How to Collect Customer Feedback

Collect Customer Feedback

Business growth is not possible if you fail to get a 360-degree view of your operations. Such an approach will require you to consider various aspects like product or service quality, better customer experience, and providing top-notch support. Emphasizing quality would also require you to listen to your customers’ needs to nail down the expectations and delivery gap.

As such, collecting feedback from your customers is a good way to gauge your performance. You are only as awesome as your consumers think you are. For instance, when a consumer reviews a product or service after purchasing and using it, their feedback involves personal experience with the product or service in question. Good or bad, their review will help your business earn credibility in the market.

It doesn’t matter what kind of business you have; you need to know how your offerings are performing or what your consumers think about it. Especially when your business is undergoing a digital transformation, it’s good to have support from customers in the form of actionable feedback about areas that need better digitization.

Before we explore various ways to collect customer feedback, let us get started with the basics.

What is Customer Feedback?

Customer feedback is the process of collecting information about your business from buyers. This involves employing their opinion as data to improve your goods and service where users say about their experiences, thoughts, emotions, and issues.

Consumer feedback may serve as a compass for your business when done correctly. Businesses that prioritize customer needs will use their feedback to understand them better and improve their customer experience (CX).

A report by Adobe suggests that one in five organizations who consider their CX to be mainstream said that they had “substantial insight” into their customers’ minds. This helps identify places of friction in the customer journey.

Why is it Important to Collect Customer Feedback?

Collecting customer feedback helps better understand how your actual and prospective customers perceive your brand, service, and product. It goes beyond basic likes and dislikes while exploring more qualitative aspects to identify areas for improvement and benchmark your performance against the competition.

If you are looking to adopt the “customer first” business model, you need to leverage customer feedback that ensures putting the interests of your consumers before anything else. Customer feedback can serve as an input for many business processes that can influence the growth and evolution of your business. 

Such a business outlook will have a significant positive impact on all areas of your company and contribute to its growth. 

There are other advantages to interacting with your consumers for feedback which includes the following:

  • Create empathy: Customers feel valued when you give them your ‘ears’ and implement their feedback when you serve them next time. You will also reflect the business value system where empathy takes the front seat, reflecting your ‘customer first’ approach. 
  • Fostering customer-centric culture: Work to extend the reach of customer feedback which leads to consumer insights reaching deeper levels inside the business environment. More functional areas and levels of company stakeholders will become aware of customer requirements that help them offer products and services that satiate customer needs.
  • Focus on customer experience: Increased levels of customer satisfaction will increase brand loyalty and thereby garner more positive word of mouth. When customers’ opinions and suggestions are considered and implemented, they enjoy a more positive experience and enhance their satisfaction to keep coming for more.
  • Faster time-to-market: Customer feedback allows key business decision-makers to recognize the value of their products and services sooner. They can launch their products faster with feedback data that gives them the confidence to explore the market. 

What are the Top Ways to Collect Customer Feedback?

There are multiple approaches that you can adopt to collect customer feedback. Choose different methods at different points of (feedback) collection depending on where your customers prefer to voice their opinion.

Remember, customers are more likely to give you their opinion if you meet them where they are. By providing different means of providing feedback, you give people the freedom to choose whatever method they like and use it whenever convenient for them.

1. Feedback Boxes

When you have many website visitors, it is best to implement a feedback box mechanism. Customers are always looking to get the best out of your business as they tend to expect a little more than you provide.

Your website may not provide customers with all the information they want in certain areas. In such cases, you can provide customers with the feedback form to leave comments or suggestions in a feedback box located on a website or a single page.

You can use feedback boxes to get input from customers regarding new designs or potential concerns they experience. This will provide your business with key data on what you should be aware of, such as website glitches and broken links.

hotjar feedback boxes example

Source

Hotjar offers users the space to provide feedback in a quick and interesting manner. As you can see in the image below, you can use emojis to ask your consumers to share a quick review of their experience with your services.

hotjar uses emojis to ask their consumers to share a quick review of their experience

Another alternative is to provide a comprehensive feedback form that works as a survey.

slack feedback form survey

Source

Here, you can inform users that they would need a couple of minutes to complete the survey. When you click on the feedback link, a new window will open with a series of questions regarding customer experience. 

slack website feedback form

Source

2. Surveys

A survey is a broad term that may be broken down into several specific categories, each serving a distinct purpose.

Surveys provide one of the finest ways to get customer feedback as they can be targeted, tailored to a specific audience segment. You can use Woorise survey templates to efficiently create powerful online surveys.

woorise rating system ecommerce survey 1

You may use various methods to gather feedback from your customers, including a rating system (as mentioned above), pop-ups, and emoticons. Below are some of the most common types of surveys where each survey offers a different way to get customers’ opinions on your website, product, or app.

NPS

Net Promoter Score (NPS) helps measure consumer satisfaction with product introductions, design or functional adjustments, and other improvements to customer service. Leverage it to create relationships with your customers and minimize friction in your flywheel by measuring customer happiness. 

A customer survey example made with Woorise is an easy way to gauge NPS

Finally, gathering NPS yields useful information that you can use to enhance product quality and customer satisfaction.

Post-Purchase Surveys

Identify what went wrong and worked best with a post-purchase or post-sale survey. You can collect feedback from customers who have recently purchased your products or services. You can use the input from such surveys to improve the number of repeat customers and cross-sell and tap up-sell opportunities. 

Exit-Intent Survey

Learn more about your bouncing or non-converting visitors with exit intent surveys to know why the visitors are leaving your site. Your Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs may benefit greatly from their participation.

The best approach to find out how your customers and website visitors feel about your CX, and UI is to get feedback directly from those who use your services or visit your website. It is an important tool that helps you identify what keeps your business away from the purchase or page-specific objectives so that you can improve what isn’t working.

CSAT 

CSAT is a CX metric that stands for Customer Satisfaction Score, a tool to assess how satisfied your customers are with a company’s overall offerings. It offers you a great way to determine whether your customers are happy with your products and services.

Also, you can identify which feature of your products/services is offering ‘wow’ experiences to customers. Customer happiness may be easily gauged by asking a simple question such as, ‘How happy were you with your experience?’ For each question, you’ll be asked to rate your answers on an appropriate scale, from one to ten.

3. Combine a feedback request with product updates and announcements

One way to create a successful business is to include your customers in the process of creating your product or service. Taking the time to show them how much you care will make them feel appreciated and motivated to help you with the right information. And therefore, you need to open communication with your customers where an email list might be a valuable resource. For building a B2B email list, you can use AeroLeads which helps you find executives’ business emails, company names, URLs, job titles, and other relevant details to build an email list in real-time for your business.

Whenever you send out an update or news about your product or service, ask your consumers what they think of it and what more you might include or modify. They may also provide specific ideas for improvement that aren’t readily available to the team. This provides a perfect opportunity to get direct input from your customers while also enhancing the quality of the conversation.

4. Send Emails

Email is a great option to keep in touch with your customers and website visitors. Set up a system that automatically sends emails when certain actions trigger — customers buy something, add a product to their wish list, sign up for a newsletter, etc. 

When it comes to the customer-seller ecosystem, email is more than a simple method of getting customer feedback.

Post-sales follow-up emails

asos Post sales follow up email example

Send a customer satisfaction survey email after the purchase

customer satisfaction survey email example

Whenever a customer contacts the help center or any other department to handle a problem, it is good to send an email asking for feedback

send an email asking for feedback Whenever a customer contacts the help center

Check out these tips to create an effective email survey. Remember, a good way to stay on top of your customer orders is to send them regular transactional emails, ensuring a positive consumer experience. 

5. Offer Live Chat Support

Customers are more likely to provide feedback when interacting with a live agent. This not only improves conversion rates but also keeps them coming back for more. You can consider the example of Pipeliner, which gets the user started by filling up the email ID and sharing the query.

pipeliner live chat support example

Most website users take advantage of the live chat option to ask questions, seek assistance, or share concerns. Leverage their input to enhance your goods and services as you analyze the information they provide.

A chat support service may help organizations resolve issues rapidly. You can also use chat platforms integrated with your customer support software that provides a transcript to store feedback. For this, ensure top-notch chat support that enables you to get the most out of this function.

For the best possible customer experience, use either a chatbot or a human agent. If customers must wait for hours to speak with an agent or find the agent uninformative, they may choose not to provide any feedback.

6. Use Analytics

A large majority of analytics tools fail to provide any insight into the actions of specific individuals. Rather than keeping tabs on individual clients, these tools were designed to monitor whole websites. It’s possible to observe the activities of specific customers when you employ customer analytics.

Your website’s performance may be tracked in real-time using analytics tools. The question is, how can you use this data to get feedback from your target audience? 

Here’s how you can do it:

  • Scrutinize the site performance to identify your popular pages, most-read articles, and the most popular landing pages. Here, you can use Google Analytics.
google analytics dashboard example
  • Once you identify such pages, leverage such pages to display feedback forms and customer experience popups to gather feedback. 
  • Implement feedback boxes on your site’s main pages to know more about what draws people to your products.
  • Analyze the data to know the right reasons for a high bounce rate and poor conversion rate by gathering consumer feedback from less popular sites.

Your website’s user experience will be improved when you compare the data. 

7. Create Suggestion Boards

You want to get your customers into critiquing your business in a productive way. For this, you can employ the technique of using customer suggestion boards. This helps gather comments and enables users to work with your business and other users on ideas.

Provide users with the space to submit feedback entries using suggestion boards. Such boards will be open for other users to vote or comment on. You may learn a lot from popular articles that have received a lot of likes and comments.

Using a suggestion board has the added advantage of making previously unconsidered suggestions widely accepted by the general public. For instance, Aha.io offers a great tool to create such boards. 

Aha io suggestion board example

Remember that you need to create a board that is easy to navigate. This means customers should be able to search for the boards and add content without much hassle. Provide your customers with the space to see the most popular ideas and search for them to get the best results.

Results will take some time to show up as feedback collection, and implementing those suggestions takes time. Wait until you get enough input from your users to know which ones are most common to have your resources focus on those aspects.

8. Use Social Media

Social media will encourage more customers to interact, share, and converse with one another. It’s a platform for expressing one’s views to the world. Using social media to get feedback from your clients is a smart move. You can use social media to collect customer feedback. There are a variety of techniques to get feedback on social media. 

For instance, you can ask for comments from your followers by running a poll. This will help you know more about what your target market wants. You may use this information to develop more relevant content and influence your social media marketing approach in the future.

When it comes to increasing social media engagement, competitions are a terrific method. Additionally, you may use competitions to get consumer feedback; customers can fill out a survey to join the contest. 

Send consumers a survey after they join the contest over their social handles. With social media, competitions are a method to get people excited about participating. One involves running the contest and providing the first 100 or 200 respondents with discounts and goodies.

Conclusion

All the above methods are a great way to collect accurate and honest feedback from customers. Whether you want to upsell new products, enhance your website, add new features, or gauge customer experience, using customer feedback is an ideal way to do things right.

Since everyone in your business is busy following predefined processes, customer feedback works as an input to refine the way your team works. Most of the time, you won’t even consider all the possible ways to enhance a product or service on your own. Customer help is necessary.

When you ask for consumer input, you’ll be amazed at the ideas that come your way. Each strategy for customer feedback has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, weighing expenses, time, and the desired output is necessary before adopting any method.

Join 68,000+ marketers today

Get exclusive updates, invites and tips from our team of marketing experts.

Join more than 80,000 brands using Woorise

Easily create landing pages, forms, surveys, quizzes & viral giveaways that drive real user engagement.