Fresh

Your users.  They have opinions about a lot of things.  They probably have opinions about your site and what’s on it.  What’s the best way to collect those opinions in order make your site better?  The easier it is for your users to tell you what they think, the better. Here are a few ways for your users to give feedback painlessly.

“Was this helpful?”

In a situation where you want to help the user find an answer to a question, or learn how to do something with your product or service, you can ask them directly: “Was this helpful?”  or “Did this answer your question?”  Allowing the user to also leave a comment along with their “Yes/No” answer (most likely “no” if they are frustrated enough to leave a comment) might give you some insight into what they were looking for and how you can improve the content itself, or the search algorithm to better help answer their question in the future. But the “Yes/No” buttons alone, along with a good look at your help documentation search logs, might be enough to show where you may have dropped the ball in your documentation.

Some sites will even display the number or percentage of people who found the answer helpful. However it’s important that you actually do something about unhelpful content rather than let it continuously collect more “no” votes. You don’t want to give the impression that you’re ignoring the feedback the users are taking the time to give.

Feedback Forum Tools

If you want to get feedback from your users on the functionality of your site – if you want them to let you know if anything’s broken, or what they would like to see in the future – you could go the old school route and put up a simple contact form. Enter name, email, a bit of text, and send.  That’s usually the end of the story, and not very satisfying for the user when they don’t know if you even got the message, let alone whether you will act on it.  That’s where Get Satisfaction and other user engagement tools come into play.

Get Satisfaction (and others such as User Voice) helps you integrate community-powered feedback into your site.  Users can not only submit problems and feature suggestions, but they can see what others have submitted and converse directly with those other users and with you (and/or your support person/team). Users can “vote” for issues or features which lets you know which problems are most prevalent and which features are most wanted. With an active support community involving the site support team and other users, the people using their site will feel more confident that what they are saying will be heard and acknowledged.

Social Network as Feedback Tool

If you don’t want to dive in with a big platform like Get Satisfaction, a much simpler way to engage users for feedback is through Twitter.  Monitor mentions of your site or business and see what people are saying about you. Are they frustrated? Confused? Happy? Impressed?  Have a human being man your company’s Twitter account (no automated replies, please) and send thoughtful replies offering help or giving thanks.  Comcast generally has a reputation for horrible customer service, but they really impressed users by making use of Twitter to track down users having problems and providing them with help (or at least consolation).

Making use of user feedback will help you provide the best quality of information to your users, and the best overall site experience.  The best way to get good feedback is to make it easy for your users to provide it to you.  Whether you have something integrated in your site (“was this helpful?” questions and feedback forms), or you go to where your users are (on Twitter), the most important thing is to open up the line of communication so ideas and feedback can flow freely.