Over many years of conducting website research and online feedback programs, we have developed the following tenets to help guide thinking around website feedback best practices.

1. You can’t avoid getting website feedback! One way or another site visitors will give you feedback…the feedback may come in the form of an abandoned shopping cart, departing from your site and going to a competitor’s site or not referring your site to a friend or colleague.

2. Providing a website feedback mechanism on your site allows you to be “proactive”. Taking steps to reach out to website visitors to uncover issues enables you to take corrective action to fix problems, capture new ideas/suggestions and continuously enhance the user experience.

3. If you can’t quantify and measure website feedback, it becomes very difficult to use it to improve your website. A sound website feedback application will capture both quantitative metrics and qualitative comments, suggestions and ideas from visitors. Ideally, the system will also benchmark your results versus industry averages to give you the broadest possible perspective on the competitiveness of your website.

4. Giving website visitors a way to provide you with feedback promotes a dialogue with customers, prospects, employees and others that visit your site. Instead of having your website simply be an online product ad, proactively asking site visitors for their feedback, ideas, suggestions generates a 2-way communication with customers, prospects and others using your website.

5. Having a website feedback application on your site will differentiate your website from the competition. Many sites today are “reactive” in how they capture visitor feedback as evidenced by a myriad of FAQ links or a contact form deeply buried in an obscure location of the site to discourage or inhibit communication.

Colin Wahl, CEO Client Opinions, Inc.