Unique Ways to Use Customer Service Surveys

Written by Gail on 23 November 2008

On the Internet, proper customer service is almost more important than offline. That’s because you’re almost never working with a customer directly. They are faceless people you will most likely never meet. You don’t have a customer service department for them to call or walk into to report a problem. Most likely, you’re using eMail, a contact form or a support desk. These support issues are handled with some form of automation.

With automation comes a very unique set of problems. If you’re not providing the correct response to a customer issue, it will escalate. People need to feel you are talking directly to them, so even if you have canned responses, you need to find a way to personalize each and every one.

Unfortunately, many people become braver online than they are in the offline world. That’s because they don’t have to face you. They leave spam or other nasty comments on your blog and very demanding requests for a refund. Don’t you just hate it when those refund requests come in and they don’t have the necessary information required to process the refund?

Use Surveys and Polls to Monitor Website Visitors

Just as you need to survey your customers that made a purchase, you should consider using an online survey tool to discover if your website visitors are finding what they were searching for on your site.

The Internet has a diverse pool of people developing digital products, selling affiliate products, building membership lists, Squidoo Lenses, Hub Pages, Blogs and much more. In order to discover if you are giving visitors what they were searching for, you should be considering using customer and visitor surveys. You may be getting traffic to your site, but they won’t do you any good if they were not looking for what you gave them.

You may think your site is visitor friendly… they may not! The only way to find out how to improve the visitor experience is by asking them.

Improving the Customer Experience

Successful web sites and pages are continually tracked for traffic, clicks through to links and monetization. If you’re not earning, it’s time to start surveying and polling your visitors.

Once you setup a survey or poll on your site, make sure it’s collecting feedback. If not, you may need to move it to a more prominent place, like above the fold so visitors see it right away. Sometimes an exit poll is effective when gathering specific information about the visitor’s experience.

You can do a Google search on “poll software” and “survey software.” You’ll find many different options for website survey creators available from services you access online to software that downloads to your computer.

Here’s a FREE poll creator I developed that’s very easy to use. This is an executable to install the software on your computer – just follow the directions and be sure to check the box to create a desktop icon: