Improve customer enquiries with web forms

• Fiona Wood
• 13 November 2007
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Online enquiry forms offer you and your staff a more efficient way of responding to and tracking the flow of customer enquiries.

A web enquiry channel won’t put the phone to sleep, but it may reduce the number of calls and provide a more manageable way of responding at a time that suits you. Plus, you have greater control over what information the customer gives you, and how to then process it at your end.

The benefit for your customers is that it gives them another way of contacting you, 24 hours a day without waiting on hold.

Before you invest time or money into developing a web channel to serve your customers, ask yourself the following:

• Do you get lots of calls for the same thing?
• When somebody emails you do they often leave out important information?
• Do you have the capacity to manage the possible increase in online enquiries?
• Would you like a way to direct enquiries to the appropriate person or area?
• Would your customers appreciate having this additional contact channel?
• Are there potential cost savings or additional revenue opportunities?

If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, then you may be ready to design a form.

First, you’ll need to carefully plan what questions to ask, where to put the form and how to manage the responses.

We will look at some existing examples of web forms from basic to expert to demonstrate the possibilities.

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Basic: simple form

Example website: Bakers Delight (click on the link to open the site in a new window or tab)

Bakers Delight uses a basic form that is well presented with a simple drop-down menu to select the type of feedback desired.

Why choose the basic option?

• You only have one contact point for your business and you want all inquiries to be directed through that same contact
• You only need to capture a small amount of information
• You want to offer a general contact point right under your company address and phone number

Just the facts

A simple enquiry form based on the structure of most emails may not look like much, but it does allow people to immediately create an email without firing up their email account, especially handy if they’ve logged on using someone else’s computer.

With a basic form like this, the responses are emailed to a designated email address.

The email received is formatted with each field set by you followed by the customer’s response.

While you can certainly direct the form to an individual’s email address it’s more than likely you will want to set up a generic email account such as enquiries@ yourcompany.com.au.

You can then give several people access to this email account and establish a process for responding to and tracking each enquiry.

To implement:

Most internet service providers (ISPs) provide this basic level of form-to-email functionality as part of your web hosting fee. If you know how to create a form in HTML, you can do this yourself and ask your ISP what to put in the form action value. If you don’t know how to create a form in HTML, then your ISP can probably help out, or any in-house or contracted HTML developer will generally know how to do this.

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Intermediate: customised enquiry form

Example website: ANZ (click on the link to open the site in a new window or tab)

The online enquiry form at the ANZ website asks for a preferred contact method and time as well as asking for an enquiry subject for sorting purposes.

Why choose the intermediate option?

• Your business receives many enquiries
• You receive varied enquiries that you want to direct to certain people or areas
• You want to provide several different automated responses

Remove double handling

A customised enquiry form guides your customers by asking them to identify the area of your business they’re interested in from a drop-down menu.

Help your customers focus their enquiry into specific issue or question types. For example, if a customer nominates ‘product interest’ their form will be sent to the sales department, but when they select ‘product help’ their form is sent to the helpdesk or after sales team.

By channelling customer questions, you should avoid double handling of emails – making your team more responsible and responsive.

If you want to examine the full gamut of questions, set up your form so that all questions are captured in a .csv file (comma separated values), which can open in Excel.

To improve convenience for your customers, include basic fields such as their preferred method and time of contact. Other fields could include order number/s and customer number/s.

Remember a golden rule of good customer service: ask the customer for information that’s genuinely necessary for you to help them. Don't waste their time with questions they see no value in.

To implement:

Ask a web programmer to set this up. When briefing the programmer, have your form design finalised and include where you wish the responses to be emailed to, and whether you would like a csv file generated.

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Expert: Customer relationship management

Example website: Dell (click on the link to open the site in a new window or tab)

Dell has a sophisticated enquiry system where a customer can check on the status of an order. This would integrate with their back-end ordering system.

Why CHOOSE the expert option?

• You have a large customer base
• You have several staff answering large numbers of enquiries every day
• You may want to track and sort customer questions to build a contact history
• You need to efficiently process large numbers of orders

Serious customer relationship management systems rely on carefully managed databases including customer profiles, inventory, order tracking and transactions.

This means you’ll need to filter the data captured from your web forms so it integrates effectively with your existing databases.

An order tracking system, for example, should be able to let a customer know straight away where their order is in the fulfilment and delivery process.

Very specific information is often required to properly identify the customer or order they are inquiring about. In these cases, be sure to stick to the principle of keeping it as simple and as easy to complete as possible.