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"Your feedback is important to us. While we do not have the resources to respond to all your emails, rest assured that we do read every single message."

Does that sound familiar? If you have a Web site, you probably receive lots of feedback and comments via email. And chances are you live by the statement above. You read every message, and file it to some archive folder. I do that, too.

At least we know what our users are thinking, right? That must be enough. It is not.

A Valuable Resource

While you should not believe everything users tell you about the usability of your Web site, feedback from users is still one of your most valuable resources.

Visitors to your Web site or customers will mail for all kinds of reasons. They have problems. They are looking for something but cannot find it easily on your site. They have suggestions. They have comments. And they have great ideas.

There is a valuable idea in every email I get from you in response to this site or the About Email newsletter. Certainly the emails you get are equally insightful, annoying, surprising, insisting, and creative.

Five Steps to Stickiness

Just reading and filing is a waste of this resource. Instead, you should put it to work. It should put you to work these steps:

• Distribute. Make sure everybody who has to do with the specific user, the Web site, or the topic of the user's feedback reads the email as well. If you cannot find a good argument against mailing somebody, forward or redirect the message to them.
• Act. Many of the ideas found in user email are easy to implement. Many of the problems are easy to fix. When you read the user's email is the time to work on it. Now you are concerned anyway. If you fix a problem, try to fix it for all users, not just the one who complained.
• Collect. Some emails are just general comments or complaints (sometimes we receive praise, too). Just because the email does not ask you to act immediately does not mean you should do nothing. Collect these messages in an organized way. That's filing, you say? Right, but wait for the next steps.
• Summarize. All the general comments you collected are a great, but long read. And don't forget the ideas and problems that you could not implement or fix immediately. This probably makes up for a large pile of emails. To make dealing with them easier (or possible at all), sum them up, possibly with lots of quotations. We don't want this to get too dry.
• Make it stick. The summaries from step four are but a nice exercise if you file and forget them. Put them in a place where everybody can -- and will -- see them. Print them and put them on the wall. Put them on post-it notes around your desk. Use them as a screen saver. Dedicate a monitor at a prominent place to run this screen saver. Use a beamer for your summaries. Whatever you do, make sure it sticks and stings.

Of course you do not employ these steps only once or one after the other, but they should become a routine. Summarizing is probably the essential -- and most difficult -- part of the strategy. If you manage to get this done well, it will help you with all the other steps.

"Loving a baby is a circular business, a kind of feedback loop. The more you give the more you get and the more you get the more you feel like giving."

Penelope Leach