With a well-designed enquiry form you can answer more of your customers’ questions more effectively and efficiently.

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 stop the phones from ringing, but it may reduce the number of calls and provide a more manageable way of responding. Plus, you also have greater control over what information the customer gives you, and how to then process it

The benefit for your customers is that it gives them another way of contacting you, 24 hours a day 7 days a week without waiting on hold. The other benefit with web forms is the data captured within the form can integrate into a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. All details captured in the form will be email to you as a record but can also be stored in the CRM. This becomes a powerful communication tool, because now you can create email campaigns and extract your clients data form one central location. Depending on the data being stored within the CRM you can then target your campaigns specifically to groups, associations, gender, age as an example. This provides benefits to both parties; the customer doesn’t feel like they are getting spammed because the information they receive relates to them and for the business this can increase sales, brand awareness, customers, service.

But 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.

General enquiry form

If you have a look at our contact form this is a good starting point. This is a basic form capturing base level information. To a user this is quick and doesn’t require a lot of input.

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 near 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. Also with some scripting the form can have validation requiring the user to meet certain requirements before the form can be sent.

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.

Forms can be as simple as this one or very complex. With complex or large web forms you need to ask yourself would I sit down and spend 15min to ½ hour filling out a form. If the answer is ‘no’ then it’s more than likely that your customers won’t either. But in saying this there are some smarts out there today that you can use to make the process not so daunting. Break the form up into small forms so that is becomes a step through process, an example of this is when you make a purchase online, the process form checkout to payment processing is multiples form linked. You follow the steps to complete the task.  

Other things to consider with web forms;

Where to put the form on your site

The best place generally is under a Contact Us section. You can then provide all the contact details in one place and then link to your enquiry form (or several forms if you wish to have one for each type of enquiry).

Other information to include

If you have many enquiries about the same thing you may like to include some Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) or help pages and provide a link to these at the top of the form. If you intend on asking your customers for personal information to help you help them, you should provide a link to security and privacy information.

Responding to the customer

It goes without saying that before you implement a form, you must have a good process and available resources to respond in a timely and efficient way. So ask yourself if staff have the appropriate skills and time to respond.

Also remember to design a response page, which appears after the form is submitted letting the customer their enquiry has been received and will be responded to. It’s also essential that any automatic email responses are clear and easy to understand.

If you have a networked content management system (CMS)

These days, most CMSes come with form functionality and with a bit of training you or your web manager should be able to create a form without any hassle. The system should include a way of managing the responses, such as sending an email or saving the responses in the back-end of the CMS. Speak to your CMS supplier about your requirements.

Where to from here?

Once you have decided that your business will benefit from an enquiry form, then the best person to create the initial design concept is you, as you know your business best. Once you know what you want, approach your web company to help with the build and implementation. Once it’s all done, you can sit back and enjoy the quiet hum of the computer without the buzz of the phone interrupting you… quite so often.