How Not to Do Website Feedback

Collecting together website feedback is an important way to determine customer engagement with your site, but it can also be implemented poorly. Some of the more common methods to collect feedback are by including feedback links on your site, doing visitor intercepts, or in-page surveys. No matter which method, it should give you the information you need to provide engaging content, and great products or services.

Before you gather feedback on your website, read this first. If you do it wrong, it may result in wasted time and effort.

1. Timing is essential. Have you ever visited a website only to be presented with a customer survey in the first five seconds? Don’t do that. Not only will your visitors get annoyed, they may just fill out the survey and give false or wrong information. How can you expect a customer to provide feedback when they have only seen your site for a few seconds? Instead, add your survey pop-up to the bottom of the page.

2. Having extremely long surveys. Ten minutes may not seem like a lot of time to the web guru who spends all day online, but your average consumer is not going to want to spend ten minutes of their valuable time doing someone else’s job for them. Instead, let them know the survey will take thirty seconds—that’s time that most of us are willing to invest in giving our opinions.

3. Not offering an incentive. Usually it’s the more valuable customers who are willing to fill out an online survey. They may have visited your site several times in one month. Today may be the day that they decide to fill it out. Once they have done so, a coupon or offer may be of benefit to them. They choose whether to accept or not. But do give your best customers something for their time.

4. Discarding the surveys, without ever reading them. Sure, your day is busy and full of things to do. Be sure to assign time on a weekly basis to read through the online surveys. If a customer has provided their email address, shoot them off an email saying that you appreciate their business. Let them know that you value their feedback, and perhaps you may even give them a telephone call if you feel that you need to collect more information about a particular sales experience.

5. Don’t berate your employees. Remember that there are easy customers, and there are difficult ones. People will seek the negative. They may have complained about one of your employees. Be sure to ask their side of things, and offer support, not punishment. Remember that unhappy employees are also likely to provide employee feedback survey on your website.

A website survey may be one of the cheapest, yet most effective ways to open up a direct channel to your customers. You can immediately start incorporating their suggestions into your business, so they can see that you are serious about providing the best products and services possible.

10 reasons why it’s important to conduct employee feedback surveys

Surveys provide a way to tap into the thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of a workforce. This can provide a detailed picture of the current state of a company. Ultimately, these insights can be used as the foundation for improving organizations.

Below are 10 ways that employee feedback surveys can be used to enhance organizations:

1. Assess employee engagement levels: Employee surveys can help companies determine the engagement levels of their workforce. Higher engagement equates to higher overall performance.

2. Assess employee satisfaction levels: Surveys can provide insight into satisfaction with: company policies, jobs, compensations/benefits, policies, and many other factors. A company can better understand employees’ perceptions and opinions regarding these issues and utilize them for future strategic planning.

3. Evaluate the working environment: With the appropriate questionnaire design, employee surveys can gauge employee perceptions of their specific working environment, the departmental environment, and even the organizational environment as a whole.

4. Understand reasons behind employee turnover: Employee exit surveys can help gain insight into why employees leave. This can help improve employee retention, particularly if reasons for leaving relate to  company policies, management and structures.

5. Build trust with employees: Conducting (and acting) employee surveys demonstrate that management is receptive to the feedback and opinions of its workforce. This can help boost employee confidence, morale, and trust in the organization.

6. Identify what motivates your employees: There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to employee motivation; employees are motivated by different factors including, but not limited to: working environment, career development, and compensations/benefits. Surveys can provide insight into what motivates different employees to ultimately improve organizational performance.

7. Providing feedback for decision-making: Employee surveys can encourage employees to provide feedback that can improve their respective working environments and organizations at large. This can facilitate feelings of empowerment, despite positions held within the organization.

8. Evaluate how one’s company is doing internally: Oftentimes, management may not be aware of processes, policy changes, and new initiatives are received by its staff. Surveys can provide such insight to management for purposes of further improvement.

9. Helps generate useful ideas: In most cases, the best ideas are generated from within. With a survey, employees are given the opportunity to voice their ideas for further vetting and evaluation by management.

10. Provide insights into management performance: In many cases, organizational leaders may operate without having a realistic and/or holistic sense of their respective performance. 360 feedback survey provide a medium for employees, peers, and management to evaluate one’s performance from their respective positions.