putting a contact form on the 404 pages to ask what the person was looking for. I’m going to try to do that right now. Thank you for your great advice.

Also, I originally thought that just having my email address was enough if somebody wanted to get in contact with since I run a small online business. But when I added REAL contact forms, the amount of times people had something to say suddenly increased by about 4 fold! So, if you don’t have even just a regular contact form, you are missing out on what your potential customers have to say.