How National Instruments handles deluge of Web feedback emails

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How do you handle it when your Web site is so successful that your customer service email in-box is suddenly jam-packed with customer feedback? When I asked John Pasquarette, who handles Web marketing for the $400 million public company National Instruments, how much customer feedback they get about their excellent site, he laughed, "Too much, on anything and everything." I asked him how they handle the influx. His reply is useful for anyone in the same situation:

We have a simplified workflow to handle Web feedback. Our Webmaster email address feeds into a database so we can record and assign these questions/comments to the appropriate person on the Web team (or in the rest of the company) to handle the issue. We have a person who checks the Webmaster database multiple times a day to make sure we are aware of any issues regarding the site. All internal requests for new projects, edits, or corrections also feed into this same database - so we try to train the rest of the company to use the Webmaster submission forms to get their input into the Web team. That way, we have a record to track even the simplest corrections.

We recently redesigned the entire site. For about a month after the go-live, we had a live hotline available within the company for anyone who was working with a customer who was having trouble with finding something on the site. We wanted to make sure that anything that was not intuitive on the new site was directly handled as quickly as possible, and we wanted to make sure we addressed the customer's need as quickly as possible too.

We also had the new site available internally for about two weeks for all of our customer service people to get comfortable with before we rolled it out to the outside world. That was a big step in helping our employees help our customers get up to speed on the new site. We had very little problems with the new design."

BTW: If you'd like to learn more about NI's site, check out our Case Study from yesterday's issue of our sister-publication B2BMarketingBiz.

How National Instruments handles deluge of Web feedback emails

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