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You need constructive customer feedback.  Where else to get it free but on your company website?  Starting tomorrow, add an easy to use and very visible section for visitors to make comments and add suggestions.

Do not restrict this incoming open input.  Allow your website visitors to write about what they wish.  Encourage them to complain, suggest ideas, offer buyer insight or any other comments positive or negative about the company.  Think about even offering gifts and incentives for the best ideas. Whatever you do, do not pass judgement, do not set boring restrictive rules and allow the contributor to submit their comments privately for your marketing/sales people to review.

What complaints do you want to know from your customers?

1. Complaints about your products and other feedback.  They will tell you how they do not like certain aspects about your products (i.e. colors, functionality, poor shelf life, bad taste, lack of options, etc.).  You will forward these great comments to your marketing people and tell them to answer these people with coupons, mailers or cash awards.  You will pick through hundreds of ideas, thank those contributors for their input, toss most of them out but in the end, you will run across a few that will actually help trigger your next $10M product launch.
2. Complaints about customer service.  The contributors will tell you about poor customer service or a problem returning products. You will forward these comments to the customer service manager to review and ensure someone called these people to see that they were satisfied.
3. Complaints about your website design and obvious flaws.  They will complain about the website and how hard it is to find something.  This you will forward to your highly paid webmaster and ask that they relook at the ease of use issue proclaimed. Ask your idea review group if they have the same problems.  Share these suggestions for improvement with your internal webmaster and request that he relook at his design to detect problems with usability.
4. Website warning #1:  Website activity – start to worry when no one comments.  If you do not get any comments, you have real problems.  Your firm is not interesting.  The website does not offer anything worth coming back to view or see updates.  Your visitors do not demonstrate any passion about what you do or those things you offer.  You are not offering the right or correct information that the customer wants and if he did visit you, he most likely will not be back or contact you to buy something from you because he was unimpressed by the website.
5. Website warning #2:  If you are not getting the traffic or interest promised, begin to change your website today; start again with new people.  Consider firing your webmaster and the website people you contracted if they are not constantly bugging you to add content.  They should be complaining that you are not giving them anything to advertise to potential visitors.  You should offer new and fresh ideas, product photos, helpful hints and updates to news stories about new products or services or something that the company is working on every day or every week.  Your website people need interesting and effective content to email out to potential clients on a regular basis.  If you have not heard from them other than to pay their bill, fire them.  You are not getting your money’s worth.
6. Complaints about your company in general.  Your contributors will complain and write about everything and you will thank them because they are helping your firm improve, free of charge.  Remember unsolicited comments from your customers are rare.  If you can get their true opinion about something free of charge, take it.  Most of the time customers never come back or do not wish to waste their time on a lousy company website with problems.  If you can generate real emotion and passions (i.e. Apple’s notoriously passionate market) among your customers, you have a great potential future because you have people extremely and genuinely interested in what you sell.  That does not happen often so take advantage of it.
7. Make it easy to complain.  Encourage the visitor to talk to you by making it easy to submit comments.  Answer each one quickly.  Be blunt and request honesty and do not allow any bias in your responses from the company.
8. To get answers, ask simple open questions.  Give examples of feedback subjects to provoke their thoughts:  In order to draw customer feedback, add a few questions to this area of your website such as,

• • “Tell us what we did wrong?”
  • “How did we screw up?”
  • “What should we do differently?”
  • “What did you not find you were looking for?”
  • “What do you want that we do not offer?  What are we missing you want to see?”
  • “Did you have problems navigating around on this website?”
  • “If we could change just one thing about our products, service or even the website, tell us what it would be.”

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