How To Get Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is invaluable for business growth. 91% of people believe companies should fuel innovation by listening to buyers and customers. They want you to listen to them rather than your R&D team.
Opinions from your customers are precious, but only if you actually hear them. If a customer vents in their living room after opening your product, that doesn't help. You might be able to find feedback on social media or via reviews, but that takes work to track down and analyse, and—if the feedback is negative—everyone else can see it too!
There's an easier way - just ask them directly. Go straight to the source.
Recently we looked at the importance of customer feedback. In this article, we'll move on to look at practical strategies to collect insightful customer feedback directly.
Identifying your feedback goals
The first step is to define your objectives for collecting feedback. Like any business initiative, you'll want to revisit these goals later and evaluate your progress.
Start by considering your target audience and their expectations. For example, feedback goals for a B2B SaaS application will differ significantly from those of a consumer lifestyle mobile app.
With your audience and offerings in mind, set clear, measurable goals. Practical goals follow the SMART framework:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Let's say you run an online bookstore. Your SMART goal might be to "Increase our customer satisfaction rating from 7/10 to 8/10 within the next six months by gathering feedback on our website's user experience and implementing improvements based on that feedback."
By setting clear goals like this, you'll have a much better idea of what feedback you need and how you'll use it to improve your business.
Choosing the right feedback channels
Once you've set your feedback goals, it's time to start collecting data. You have several options, each with unique pros and cons. Consider factors like your audience, resources, and the type of customer feedback needed.
Most importantly, select channels your customers use. Otherwise, you'll struggle with low response rates.
Surveys
If there's one thing people don't mind doing, it's surveys. That's why so many companies regularly use them to get feedback. Customer experience surveys collect quantitative data through numeric ratings and rankings. However, you can also add open-ended questions for qualitative feedback.
Online survey software like SmartSurvey makes surveys easy to embed anywhere online. We also provide advanced features you can use with your surveys. For example, you can use question logic to change what questions people see based on their earlier answers. You can also make surveys anonymous, often making people feel more comfortable giving honest feedback.
Pros:
- Efficient way to collect data at scale
- Flexible question types
- Can be anonymous
- Easy to analyse
- Cost-effective to distribute
Cons:
- If not designed well, it can lead to biased or unhelpful responses
Social media
Social media allows you to leverage existing platforms where your audience already spends time. It can work well if you have an established following. However, social media respondents often represent a vocal minority. Not all feedback is from genuine customers. Fans may provide overly optimistic opinions that lack objectivity.
Pros:
- Leverage existing platform
- Real-time responses
- Reach wide audience
- Increase awareness
- Foster engagement
Cons:
- Biased feedback
- Negative comments publicly visible
Email is easy and convenient for both you and your customers. With it, you can carefully choose who you'd like to send your feedback request to, helping to ensure you're reaching the right people.
As well as surveys sent by email, regular email correspondence also allows people to give longer, more detailed responses than other methods. However, there's always a chance your email will end up in the spam folder or just be ignored.
Pros:
- Target specific segments
- Detailed responses
- Cost-effective
- Flexible design
Cons:
- Impersonal
- Easy to ignore
- Could reach the spam folder
User testing
Perhaps the most complete way to gather feedback is through user testing. User testing is usually done in a controlled environment and lets you watch how people use your product, which can give you valuable insights.
You can also ask follow-up questions immediately and get more detailed feedback from those testing your product. Of course, because of time constraints, you won't be able to get as many respondents as with other methods, but it remains an option, nonetheless.
Pros:
- Direct customer observations
- In-depth insights
- Clarification built-in
- Quantitative and qualitative data
Cons:
- Small sample sizes
- Resource intensive
- Artificial environment
Phone
Speaking directly with customers over the phone delivers a personal touch while allowing detailed feedback. You can have natural conversations and ask follow-up questions. Yet phone outreach takes more effort, and some customers won't be comfortable or available to chat.
Pros:
- Personal connection
- Detailed responses
- Clarification built-in
Cons:
- Time-intensive
- Intrusive for some
- Difficult to scale
Designing effective customer surveys
With SmartSurvey, researchers can employ customer survey templates to get started collecting feedback. But whether you use a pre-built option or create a survey from scratch, one thing is constant; surveys let you reach many customers quickly and efficiently. Building a survey is easy with our platform and can be done in just a few minutes. But you still want to put in some effort to get the most accurate results.
Creating the questions
A survey lives and dies by its question choices. Craft questions that clearly and concisely address your feedback goals.
Use a mix of open-ended, multiple-choice, ranking, and rating scale questions. Each format serves a different purpose. Test different questions to see what works best for your goals and audience.
Survey length
Keep your survey as short as possible while still collecting the necessary data. Long surveys can lead to abandonment, so target a maximum completion time of around 5-10 minutes. Use page breaks in your survey format to chunk longer surveys into logical sections, making the process less overwhelming.
Timing
When you send out your survey is just as important as what you ask. You want to catch customers at the right time. This doesn't just mean the right time of day or week. It's more about the right time in their journey with your product.
Should you send it right after checkout? Wait a bit, so they have time to play around with the product? These are the questions you have to answer. Timing also affects the response rate. Avoid busy holiday periods or weekends when completion rates tend to decrease.
Read more about the best time to send a survey.
Using real-time feedback tools
Real-time feedback tools allow you to add quick feedback touchpoints directly into the customer experience. These include chatbots, in-app prompts, help hotlines, and more.
The main benefit is catching customers when feedback is on top of their minds rather than letting time elapse. This leads to more candid, detailed insights. Quick feedback via chatbots or single-question prompts is easy to implement. Often, the feedback is less thorough but still helpful.
While not as comprehensive as a customer survey, real-time tools provide an excellent supplemental source of customer perspectives.
Encouraging customers to provide feedback
One of the trickiest parts of gathering feedback is actually getting people to take the time to give it. Since you can't force anyone to share their thoughts, you need to find ways to encourage them.
Incentives
Offer small incentives for completing surveys or interviews. These include discounts, sweepstakes entries, loyalty points, or free products. Incentives work because they make people feel like they're getting something back for their effort. Just make sure whatever you offer is something your customers will actually want!
Personalisation
Personalised outreach improves open and response rates. To make emails and surveys feel tailored, use first names, customise questions based on previous interactions, and segment audiences.
It makes customers feel like their individual opinion matters to you. They're not just another faceless customer - they're Sarah, whose thoughts on the coffee maker are essential to your company.
Recognition
Finally, it's crucial to let customers know that their feedback is valued and will be used to improve the situation.
Always say thank you when someone gives you feedback. You could send a personal thank-you email or even mention constructive feedback in your company newsletter (with the customer's permission, of course).
Analysing and interpreting customer feedback
Once you have your mountain of feedback, what do you do with it? Not let it go to waste, that's for sure. First, you'll want to organise your feedback. You might group similar comments together or separate positive and negative feedback. It can also be split into areas like shipping, pricing, product features, etc.
Then there are different ways to analyse feedback:
- Sentiment analysis: Detects emotional tone as positive, negative or neutral
- Word clouds: Visualises frequently used words
- Trend analysis: Tracks changes over time
- Demographic filtering: Segments by audience groups
Look for patterns and main takeaways within each area. What are the main weaknesses? Biggest opportunities? Strongest performing features?
With SmartSurvey, you can do all this analysis right on our platform. No need to export data or use other tools.
Acting on customer feedback
Carefully collected and analysed feedback only matters if you act on it. Start by developing an action plan grounded in feedback insights.
You might want to use the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule. This suggests that 80% of your problems probably come from 20% of the issues. So, focus on fixing those big issues first.
Keep customers informed on changes made based on feedback to close the loop and demonstrate you take action on their opinions.
And remember that it's an ongoing process. Continue to use feedback to refine and improve over time.
Overcoming challenges in feedback collection
Collecting feedback isn't always easy. Low response rates, biased data, or negative feedback can derail efforts. Arm yourself against these pitfalls. First, ensure your outreach methods match channel preferences for your audience.
When possible, leverage captive feedback opportunities like support conversations or account check-ins.
Also, note that 85% of people give feedback after a good experience and 81% after a bad one. Expect to encounter criticism and handle it with grace. Negative feedback is tricky but provides enormous opportunities for improvement. Address issues professionally without getting defensive.
Wrapping up
Customer perspectives provide a compass to guide products and services in the right direction. But collecting and acting on feedback requires a thoughtful, structured approach.
Define your goals, identify optimal channels, design effective surveys, and analyse results to extract meaningful insights. Keep customers involved in the process to demonstrate you value their voice.
Key takeaways
Value of customer feedback: Customer feedback is crucial for business growth and innovation, providing insights that can directly influence product development and customer experience.
Setting feedback goals: Clearly define your feedback objectives using the SMART framework, which ensures that feedback collection aligns with business goals and is measurable and actionable.
Selecting feedback channels: Choose the appropriate feedback channels based on your target audience and resources, with options including surveys, social media, email, user testing, and phone calls.
Designing effective surveys: Craft well-structured surveys with a mix of question types and keep them concise to maintain high response rates, ensuring the timing of distribution is carefully considered.
Using real-time feedback tools: Implement real-time feedback tools like chatbots and in-app prompts to gather immediate, candid insights, supplementing more comprehensive survey data.
Encouraging feedback participation: Motivate customers to provide feedback through incentives, personalised outreach, and recognition, making them feel valued and appreciated.
Analysing feedback: Use techniques such as sentiment analysis, word clouds, and trend analysis to interpret feedback, identifying key areas for improvement and opportunities for growth.
Acting on feedback: Develop action plans based on feedback, prioritising significant issues, and keeping customers informed about the changes made, reinforcing that their opinions matter.
