The way businesses gather customer feedback has changed dramatically in recent years. Whereas in the past, companies would primarily rely on face-to-face interactions or customer surveys to gather feedback, today businesses are using a variety of digital channels to learn about their customers. These include email, online reviews, feedback surveys, and website analytics. The reason for this shift is that customer feedback is now seen as one of the key drivers of long-term growth.
According to research done by Harvard Business Review, customers who are asked for feedback are more profitable and less likely to churn than those who are not asked for feedback.
The most impactful way to get feedback from customers is by asking them directly, however, customers don’t always tell you the entire truth.
Users are likely to only mention what they think is important, but other factors that impacted them may be overlooked. This means that the customer feedback you collect may not be entirely accurate, which is a big issue on its own.
Customer analytics systems help you understand your buyers’ behavior, what excites them, and what makes them dislike your product.
customer feedback is when customers give their opinions about a company’s product or service. It is important because it can help businesses improve their offerings.
What is Customer Feedback?
Customer feedback is information that customers provide about their experiences with a product or service. This type of feedback can be helpful for product, customer success, customer support, and marketing teams so that they can identify areas that could be improved. Ways to collect customer feedback can include polling and surveying customers, interviewing them, asking for reviews, or using tools that collect feedback indirectly.
The important question now is: how do you use these channels to actually learn from the feedback? It is crucial to develop a clear picture of WHY you are collecting feedback before you establish the viability of a channel.
Why should you gather customer feedback?
Listening to your customers is essential for success. You need customer feedback to know if what you’re doing is right or wrong and to understand how your customers are reacting.
Getting feedback from customers is useful in more ways than one. Not only does it help you make your product better, but it also provides insights that can be applied to every other aspect of your business, like marketing, sales, and customer service. Keeping tabs on what your customers think and feel is a surefire way to propel your business forward in a way you haven’t before.
There is no single tactic that is guaranteed to work in all situations in order to gain information from users. The method of collecting customer feedback that will be most effective in any given situation will vary depending on the circumstances. For example, sending a survey form to a user who is already unhappy is likely to make the situation worse; in this case, it would be better to make a phone call.
Now, let’s find out what are the best methods of collecting customer feedback:
The best ways to collect customer feedback
There are many survey tools available to collect customer feedback. The most popular and effective ways to ask customers for feedback are discussed below.
1. Long form-based surveys
The most common method of completing the feedback loop is through customer feedback surveys that are typically sent via email.
When sending email surveys, always keep in mind not to ask too many questions. Once you learn how to create a survey, collecting feedback will get easier over time.
Survey Monkey states that the longer your customer survey is, the less time each respondent spends on average answering each question.
In other words, the more questions you ask your respondents, the more likely they will “speed” through it, and the quality and reliability of your data will suffer:
A good rule of thumb for keeping your surveys short is only to ask questions that fulfill your end goal. Make sure every question serves a clear purpose, and don’t ask questions you don’t intend to use the information from. The goal is to collect customer feedback, not to have them write an essay.
If you’re surveying a customer who has just cancelled their paid subscription, there’s no point in asking them if the onboarding process was easy. Your only goal should be to understand why they’re cancelling and what you can do to prevent it.
It is more important to start with open-ended questions. This is because it allows your customers to surprise you with their answers. If you use multiple choice questions, the answers will be based on your assumptions. For example, you may think the customer is leaving because of your pricing, but they may be leaving because of a missing feature. If you want to know what the customer is thinking, you should give them an open-ended question.
The best thing about this product is: ‘What do you love the most about the product?’
It’s a good idea to start your survey with a positive question to set the tone for the rest of the survey.
When to use form-based surveys to collect customer feedback
This [form-based surveys] is best used when detailed inputs are wanted and there are some open-ended questions to ask. This should only be sent to an engaged user, who you’re sure would like to take the time to provide feedback to you. For instance, if you build online courses as part of your business, form-based surveys are a great method to get feedback from your students as they’re already closely involved with your material.
2. Short in-app surveys
Customers are always thinking of ways your product can work better for them. Maybe parts of your app don’t have what they are looking for, or maybe the design could look a little better, or maybe they found something that is broken.
Oftentimes, they will not contact you at your support address unless the problem is big.
A good idea for collecting customer feedback is to offer a survey while they are using your app. The survey can be prompted the moment a user finishes interacting with a particular feature in the app.Since the user is already in the process of using that feature, their feedback is likely to be more accurate and specific, rather than ambiguous.
It’s not a good idea to give your users a long survey to fill out. Keep it to two or three questions that are relevant to the page they’re on.
Intercom can be used to trigger in-app surveys in your app. For example, if you want to get feedback from users about a particular feature, you can ask them a quick question after they finish using it.
When to use In-app surveys to collect customer feedback
When you want quick feedback from someone who has performed a certain action, you have to trigger the survey at the very moment the transaction ends.
The questions should also be in the present tense. What would you like to do? What would you like to do next?
3. Customer feedback surveys
Choosing the right type of customer survey can be more challenging than you may think. There are a lot of questions you could ask customers. The good news is that you can choose between short slider surveys that can help you target specific issues or longer, traditional surveys.
If you want to find out what your customers think about something, you can use a tool like Qualaroo to survey people who are already using your website. This is a good way to get feedback from people who are familiar with your product or service.
There are plenty of options for longer-form surveys. SurveyKing offers a free platform for small businesses that’s just starting to explore the power of feedback. Alchemer adapts to everyone from solopreneurs up to larger organizations. At the enterprise level, Qualtrics yields dynamic, sophisticated insights.
Some simple best practices to ensure customers follow through on completing a survey are: -Create a clear and concise survey that is easy to understand -Offer an incentive for completing the survey -Thank the customer for taking the time to fill out the survey
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Only ask questions that help you meet your goals.
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Write thoughtful open-ended questions.
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Create consistent rating scales.
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Avoid leading or loaded questions.
4. Email and customer contact forms
Emailing your customers is one of the simplest ways to collect honest feedback from them. To maximize the likelihood of hearing back from a customer, do these three things:
Set clear expectations
Some customers don’t offer feedback because they think it won’t make a difference. Companies often don’t hear from unhappy customers because of this. Customers would be more willing to leave feedback if they knew they would get a response.
Adding a sentence to your emails that tells people when they can expect to hear back from you can help to build trust with your community.
Organize email feedback
Trello is a project management tool that Help Scout uses to create boards that the whole team can access and contribute to with customer feedback. Here’s the system:
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You should create three different boards on Trello in order to keep track of your product ideas, what you are currently working on, and what is planned for the future. This will help you to stay organized and ensure that you are always making progress on your product development.
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To organize your board better, build cards for each category of requests. For our “Product Ideas” board, we use sections like “Inbox” for new ideas, “Rejected” for ideas we don’t want, “Someday/Maybe” for ideas that are good but not urgent, and “Apps” for requests to integrate with other applications.
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If you would like to add an email address to a card for the people who requested the idea, you can do so by adding their email address in the “Add email addresses” section. Here’s an example card (with emails blocked out for privacy):
This system allows you to track requests and the people who made them, as well as ideas you have already rejected. The process also provides employees with a clear guide to future customer interactions.
Send personalized responses
In order to get an honest response from a customer, the best thing to do is to ask them directly. Emailing them enables you to ask for more personal feedback than you could through a survey.
When customers sign up for information about your services, you could send out an auto-responder email asking a single question. Get feedback on the issues that customers are struggling with most, what features they would love to see, or why they signed up!
The key is to ensure that your team has a system in place for responding to these emails; otherwise, your customers will feel disappointed.
You can also use a help desk to transform every email into an opportunity to tune into customer feedback with happiness ratings. When your customers rate a reply from Help Scout, they can also add extra comments:
You can use the rating and comments to create happiness reports that capture the performance of individuals and teams.
5. Usability tests
If you want your company to gain deep insights from usability testing, more upfront planning is required. By having a clear strategy, you can discover challenges that customers may not be aware of and find actionable insights to improve their experiences.
Although it isn’t necessary, you may want to reward your user research participants in the same way Google does.
We use usability testing at Help Scout to refine design details or new features. These tests help us to make sure that we get the last 10% right when we are already 90% finished with the updates.
The team prepared to launch major improvements to the Beacon product by opening Beacon 2.0 to a small number of beta participants. The feedback from the participants was used to make adjustments to the product before it was rolled out to everyone.
Even though we usually think of user testing as something that is done with web-based products, the same principles can be applied to any business.
Would you like to try our gym for free for a month? Come visit us three to five days a week and keep a diary about your experiences. This will help us learn about the business from your perspective and uncover small tweaks that make a huge difference to the customer experience.
This book can help you to understand the importance of usability testing, even if you aren’t familiar with the concept. UserTesting is a great resource if you want to try usability testing for your web-based business.
6. On-site activity (via analytics)
The following text is about how analytics can help you understand your customers better, especially if you have a digital product or service. By understanding how your customers interact with your company, you can improve your product or service.
If you want to improve your customer service, you could look at the number of people visiting each self-service article.
If an article has an average time on page of 0:09 and a terrible bounce rate, you can tell that the messaging isn’t resonating with readers.
Collecting customer feedback is crucial
If you listen to your customer’s feedback, they can help improve every aspect of your company. To get started, focus on one clear and simple method of collecting feedback, such as usability testing or analytics. Once you have that down, you can expand to more complex methods.
The best place to start in terms of customer support is with your support team. They will be able to provide valuable feedback, both quantitative and qualitative, based on real experiences they have had with your company.
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