Get better feedback more often with suggestion forms

If you want to know how to serve your customers better, provide an online form as a way for them to offer their opinions, even if those opinions are grievances. Any feedback from a customer is valuable information for you to use to improve your product or services. Taking feedback to heart is a great way to improve your organisation's operations. 

There are many ways to solicit feedback for your business or other organisation. Complaint forms are good for giving people a place to air grievances and feedback forms are great for targeted feedback. In addition, you can use the digital equivalent of the suggestion box: an online suggestion form. 

Using suggestion forms can help you obtain the information you need to construct a better workplace culture and increase productivity. With an online suggestion box, you're providing an efficient way to streamline new ideas from customers, employees and stakeholders while providing them with an accessible way to provide their opinions. Suggestion forms are also a way to collect targeted feedback.  

Here’s why suggestion forms are so valuable:

It's always good practice to take a proactive approach to collecting feedback from employees, customers and stakeholders. Although providing a grievance form has its advantages, the purpose of an online suggestion form is to minimise the number of grievances. Keeping an open line of feedback offers insights into potential problems that may negatively affect your operation. Consistent feedback can help you solve issues as they arise, improving your overall operation. 

Here’s the takeaway for how suggestion forms are good for operational improvements:

While other feedback forms may be reactionary, by using a suggestion form, you’re able to discover issues before they can cause major problems. Analyse your workflow to seek out potential glitches that could cause significant challenges to your operation. With SurveyMonkey’s suggestion form template, you can customise your online suggestion box to target specific parts of your organisation’s workflow. It’s a forward approach to ensuring that your operation is working smoothly and modifying it to avoid any issues. 

Having an online suggestion box in place means that employees or customers can leave ideas whenever they come to mind. It might be challenging for business owners, managers and even human resource departments to have one-on-one conversations with every employee. Furthermore, being privy to the intricate workings of a business operation requires a constant flow of communication between customers, management and employees. An online suggestion box is a business tool that keeps customer relations and business-to-business communications lines open.

Employees and customers are two main sources of information that can help improve your business. Employees can offer ideas about improving your internal operations, whereas customers provide insight into your product or services. Both employee and customer suggestions provide insight into how well the other is working and whether and where it may need improvement. 

Employees and customers are the people on the front line of your business who can provide valuable feedback about how well your operation aligns with your company's mission statement. Your employees' and customers' feedback can also verify whether your business is on track in terms of following your vision statement. SurveyMonkey suggestion forms are one of the best ways to collect insights from your shareholders and to inform them of how well your business is performing. The platform also gives you the power to present your assessments and solutions in an organised way.   

Let’s look a little closer at the advantages of employee and customer suggestion forms. 

Making a suggestion form available to employees is a great way to give them a voice all the time. You can also customise an employee suggestion form template so that your employees' responses are anonymous. Anonymous employee insights can be an invaluable tool for assessing how they feel and can show areas of the business that may not be operating at their full potential. 

Furthermore, having a voice in the company increases employee engagement, so make sure you acknowledge suggestions and act on them whenever possible.

Customer suggestion forms are great for improving customer satisfaction. Making a suggestion form available can help you gain insights into what customers like or do not like about your product or service. Using these insights can help you retain existing business and win new customers.

Once you have a good suggestion form template, how do you customise it to obtain the best possible feedback for your market research? You need to start by ensuring that the form is easy to find and then provide the option to make your respondents' feedback anonymous. When it comes to constructing the form, make sure you provide a few questions with open-ended responses and then keep your alerts on so you're notified instantly. 

If you want open and honest feedback, make sure you give customers, and especially employees, the option to remain anonymous. Providing anonymity to responses is a great way to ensure you get honest feedback. If you have a secure feedback system, you'll get more accurate representations of how people feel.

Although there are many types of survey questions, they are generally split into those seeking open- and closed-ended responses. Closed-ended questions provide insights that are easier to access, whereas open-ended questions offer employees and customers the opportunity to speak freely. You will obtain the most meaningful responses by giving respondents an open-ended space to provide suggestions. 

Consider closed-ended questions for any basic information, such as company department or which store a customer visited. 

Making these suggestion forms easy to access is key to getting people to use them. If your employees have to make an effort to find the form, then you're less likely to receive a helpful amount of feedback. 

When looking for employee suggestions, you can place your online suggestion box on a company intranet and publicise it via company announcements. The intranet is great for employee feedback. For customers, you can publicise suggestion forms in-store with QR codes or on your website for all to use.  

It's best to get someone to assess customer and employee suggestion forms in real time to ensure that they are dealt with in a timely manner. These suggestions aren't going to be useful if they’re not being monitored. That’s why SurveyMonkey makes it easy to set up instant alerts when responses come in so you can take action immediately. 

Use a template if you need help with structuring your online suggestion form. Using existing templates takes much of the work out of creating a suggestion form. SurveyMonkey provides a variety of suggestion form templates where you can modify questions to suit the type of research you're looking for and customise it to your brand.  

Many feedback questions can be found in the SurveyMonkey question bank when you build your form, and many other templates exist for employee feedback and customer satisfaction. 

Search the SurveyMonkey suggestion form templates and question bank to create a suggestion form for your business. Select a plan that’s suitable for your research today.