Types Of Customer Feedback

With today’s highly competitive landscape and better-informed consumers, customers expect to receive a seamless, high quality customer experience (CX). And considering the many alternative options available to them, which they can easily find online, it means customers not getting the service or experience they expect won’t hesitate to swap to another business who can quickly meet their needs.

Subsequently, having the means to reach out, listen and improve your customer experience, makes implementing a customer feedback strategy an essential requirement for any prudent organisation.

So, what exactly do we mean by customer feedback?

Customer feedback definition

Customer feedback is essentially the insight that customers give you about their experiences with your products and services. This feedback can be gathered in a wide number of ways, from your support teams’ chats with customers, in-app chats and surveys, to focus groups, online reviews and more.

Customer feedback not only helps you to improve your products and services, which helps you to retain customers, but it also makes it easier to attract new ones too.

Given the many ways in which a business interacts with its customers and the many areas of responsibility within a business itself, it means there are many touchpoints where you should be collecting customer feedback. We’ll go on to explore the most common types of customer feedback next.

Types of customer feedback you need to be collecting

Obviously, this will depend a bit on your size and the sorts of products and services your business delivers. However, a large or reasonably sized organisation could expect to collect customer feedback across some of the key areas outlined below.

Product feedback

If your customers are to continue buying your products, you’ll need to continue fulfilling their needs. Subsequently, finding as many ways as you can to collect product feedback and act on it will help you to improve your products, create new ones, and retain and attract new customers.

Fortunately, there a number of ways in which you can collect product feedback.

Usability tests

Going with usability tests enables you to test your product with real users. Using this option, users test a product, performing tasks that are observed by a researcher. The findings are then used to make suggestions on product development.

This process can be exploratory or focused on comparing products and services.

Under the exploratory approach, usability testing looks to undercover what functions a new product should include to meet user requirements. In this scenario, users can test varying products or services to help see if there are any gaps in the market that can be exploited.

With comparative usability, users get to compare similar products or services from competitors to identify which one provides the best user experience.

Focus groups

Focus groups are also an effective way of gaining customer feedback that is not too time-consuming. Typically consisting of a sample of customers with the assistance of a moderator, focus groups enable a detailed discussion about a product or a particular subject matter.

Although, they’re not the same as usability tests, the qualitative nature of focus groups makes them helpful in generating and uncovering opinions about a specific brand and its offerings.

Customer interviews

Although more time-consuming than some of the other methods, customer interviews enable you to dive deeper into the opinions of your consumers.

Through interviews you can discover what drives your customers’ purchasing decisions, their thoughts on user experience and brand awareness. Such information can help you to enhance your products and services and other areas of your business.

Customer reviews

From Trustpilot to G2. Not only are many customers aware of and active users of product review sites, but you can also push them towards product reviews sites where you’re listed and ask them to leave a review.

Review sites are also typically listed by industry and product type, so it enables you to compare yourself to competitors in your own space and therefore what you need to improve.

Product surveys

Another cost-effective option is product surveys.

From your initial product designs, brand logos and packaging, to your product UX and pricing strategy. Whatever it is that you need to get feedback on before your product ‘s launch, issuing a product survey to a sample of your customers is a good way to achieve this.

Consumer panels

If you want to issue a survey, but don’t have a sufficient number of the right audience type within your existing contacts, you might also want to use a consumer panel.

Given that it offers access to millions of respondents worldwide, using a consumer panel can swiftly put you in touch with the exact size and criteria of audience you require, so that you’re quickly gaining the responses to your survey that you need.

Feature requests

Strictly speaking feature requests are really a subset of product feedback, but because they cover quite a big area, they’re worth covering in a separate section.

Similar to many other areas of your product, feature requests are another way for customers to communicate what they need from your product or service to keep using it. This could include anything from suggestions for new products to functionality or bug fix requests.

Once again there a number of ways in which you could collect this feedback.

Product survey

If you’re regularly issuing product surveys to measure what your customers think about your products and any new additions, it offers the perfect opportunity to see if they have any feature requests at the same time.

Feature requests section on your website

Your website offers you a wealth of opportunities to find out more about your customers. And with a features requests section in the product area of your website, it offers a golden opportunity to ask what customers would like to see more of or want improved.

Support tickets

Given that a fair number of your support tickets are likely to be about your product and not just your service, you could consider adding the option for customers to make feature requests here, as well as bug fixes.

Customer satisfaction feedback

From customer satisfaction with a sales or onboarding experience to measuring their engagement and loyalty to your products and brand. There’s a lot more to customer satisfaction than just the customer service experience and it’s something that needs to be measured and maintained throughout the entire customer journey.

By collecting both functional and emotional metrics, customer satisfaction analysis can help organisations to better understand and improve the customer experience journey.

Here’s some key ways in which you can collect this feedback.

Conversations with customer support teams

Whether it’s over the phone or via a live app chat. Depending how well the conversation is going, these customer interactions offer a perfect opportunity to find out how satisfied customers are with your business and the service you’re delivering.

Customer surveys

From customer satisfaction and customer experience to customer engagement and customer loyalty. There’s a wide range of customer surveys you can run periodically to get a better idea of satisfaction levels among your customer base.

However, always try to be mindful not to overwhelm your customers with too many surveys. Failure to do so could result in survey fatigue with some customers not responding or rushing your survey, which could affect the accuracy of your results.

Digital options

From comment boxes or embedded forms on your website to web embed, web popup or website exit surveys. There’s lots of opportunities to gauge customer satisfaction as they’re moving around your site.

From UX and navigational issues to how easy it is to find what they need or make purchases on your site. Besides asking questions about your business or products, asking customers for feedback directly about your website can enable you to make some really positive improvements to this aspect of their experience.

Key customer metrics

You can also use customer metrics to better gauge customer satisfaction with your business including the customer satisfaction score (CSAT), customer effort score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS®) metrics.

From measuring how satisfied a customer is with a specific area of your business or how easy they find it to interact with you, to measuring their overall loyalty towards your brand. By employing and analysing each of these metrics in turn, it can help give businesses a better measure of overall customer satisfaction with their business and brand.

In addition, if you’ve attached these metrics to key touchpoints in your customers’ journey and they’re fully integrated with other critical systems you use, you’ll always be fully aware when someone’s given you a low score and it requires resolution.

Complaints

Complaints are not something that anyone likes to hear, but they are an area of your business that you need to be tracking and always actively working to resolve.

From a direct complaint made verbally or via an email or support ticket, to an indirect complaint aired on a review site or social media platform. The problem with complaints is that depending on where that complaint has been made, they can quickly escalate into something much larger for your business to resolve.

Subsequently, it’s prudent to have feedback loops in place at key customer touchpoints, where you can survey them or measure their sentiment with metrics to keep a better track of this. In addition, if you can also combine this with complaint tracking tools, it can further enhance how effectively you can scan for and respond to any negative comments.

Ultimately, the better you’re able to do this, the more effective you’ll be in resolving complaints, which should further improve customer satisfaction levels with your business.

Sales feedback

Finally, the feedback and data you collect during your sales process can tell you a lot about your customers and their perceptions of your products and services. It’s also important to monitor this, as purchase and post purchase are also key stages of the overall customer experience, so you want to ensure you’re meeting their needs.

From recording your sales calls or point of sale (POS) surveys administered via kiosk devices, QR codes on customer shopping receipts or SMS notifications to post-purchase surveys. There are several ways in which you can gather feedback during the sales process. It’s also important to note that product returns or subscription cancellations can also provide a valuable source of information about what you should be improving. So, you also need to try and gather feedback here too.

The importance of collecting customer feedback

Having explored the importance of collecting customer feedback and the types of feedback you should be gathering; we hope you’ll now feel better informed about when and how to collect it.

When gathering customer feedback, it’s also important to think about the type and demographic make-up of the people you’re reaching out to. By using a variety of feedback collection methods, it will ensure that you’re able to gain the most accurate picture of your business from your customers perspective.

Remember, customer feedback can help you shape the products, service and experience that you deliver into something that your customers want to revisit, time and time again. So, it’s worth taking the time and effort to get it right.

Maximise your survey’s success

Online surveys are a fast and effective data collection method for helping you achieve great results, but you’ll only maximise your research success, with the right survey tools to support this.

Find out more