Landing Page Optimization & Web Design

In this post I am going to focus on the importance of surveys for software vendors offering their service as Saas (software as a service).

What’s the purpose of the survey? The purpose is to find out what your current customers or customers who are just having their free trial account think about your service, what they like and what they would like to add.

One thing you need to understand is that it is very likely there are minimum of 2-3 other vendors selling exactly the same or a similar product, and very likely your test trial visitors are test trailing 2-3 services at the same time. Also new competitors are entering the market every day improving what your software currently offers and making it easier to use, so beware.

But running a survey and/or allowing them to comment, like in the examples below, gives you the opportunity to find out what they like, and most importantly what they don’t. NOTE: in your survey ask you customers what competitor application they also like and why.

If you cannot afford to run a survey or want something more simplistic, then below is a good example, where this company used a pop up window.

Also don’t forget to have permanent links (preferably visible) so your customers can send you feedback at their leisure.

Don’t ignore the feedback:

This is from my own experience. I was test trailing 2 services. With one provider it took me 5-10 minutes to accomplish my task, with another and more established company, after 45 minutes I gave up and I didn’t accomplish the task. Obviously I choose the vendor I found easier to use.

But as I was trying to be nice and wanted to help, I sent an e-mail to the software vendor explaining that I wasn’t able to use their software and that the competition is easier to use. Their response: our customers are able to accomplish their task with their software within 5 minutes. So they made me feel like an idiot even though I was trying to help. By the way: I run usability testing at proimpact7.com so I should know a bit about users experience.

Anyway, what’s the moral of this story:

If with your survey or feedback you receive complaints about how difficult it was to use your software, run usability testing to clarify it and fix it. Usability testing is very affordable, and by spending only a few hundreds pounds or so, you will be able to uncover issues stopping people from using your software. In some cases this could save your company millions in lost revenues because you listened to people who effectively pay your salary.