Effective customer complaint forms gather actionable feedback that improves your business. The key is designing forms that encourage constructive criticism and identify specific improvement areas.
This article covers how to build complaint forms that work. You’ll learn the benefits of adding a dedicated complaint form to your website and the best practices for creating one.
Benefits of customer complaint forms
You may wonder whether formalizing the complaint process using an online form is necessary. Indeed, using general feedback forms will encourage customers to submit crucial feedback of all types, both positive and negative.
That said, a general-purpose customer feedback survey form isn’t quite set up to handle detailed consumer complaints. Creating a dedicated complaint form for your customers to use if they need to is advantageous.
Uncovering hidden issues
The reality is that most unhappy customers don’t write complaint letters. They simply move on to one of your competitors, and standard feedback channels don’t always capture the kind of detail you need to be able to take corrective action.
The first step toward increasing customer satisfaction and, ultimately, your customer retention rate, is knowing what you need to improve. Making effective complaint forms available gives your customers a chance to draw your attention to systemic problems and you the opportunity to address issues as needed.
Supporting compliance
Depending on the field your company operates in, you may have to meet specific compliance requirements. For the most part, these should already be factored into your operational processes. For example, if you sell financial products in the US, you need to adhere to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), which sets standards for how companies protect sensitive financial information.
Some compliance frameworks may include stipulations on how you deliver service to your customers. If that applies to your business, having a clear system for collecting customer complaints can help you should you have to undergo compliance auditing by a regulatory agency or other third party.
Actively protecting your brand reputation
Encouraging customer complaints by creating a custom complaint form can help you protect your brand reputation. It means customers with product or customer service complaints bring them straight to you rather than unloading them elsewhere.
If, instead, numerous complaints start landing on third-party review sites, it can be deeply damaging to your brand. In essence, customer complaint forms act as a pressure release valve, so they’re just as useful for safeguarding your standing as they are for informational purposes.
Creating a customer complaint form that works: step by step
Two approaches work best for designing consumer complaint forms that collect valuable feedback: using an existing customer complaint form template or building one from scratch.
Using a template
The big advantage of using a template is that you can simply select from the available fields and throw a demo customer complaint form together very quickly. There are a large number of online tools you can use to do this, such as SurveyMonkey or Typeform. These all let you customize the basic design to create an effective customer complaint form that helps deliver actionable insights. Here’s what to do:
- Choose your template and edit it to suit your relevant business needs.
- Customize it with your logo and branding.
- Test the form to make sure the user experience is good across multiple devices and browsers.
- Embed the form in a prominent position on your website and start collecting those crucial customer insights.
That’s it. Of course, you may prefer to keep full control of the design by creating it from the ground up. If so, here are a few pointers when building a customer complaint form from scratch.
Building from scratch
If you’re designing the whole thing yourself, you’ll need to think about which individual elements to include and how to bolt them together.
There are a few essential ones that every customer complaint form should have:
- Contact details: e.g., email address or phone number
- Details of complaint: basic info including time, date, location
- Full complaint description: blank text box for additional explanation
- Document upload fields: allows customers to send additional documentation to support their complaint
- Follow-up preference: for example, whether the customer would prefer email updates, a phone call, etc.
Depending on the nature of your business, you might want to include additional fields. For instance, a restaurant feedback form might include sections dedicated to individual courses to encourage more detailed feedback about food quality.
Just be careful not to overdo it. With that in mind, here are a few best practices for creating a customer complaint form.
Best practices for creating complaint forms
Remember that the principal goal of creating a dedicated complaint form is to understand how best to improve so you can deliver great omnichannel customer service every time. That means creating a well-structured document that makes lodging complaints easy for your customers. Take these tips into consideration as you go:
Keep it simple
Overwhelming customers is a bad idea. If someone wants to communicate something they’re unhappy about, making them fill out 50 different boxes is likely to make them even unhappier. And of course, they’ll just abandon the complaint form because they’ve probably got something better to do than spend half an hour completing a marathon form.
So, keep it simple. Get the basic details you need for your complaint records, and resist adding too much more. Two or three extra boxes should be enough. Remember that you can always follow up with the customer to ask for further information.
Make it accessible
There are two main threads to accessibility: clarity of language and technological compatibility.
It’s vital to use clear, simple language to explain how to use the complaint form. Label each box with brief instructions so the reader knows what’s supposed to go where.
Once you’ve completed the basic design of your form, make sure it’s optimized for mobile devices and desktops. That means ensuring the boxes are large enough to tap on a small screen, that the form’s flow works well across device types, and so on.
Include data privacy information
When you recruit a new contact center agent, one of the most important elements of their training is how to comply with data privacy rules when they communicate with customers. The same principle should guide you as you design a customer complaint form.
State clearly what you intend to do with the information the customer is providing. That means drawing the reader’s attention to the explanation rather than putting it in fine print afterwards. Include a box for the customer to tick to give consent before they submit the form.
Acknowledge submissions
Please remember to acknowledge the complaint submission automatically. There’s nothing worse than submitting an online form and being left to wonder whether it’s been received.
Just sending a quick email or setting a message to pop up saying “thanks for your feedback” isn’t quite enough, either. While that might be acceptable for general feedback, it doesn’t cut it for customer complaint forms.
The receipt notification has to include an estimated timeline for action, and it needs to be realistic so you can manage the customer’s expectations properly. The customer has done you a favor by taking the time to submit a complaint, so the least you can do is give them an honest estimate for how long the complaint resolution process is going to take.
Final thoughts
Customer feedback is valuable in many ways, but sometimes, the negative feedback can be even more important than the positive.
That’s why it’s often worth going one step beyond the standard net promoter and CSAT scores to take a deep dive into what your customers want you to know.
A well-designed customer complaint form allows you to do that. You’ll learn all kinds of useful things that will help you deliver the best customer service possible. And in the long run, it’ll do wonders for your brand reputation.
Frequently asked questions
Where should a customer complaint form go?
The best idea is to feature your customer complaint form prominently on your website. You can then include links to it with any customer communications you send out, for example, in order confirmation emails or via social media interactions.
Is it better to use a dedicated complaint form or a general feedback form?
General feedback forms are great as far as they go, but they tend to be quite open-ended. Building a dedicated complaint form is more likely to encourage customers to be honest about problems they’ve encountered while using your products or services.
Is it a good idea to allow anonymous complaints?
Yes, it can be, although you’re under no obligation to do so. It really depends on what your main objectives are. Allowing anonymous complaints is likely to encourage even more submissions, so if the content of the feedback is your primary concern, it may be wise to allow people submitting complaints to remain anonymous. The downside, of course, is that you won’t be able to contact them to follow up.
Updated Jun 26, 2025
