Form fillings through survey or feedback form and even email responses is now getting boring and appears to be a waste of time for many users to click on or even answer. I even revert to "you must fill this form to view this page" so that users can give us feedback about our app or site.
What do you think is the best strategy to present feedback contribution forms to users?
I think you have to look at visitor satisfaction. Forcing your users to do something is a sure way to lose visitors, that goes for forced feedback forms too. So the best strategy to present feedback contribution forms to users would, to my opinion, be: as unobtrusive as possible. Also, make sure the forms are short and easy to fill in. I recommend not asking more than 3 questions. Keeping these questions open allows for the user to fill in as much or as little as they want. The questions could be page specific, asking about elements that are on that specific page. So in short, don't force feedback forms on your visitors, because they won't like it. Keep it simple and keep your fingers crossed, hoping for someone to fill in your form.
First you have to make the distinction between feedback and help as they require different language and timing.
IMHO feedback and help should be metrics driven. That will help you find out when is the time to send and email. Services like Mixpanel can send automatic email based on the completion of certain funnels or actions. But you can also setup your site to trigger form based on some actions.
About support/help form, make sure to ask about the current mood of the person seeking for help, it will help you figure out how to answer the person (you won't answer an angry or desperate person the same way as a wondering or happy one).
It's also a good practice to have some kind of help center/Q&A because as it will prevent you from having similar request for help all the time.
A good way to figure out what your users want is to implement a feature voting system where users can vote for specific feature and ask for new ones. (User voice service does exactly that)
Only based on my own behaviour with 'survey' forms:
If I really want to comment on the site or service I don't want to answer any questions - all I want is a text feedback box so that I can write my wish in it. (and hope that someone takes note and sorts out the problem).
So really what I want is some means of starting a conversation by email where someone will tell me how great my idea is and how they have done something about it.
And then to actually see that they've done it.
I like to do "feedback campaigns" where we gather feedback about specific areas of interest to us and then we act on the information gathered.
An example is that we featured a BETA version of some functionality on our main page with messaging about give it a try and let us know what you think. We then used the feedback to make the functionality better and then changed our messaging to something like . . . Thanks for all the feedback, we listened. We provided a "details" link for folks who wanted to read about how we enhanced the functionality based on the feedback.
