An irritated customer who finds no easy way to complain usually does not complain; they just stop coming back. A clear complaints and suggestions form does not prevent problems, but it lets you hear about them while you can still fix them.
What the international standard says
ISO 10002 is the international guideline for handling complaints in organizations. Among its principles: customers should know how to complain, the way to do it should be easy to reach, each complaint should get a prompt response, and the complainant's details should be kept confidential. Each of these turns into a simple decision in the form's design.
The questions
- Is this a complaint or a suggestion?
- What is it about? Service, product, staff, website or app, with an “Other” option.
- The details: what happened, when and where.
- A photo, optional; a picture of the receipt or the product saves a lot of back-and-forth.
- Name and phone, both optional, for whoever wants a reply.
Why are contact details optional?
Requiring a name makes some people back out, especially when the complaint is about a member of staff. Keep identity optional, and say plainly in the field's description that the name and number are for anyone who wants a reply. More complaints will reach you, and those who want a follow-up will leave their number.
Once a message arrives
- Reply to anyone who left a number as soon as you can, even just “we got your message and we are on it”.
- Group messages by topic to see where the same problem keeps coming back.
- Tell customers what changed because of their feedback; it encourages others to write.
- In Formza the messages land in the responses table, where you can filter and export them, or send them to Google Sheets to track each one's status.
Keep the way to it short
A form link does nothing if nobody finds it. Put it in your site's footer and your social profiles, and print its QR code on the receipt or at the till. With the conversational layout, one question per step, it is easy to fill in on a phone.
The “Complaint or suggestion form” template comes with these questions in Arabic and English. Try it, then copy it and adjust the topics to your business.
Sources
- ISO 10002:2018 — Quality management — Customer satisfaction — Guidelines for complaints handling in organizations (iso.org).
