OK, so you’re running an online store and despite what you might think about customer service not being as vital on the web: its even more so! A bad reputation can easily destroy an ecommerce business very quickly. In this guide I will be walking you through how to create a web form, embed it on your OpenCart site and gather the results.
So, why would you want to do this? Believe it or not you’re at a disadvantage by selling online; you can’t see your customers face-to-face and therefore it can be hard to judge when they aren’t happy with you. By the time you stumble across their bad review or dig out their lost email it is already too late!
By having a very clear (and very accessible) channel to connect you and your disgruntled customers you are opening up that communication which can take them from potential to customer to advocate.
To use this guide you will only need a Google Account, an OpenCart store and about fifteen minutes of your time to implement it.
Think About What Information You Want To Gather
Might seem obvious but you need to think about all the things your customers might want to say to you and give them the option. A few examples could be asking what they thought of the design, load speed, selection, advice, reviews, images or the user experience of your OpenCart store.
Create Your Google Drive Web Form
If you don’t already have a Google Account then sign yourself up and get on to Google Drive. Click the “Create” tab on the left and select the “Forms” option which drops down. Then it is a simple case of choosing your questions and ordering them, the Google Docs/Drive system is fairly intuitive and you can have text boxes, text areas, radio buttons, drop downs and more. Just try not to make your customers have to spend more than about two/three minutes tops on it or you run the risk of turning them away. Unless you’re offering them an incentive of course…
For those of you who are building longer forms, the software allows you to break it down with headings and page breaks. Just having a long line of questions is going to be off-putting for anyone so break it down a bit!
Creating Your Customer Service Feedback Page On OpenCart
OK, once you have your web form ready your going to need a place to hold it on your OpenCart site for customers to fill out. You can do this very easily by creating a new OpenCart Information page and copying in the source code which you can find on your form page by clicking “Embed” in the top right corner. I would recommend giving the SEO keyword value a term like “feedback” or something like it so people will very easily be able to get what the page is all about from the URL.
It gives a set width and height of the iframe but you can always adjust this to fit in with your OpenCart theme. Just get your iframe code which will look something like this:
Then just adjust the “width” and “height” values to fit in with your template. You can also adjust the form colour scheme by click on the “Theme” tab at the top left hand side.
Collect Your OpenCart Customer Feedback And Boost Relations
Now all you have to do is add in links here and there to tell your customers about it! Your web form is linked to a spreadsheet in Google Drive which will populate with your customers answers as they fill in your form on the web. The advantage of this is using Google Docs for your Customer Service Engagement is that you get all your answers in a handy spreadsheet; meaning that you can sort through, create graphs and easily spot patterns in your data.
I know many of you will ask whether this could be used with other forms which can be embed into a web page. The answer is of course, yes. But of all the form services I have tried, Google Docs is the easiest, feature-rich and versatile solution. You can also export the spreadsheet if you want to play with it in Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.
So, remember that you should be constantly engaging with your audience and offering different channels of communication for then to tell you what they do and don’t like about your OpenCart store. This isn’t just for fun or as an interesting talking point, it should be something which is integral to your Marketing Strategy and should be tracked and acted upon to constantly improve your customer’s experience when shopping with you.
If you want to see an example, or suggest an OpenCart topic for me talk about next, you can see one here.