Organizations today are very focused on customer feedback as a way to increase long-term growth. They take every opportunity they can to talk to customers or learn about them, and they spend a lot of money on setting up feedback channels including emails, reviews, feedback surveys, and website analytics.
What is customer feedback?
Feedback from customers is useful in helping a company improve its products or services. It is especially important to listen to negative feedback, as it can help prevent future problems.
Why is customer feedback important?
Customer feedback is important because it shows what the company is doing wrong and right through the eyes of the customers.
Now, let’s find out what are the best methods of collecting customer feedback:
1. Customer feedback surveys
It may be more challenging to develop a useful customer survey than you think. You could ask customers a ton of questions. The good news is that you can choose between short slider surveys (which help you target specific issues) that pop up on your site or longer, traditional surveys.
Long form-based surveys
You should always keep in mind not to ask too many questions when sending email surveys so that you won’t get carried away. Learning how to create a survey will make it easier to collect feedback each time.
Open-ended questions are important to start with. They let your customers surprise you. Multiple choice questions give you answers based on your own assumptions. You may think the customer is leaving because of your pricing, but they may be leaving because of a missing feature. If you really want to know what the customer is thinking, give them an open-ended question.
You have a lot of options for surveys that take a long time. SurveyKing has a free platform for small businesses that are just starting to explore the power of feedback. Alchemer adapts to everyone from solopreneurs to larger organizations, and at the enterprise level, Qualtrics yields dynamic, sophisticated insights.
If you want customers to complete a survey, follow some simple best practices.
- Only ask questions that help you meet your goals.
- Write thoughtful open-ended questions.
- Create consistent rating scales.
- Avoid leading or loaded questions.
2. Short in-app surveys
Your customers are always thinking of ways your product could work better for them. For example, maybe parts of your app don’t have what they’re looking for or maybe the design could look better. Maybe they found something that’s broken.
A good way to gather feedback from your customers is to offer a survey while they are using your app. The survey can be prompted the moment a user has finished interacting with a particular feature in the app. Since the user is already familiar with that feature, their feedback is likely to be more specific and accurate.
Intercom can be used to send in-app surveys to users. For example, if a user has just finished using a feature, a question about how it could be improved is a great way to get their feedback.
When to use In-app surveys to collect customer feedback
When you want quick feedback from someone who has performed a certain action, you need to trigger the survey at the very moment the transaction ends.
You could ask one or more of the following questions. “If you have any questions or feedback about the product, please let us know.” “Do you have any questions about the product you just used?” “Alternatively, do you have any feedback about the product you just used?”
3. Email and customer contact forms
Email is an effective way to obtain customer feedback that is honest. This is because most companies use email as a support channel, so each interaction can be used to gather feedback.
Organize email feedback
Help Scout uses Trello to create “boards” which are accessible to and can be contributed to by the whole team. These boards contain great customer feedback. Here’s the system:
- Boards should be created within Trello for “Product Ideas” (feature requests), “Up Next” (what is being worked on), and “Roadmap” (what is planned to be worked on).
- When categorizing requests on a board, create separate cards for each one. For example, on the “Product Ideas” board, we have sections titled “Inbox” (for new ideas), “Rejected” (for ideas that have been discarded), “Someday/Maybe” (for ideas that are good but not urgent), and “Apps” (for integration requests).
- Add email addresses to cards for people who have requested the idea. For example, anyone who has asked for Reports upgrades will be added to a list within the card so they can be notified when the upgrade is done.
Send personalized responses
The best way to get a candid response from a customer is to ask for it. Since email enables you to send a one-to-one request, you can ask for more personal feedback than in a survey or public forum.
4. Customer satisfaction score surveys
What a customer satisfaction score measures is how satisfied a customer is with a product, service, or their interaction with a company.
There’s a pretty simple formula to calculate the CSAT score:
CSAT score = [Number of satisfied customer ratings – Number of Not Satisfied ratings] %
When to use CSAT to collect customer feedback
You can measure customer satisfaction at different points in their journey by, for example, sending out a CSAT survey after onboarding and training them, after a product or feature has been launched, or after a customer support query has been resolved.
A good customer service solution like Hiver will allow you to add a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey at the end of every support interaction.
5. Usability tests
Usability testing can provide your company with deep insights, but it requires more upfront planning. By developing a clear strategy, you can uncover challenges that customers may not be aware of and gain insights that will improve their experiences.
One way you could make your user research participants feel more valued is by rewarding them in a way similar to how Google does.
Help Scout uses usability testing to perfect new features or design details that are almost complete. These tests are conducted near the end of the process to ensure that we have nailed down the last 10%.
6. Exit-intent survey popup
Pop-up surveys that are triggered when a visitor is trying to leave your website are an excellent way to collect customer feedback.
This can provide valuable insight into customer thinking and motivation for abandoning the site.
By looking at your website’s bounce rate, you can figure out ways to make your website more effective in converting visitors into customers or subscribers.
When to use the exit-intent popup to collect customer feedback
Exit surveys can be used to gather information about why people are leaving your website and what they might want from you in the future. You can ask customers to leave a comment or fill out a survey to collect feedback before they leave your website.
7. Website feedback widgets
Your website is one of your most important resources as a business. Just as you would put time and effort into developing and nurturing your physical property, you need to do the same for your website.
Your customers should be able to easily give you feedback and report any issues they have.
A tool like Marker.io allows your customers to quickly and easily capture feedback by taking a screenshot, adding visual annotations, and sending it with just a few clicks.
8. Exploratory customer interviews
While surveys and tests can provide a lot of data, they can never give you an insight into how a person really feels about your product. This is why it’s important to get on a call with your users as part of your customer feedback strategy. This is a more personal and proactive approach that will get you better responses.
Keep the following tips in mind when you sit down to talk to customers:
- Start a conversation by asking an open-ended question. This will allow the customer to give a more detailed account of their experiences.
- As you talk to your interviewee, start with more general questions and get more specific as the conversation goes on. Ask follow-up questions based on their answers to get more information.
- Make sure you are practicing active listening with your team. This means being open and receptive to what they are saying. Maintain eye contact and mirror back the key takeaways you’re hearing from them. This will ensure that you are always keeping the spotlight on them.
9. Transactional emails
This type of email is sent after the user has taken a specific action, such as signing up for a new service or upgrading to a new plan.
Companies usually don’t put a lot of effort into making their transactional emails look good or creating a dialogue with customers. This lack of effort often results in emails that don’t look as good as the company’s website or newsletters and provide a inconsistent customer experience.
10. Social media
Businesses can use social listening to collect customer feedback that they would not be able to access otherwise. Mention and comments on social media platforms are not the only way to collect customer feedback. Social media networks usually have built in polling tools that businesses can use.
11. Suggestion boards
With a suggestion board, users can not only give feedback to the company, but they can also collaborate with other users on ideas.
These boards allow users to share feedback posts that can be voted on or commented on by other users. The most popular posts that have been voted on or commented on can help you discover what the majority of your users need.
12. On-site activity (via analytics)
Data analytics can show you what customers don’t know about how they use your product. This is especially useful if you sell a digital product or service, as it can help you understand how users interact with your company.
If you offer self-service content, you could see how many people visit each article.
If an article has a short average time on page and a high bounce rate, it means that readers aren’t engaging with the content.
13. Instant feedback from your website
With Beacon, you can collect customer feedback without asking them any questions.
For example, you could create a webpage with nine articles that could be valuable for potential customers. Beacon could then be used to collect data on which articles were most popular instead of asking customers which ones they preferred.
What to do with the data you have collected?
1. Identify product improvement areas
Many of your loyal customers likely have expertise in your product features; some of our users understand the product as much or perhaps even more than our product managers do.
Regular users of your product will have the best insight into how it can be improved. This is the feedback you need to take note of!
2. Feed customer feedback into your product roadmap
It’s important to sort feedback into suggestions for improvements and suggestions for major changes. For example, let’s look at feedback from Hiver users.
- A few customers thought shared labels can have different colors as that would help them manage their inboxes better. Now, this is a product improvement – they added it to their ‘task manager’ and had implemented it in almost no time!
- After a company built the shared inbox, a few customers suggested the company implement automation that will allow emails to be assigned based on a few preset conditions. Now, this is a game-changer as it would significantly reduce the time people spend on task assignments. The company added it to their ‘brainstorming session’ and discussed the pros and cons of doing it. It took then a few weeks to build it, but it’s been worth it.
The biggest challenge is getting customers to suggest new features. Would they really bother to spend time suggesting a feature?
3. Optimize your conversion path
Your website contains a lot of valuable data. Use this data to make decisions that will reduce the number of people who leave your site, increase the number of people who convert, and figure out where people are leaving your marketing funnel.
- Lower your bounce rates: With the scroll maps data, identify the high-friction elements of your website that lead to maximum bounce off. Find answers to questions like “Where should you place your calls to action?”, “At what depth do most users drop off?”, “What are the distracting elements that lead to drop-off?”, and more.
- Prevent leakages in your funnel: For businesses, it is very important to prevent leakages as people move from one stage of the buyer’s journey to another. This does not only apply to signups and purchases. Funnels can be put anywhere on your website to know how visitors move through a certain flow.
Collecting customer feedback is crucial
Customers can help improve every aspect of your company if you listen to their feedback. Start by collecting customer feedback using one clear, simple method, then expand to using more complex tactics like usability testing and analytics.
Although it may be startling, it is true that most companies’ support teams understand more about what the customer needs than the product teams.
The support team should be included in discussions about the product roadmap because they are familiar with the problems customers actually face.