Technical Writing – Feedback Forms

One of the many tasks that face a technical writing professional is creating product or service feedback forms. While conceptually this seems easy, creating a form that delivers high quality responses that can be used to inform future development is often not as straightforward as it seems. Care teams, marketing, sales, developers themselves will all want information, and you’ll be left with the task of working out how to deliver it. Here are some simple ideas to help develop the ideal feedback form.
What’s it For?
Your form can’t be all things to all men, so you need to decide what aspect of your offering that you need your customers’ opinion on. The best designed surveys are short, simple and to the point, so instead of approaching from a “scattergun” perspective that tries to please everyone in the organisation, you’d be better off targeting specific areas.
So if the form goes in the product box, you’d want to ask about the look and feel of the design and whether it was easy to set up. On the other hand if it will be mailed to a customer 3 months after purchase, you’re going to be better off asking about the usability and long-term implementation. And if you send one out after a call to support, that should be focused on customer care and the service provided.
Keep it Short
People hate filling out forms, so ask no more than 3 or 4 questions, and keep all but one in a “tick box” or “grading” format. Free text is actually most useful for feedback, but it’s hard to quantify so balance the two for reporting purposes.
Keep it Honest
I once worked for a company that decided to send out a customer satisfaction survey following a somewhat (very) troubled launch, in order to mitigate feedback they decided that all opinions would range from “OK” to “Superb” with no lower score possible. In the end nearly 10,000 customers crossed out the options and many of them substituted rude words instead.
If you want people’s opinion you need to recognise that some of their responses are likely to be negative, even companies like Apple which have a very high level of customer satisfaction generally have their detractors. If you just want folks to say “you’re great!” then you can conclude the mutual back slapping in-house and stop bothering your clients for that.
Feedback forms are simple and straightforward, and when well designed, they can bring you valuable input for the next generation of your products and services. A good technical writing professional will use these strategies as part of their form design approach.