New Features. Faster to manage feedback. Easier to sort with tags.

It's easier to process customer feedback

We've moved the list of feedback options to the top right and added icons for the most common tasks.  They're always in the same place on the screen and there's a much crisper response when you click so you can now give your customers high speed responses.

This is how it used to look.  Everything's still available and we've made some changes to 'Useful' to make it more, er....useful.  (See section below).

Faster to 'mark complete'

When you're ready to mark feedback as actioned, just click on the solid bar at the top of the feedback symbol.  That will turn it green and mark it done.  If you click on one by mistake, just click again to change it back to 'To do'.

You can still click on the main body of the symbol for comments: to reply to a customer, record a note as a reminder to yourself or to let other people in your company know what you've done.

Customers are accustomed nowadays to getting a slow response or no response, so these features can help you shine.

Feedback details are clearer

We've simplifed the layout of feedback details and removed the tabs so now you can keep track of everything in one place.  Comments, links to follow-up actions, tags, replies...they're all together and they're easier to read.

What happened to 'Useful'?

The feedback symbols used to say 'Useful?' at the top, but we've replaced that with 'To do' and 'Done' to make it faster to keep track of where you're up to.  If you had marked any items as useful these will now be tagged and you can see them all grouped together by clicking on the tag's label icon.  Tags are a great way to sort feedback and actions into categories, which helps you identify problems and spot opportunities.

A sharper design for the feedback list

We've refreshed the design of the feedback list to make customer comments easier to read. You told us that some comments are quite long, so we've made them a standard height and added a 'read more' option.  It means we can fit more on the page so they're easier to scan.

Changes will be effective at around 08:15 GMT on Tuesday 22nd May 2012.

New Features: Improved surveys, new ratings widget and simpler configuration.

At 8:15 on Monday 20th February CustomerSure software will be unavailable for a few minutes while we upgrade to introduce new features.  If there are any changes to plan we will broadcast here and on our Twitter status channel (@CustomerSureNow).

Update: The upgrade is now complete. Thanks for your patience while we deployed the new version, we hope you like the new features:

An additional text question (woohoo - now there's two!)

It's still not many, we know, but that's deliberate because this isn't a market research survey, it's a satisfaction questionnaire.  And you can still add plenty of scored questions.  Our legendary 'lightning' surveys guarantee happy customers and high response rates.  We never hear complaints from customers about our satisfaction surveys being too short, but we do hear a lot of complaints that other people's are too long.  We recommend using one question for internal consumption ("What could we do to improve?") and one for marketing the good feedback in public ("How would you describe your experience overall?").  Or you could use them for what's good, what's bad, or...however you wish.

Each question can have public or private responses

Instead of choosing at the survey level, you can now choose this at the question level.  It means there is even greater flexibility in how you put survey results to work to guarantee both customer satisfaction and effective marketing of your performance.

Show customer ratings anywhere with the new Ratings Widget

This is available under the 'Admin' menu in 'Integration Options'.  You can include one or more ratings from your satisfaction survey results, and they can be from any combination of different surveys.

Simpler 'on/off' settings for optional tabs on public facing pages

These options are available under 'Settings' on the 'Customise' tab of your public facing pages.  (The customise tab appears when you view the pages as a logged in Admin or Operator).

Menu changes for faster access to surveys

The previous 'customer service' menu has been removed to improve clarity.  'Surveys' now have their own dedicated menu while settings for the optional public facing tabs are now under 'Admin'.

As ever, we'd love to receive your comments and feedback.  Feel free to get in touch...

New feature: filter feedback to a single survey

Since we launched multiple surveys many of you have been asking us for the abilty to filter the feedback stream to a single survey. We've just deployed this feature! Now when you select 'Survey feedback' from the filter list an additional survey list will show up.

Improvements to email deliverability and Getting Started Guide

We’ve made some changes to improve the delivery of emails from CustomerSure, reducing the (already low) chances of them being marked as spam and making sure that any replies go directly to the correct person.

You don’t need to take any action and most people won’t be affected by the changes.

The most common way to send out surveys is by copying the survey link into an email which you then send from your own email system.  Until now we have provided an alternative method which we hoped would make it even easier for people just getting started with CustomerSure but it led to a few problems which outweigh the benefits. 

If you send surveys by copying the link, you can carry on as normal and there is no change.  If you use the blue button like the one in the picture then instead of entering a list of email addresses into one of our forms, you will instead enter them into an email from your own email system that we pre-populate for you.

Along the way we’ve shortened the Getting Started Guide from four steps to three, making it even easier to get up and running with the business benefits of CustomerSure.

If you have any questions, please give us a call or drop us a line.

New features - colours and branding

We hope you like the changes, for details and instructions click here.

Internet Explorer - issue now resolved

We have resolved yesterday's problem regarding downloading CSV files in Internet Explorer. 

The problem was caused by IE refusing to store files downloaded directly over https (the secure version of http which CustomerSure requires).

We have implemented and tested a fix which permits IE to store these files, meaning our customers using Internet Explorer 7 and 8 are now able to download survey results again.

If you haven't tried downloading and analysing your survey results yet, you can find this feature in "Satisfaction Surveys" on the "Analytics" menu.

Downloading from Internet Explorer

There is a problem with the downloading of survey results.  The problem is restricted to versions of Internet Explorer prior to version 9.

We're working on a fix and we'll post again when it's resolved.  In the meantime you should be able to download the data using a different browser, such as Chrome or Firefox, or by ugrading to IE9.

Please get in touch if you're experiencing problems in the meantime and we'll do our best to help.

All systems go...

Planned maintenance has been carried out, and everything should be running smoothly. As ever, if you encounter any errors, let us know:

• By phone: +44 (0) 191 300 1469
• By email: support@customersure.com
• On our own CustomerSure: http://service.customersure.com/

Thank you for using CustomerSure.

Planned maintenance

We are upgrading CustomerSure from 10:20 BST (9:20 UTC) today, (Fri 21st October). This will result in a short period of downtime, expected to last no more than five minutes.

We will update this blog post with status as we progress.

Planned maintenance

Normally, we make many updates to CustomerSure throughout the week, with no 'downtime', as these changes are relatively small and incremental.

Today (Monday 3rd Oct), we have a large one-off change which will result in CustomerSure being offline for up to 30 minutes from 4:30pm BST. Naturally, we aim to minimise the downtime, and hope to be back with you sooner than this.

We will update this post with a running status log, and a notification of when CustomerSure is available again.

We apologise if this causes any disruption to your business, and as ever, we appreciate your custom. 

Update (1652 BST): Maintainance is proceeding well, all new code has been deployed. We are currently migrating your data to our new infrastructure, and will be back up shortly.

Update (1701 BST): We're back. All aspects of CustomerSure are running normally - please inform us if you experience any unusual behaviour.