How to collect feedback from the customers

Collecting customer feedback is essential to improving your product or service. But customers will rarely provide feedback if you don’t ask for it.

So how do you overcome this hurdle?

Here are 5 methods to gather honest customer feedback along with actionable tips and free survey templates!

How to Get More Customer Feedback?

Firstly, to get more customer feedback, you need to be asking your audience the right questions at the right time.

Secondly, you need to create a seamless experience for your customers. If they have to put too much effort into providing feedback, most of them won’t even bother.

According to our report

email surveys note the highest average completion rate of 74%.

Surveys are a great way to get accurate and honest customer feedback because they’re quick and easy to answer.In fact, HubSpot has recently asked its customers:

‍'How does your company actively listen to customers?'.

Four out of the five most popular answers involved using surveys.

How to collect feedback from the customers

The right survey software will allow you to run surveys across various channels like website, email, mobile app, chat, and link. How does this help?

Most importantly, you’ll reach customers where they are most engaged. If you’re getting a lot of traffic to your website and would like to ask about website feedback, you should go with website surveys.

Free Website Survey Template Example

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for customer satisfaction feedback, you should go with email surveys or chat surveys instead.

Surveys enable you to collect meaningful customer feedback because you can target them precisely.

For example, imagine a visitor is just about to leave your website. You’d like to know why. Easy! You could show them a subtle exit-intent survey that triggers only if someone wants to leave your page.

In short, different situations require different methods of collecting customer feedback. It's important to find the best customer feedback tool that will let you do the job.

FURTHER READING: POWERFUL Survey Questions.

Customer Feedback Methods Based on Business Goals

Business goal ➡️ Recommended method of collecting customer feedback

  1. Create better converting website and build better products ➡️ Website surveys and In-product surveys
  2. Gather new content ideas and improve your blog ➡️Website surveys and In-product surveys
  3. ‍Ask for feedback on your pricing page ➡️Website surveys and In-product surveys ‍
  4. ‍Find out how people find your website ➡️Website surveys and In-product surveys ‍
  5. ‍‍Discover new feature requests and prioritize product roadmap ➡️Website surveys and In-product surveys or Mobile app surveys ‍
  6. ‍Get feedback on a new design and features releases ➡️Website surveys and In-product surveys or Mobile app surveys
  7. ‍‍Let your users quickly share their ideas, bugs and concerns ➡️ Feedback Button ‍
  8. ‍Get feedback on your newsletter ➡️ Email and link surveys ‍
  9. ‍Research your Product-Market Fit ➡️ Email and link surveys ‍
  10. ‍Measure CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)➡️ Email and link surveys or Website surveys and In-product surveys ‍
  11. ‍‍Track CES (Customer Effort Score) ➡️ Email and link surveys or Website surveys and In-product surveys ‍
  12. ‍‍Measure NPS (Net Promoter Score) ➡️ Email and link surveys or Website surveys and In-product surveys ‍
  13. ‍‍See why users cancel and improve your retention ➡️ Email and link surveys or Website surveys and In-product surveys ‍
  14. ‍‍Improve your mobile app’s usability ➡️ Mobile app surveys
  15. ‍‍Identify promoters and get more positive reviews of your mobile app ➡️ Mobile app surveys
  16. ‍‍Get customer feedback after closing a ticket ➡️ Chat surveys or Email and link surveys

1. Website surveys and In-product surveys

Website and in-product surveys are a great way to get accurate customer feedback. Why? Because you can target them to appear only to the relevant visitors and users. The available targeting options include:

  • Where visitors and users are: display on all pages, display on specific pages, domains, subdomains, regex
  • When surveys appear: exit intent, visit duration, scroll progress, event-triggered, and more
  • Who visitors and users are: sampling, traffic source, location, logged in status, device, cookies, and more
  • Surveys frequency: automated recurring surveys, display once per visit, once per visitor
  • When surveys start and stop: scheduled start & stop date, manual start & stop, a target number of responses

This makes website and web surveys the most convenient way of collecting feedback on a website.

Survey examples: Exit-Intent survey, "How did you hear about us?" survey, Website feedback survey, Pricing feedback survey.

👍 Pros:

  • target specific website visitors and product users
  • install once, survey forever without developers’ assistance
  • create user-friendly design with customized colors, logos, fonts and custom CSS
  • subtle and easy to answer

👎 Cons:

  • limited respondent availability, you need to draw people to your website first
  • might be seen as disruptive

Hint: Think about which group of users you’d like to survey. And what’s the information you want to get from them. Then target your survey accordingly.

2. Feedback button

It’s an always-visible, static button that floats on the side of your website.

As such, Feedback Button is the fastest way to get actionable in-app feedback. Without boring your users to tears with long surveys at that!

However, it only consists of two questions.

So you can’t really use it for more detailed research. If you’re looking for a quick website or product feedback, though, Feedback Button is your best bet.

People love sharing feedback but hate wasting their time. Feedback Button helps you overcome this hurdle as it makes collecting feedback fast and fun.

Usage examples:

  • get users to share bugs, ideas and concerns
  • identify usability issues
  • measure and analyze customer sentiments over time

👍 Pros:

  • quick and easy to install and answer, multi-language options
  • shows your company welcomes customer feedback
  • your visitors don’t have to search to provide feedback - it’s always visible
  • you can add your logo and customize colors

👎 Cons:

  • consist of only two questions - Smiley Scale and Text Answer
  • targeting is limited to page targeting (where to show Feedback Button)

Hint: When you get customer feedback via Feedback Button, you can forward it to your mailbox or a Slack channel. You can also ask users for their email addresses to follow up with them afterward.

Email and link surveys are by far the most flexible way to gather customer feedback. And here’s why.

You can embed an email survey directly into the email’s body. This results in increased response rates as your audience can answer the survey straight from their mailbox.

Take a look at this NPS email survey example:

Users usually expect email surveys to be short which is why you can get completion rates of up to 83%. If there’s more than one question in a survey, though, users will answer it in a new browser tab.

Alternatively, you can use link surveys. They’re great for sharing via social media, email, chat, or any other method. You just need to provide your respondents with a link to the survey, and that’s it!

How to collect feedback from the customers

In addition, Survicate surveys integrate with many marketing tools including HubSpot, Intercom, Mailchimp, Drift, and more. This means that once you send surveys via these tools, you can identify who gave you each response.

How is it helpful to know who answered your survey? You can then respond to customer feedback and follow up with your customers.

But if you’d like your surveys to be anonymous, that’s also possible.

Also, you can choose from over 18 native integrations with CRM, marketing automation, collaboration, and customer support tools.

It’s worth integrating email and link surveys with the tools you’re already using. As a result, you can trigger custom workflows based on the customer feedback you’ll get.

Remember: customer feedback is only as useful as you make it. To truly capitalize on customer feedback, you need to take action after receiving it. For example, when you get a high CSAT or NPS score, it’s worth asking the user for a positive review, testimonial, or case study.

How to collect feedback from the customers

Survey examples: NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey, Customer Effort Score (CES) survey, Churn Survey, Product-Market Fit survey

‍👍 Pros:

  • send email and link surveys via any tool you’re using
  • users can answer email surveys straight from the email
  • use 16 survey question types and support the most common use cases
  • identify survey respondents and follow up with your customers

👎 Cons:

  • if your survey has too many questions, people might abandon it
  • you need to craft an email copy and subject lines to send an email survey

Hint: For up to 4-question surveys, use email-embedded surveys. For more than 4-question surveys, share the link instead.

That’s because when you embed a survey into an email, users expect it to be rather short. If the survey turns out to have multiple questions, some people will feel deceived and abort the survey.

Free NPS Survey Template

4. Mobile app surveys

So how do you boost your mobile app to 5 stars? Well, for one thing, you can collect user feedback directly inside your Android or iOS mobile app. Mobile surveys help improve your mobile app’s usability.

For example, imagine you can get feedback on new designs and feature releases within your mobile app. Or discover new feature requests and prioritize product roadmap.In fact, you don’t have to imagine. You can achieve all these goals with mobile app surveys!

How to collect feedback from the customers

Most importantly, you can target mobile app surveys to appear only to the users that matter. This lets you collect customer feedback that’s actually valuable.

Suppose you want to ask the users how they like your mobile app after a recent update.

Of course, you won’t want to target those of your users who just installed your app. After all, they don’t know how the app worked before the update. So their opinion will be meaningless and it could skew your results.

That’s why you need to ask only the right users for feedback. And to help you with that, you can trigger mobile app surveys based on:

  • specific screens, events, users’ custom attributes or actions
  • show surveys only to a percentage of users meeting targeting rules (sampling)

Also, mobile app surveys don’t require leaving, relaunching, or updating the app. Talk about making it easy for users to provide feedback and offering a fatigue-free experience!

Survey examples: User experience survey, Software evaluation survey

‍👍 Pros:

  • target specific mobile app users
  • install with a developer once, survey forever without developers’ assistance
  • create a user-friendly design with customized colors
  • capture negative reviews before they appear in app stores

👎 Cons:

  • might be seen as disruptive

Hint: Use mobile app surveys when the context of using the mobile app at the time of surveying is important. For example, when asking “How helpful do you find this new button?”.

For more extended product feedback, use email and link surveys instead.

5. Chat surveys

There are a couple of ways to run chat surveys. If you’re an Intercom user, you can run surveys directly in the Intercom Messenger.

If, on the other hand, you’re using a different tool, you can share a link to the survey in the chat window.

Chat surveys are great for measuring customer satisfaction or researching your NPS (Net Promoter Score).

For example, here at Survicate we use chat surveys to encourage NPS feedback.

How to collect feedback from the customers

If the customer doesn’t reply, we tend to send them the same survey by email.

Moreover, chat surveys help you get real-time customer feedback while talking with your customers. They are also more engaging, personal, and fun for people to take than traditional questionnaires.

Survey examples: NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey, Customer Effort Score (CES) survey.

‍👍 Pros:

  • feel more personal and fun
  • get you real-time feedback

👎 Cons:

  • Not all chat providers allow adding HTML to messages. If they don’t, share a link to the survey instead.

Get Started with Gathering Customer Feedback‍

To collect more customer feedback, follows these steps:

  1. Decide what is your goal in collecting customer feedback. For example, it can be improving your newsletter or measuring Net Promoter Score
  2. Choose the most suitable survey distribution method. For example, email and link surveys
  3. Sign up with Survicate
  4. Create your survey from scratch or choose a survey template
  5. Launch your survey!

Survicate provides a lifetime-free plan which gives you:

  • 25 free survey responses each month
  • All survey distribution channels
  • Unlimited users
  • Unlimited surveys and questions in a survey
  • 15 survey question types including NPS, CSAT, and CES/li>
  • 14 native integrations including Intercom, HubSpot, and Slack

The biggest perk of using Survicate? You can accommodate all business goals and methods to collect customer feedback I mentioned in this blog post!

Summary

With 5 survey distribution channels and free survey templates, it’s easy to get customer feedback. Every organization should add collecting customer feedback to their to-do list.

Whether you’re looking for improvements on your website, feature requests, or measuring customer satisfaction, surveys can help you gather accurate and honest feedback from your audience. Don't forget the use the data you collect by closing the feedback loop!

Here’s a summary of the 5 methods to get customer feedback mentioned in this blog post:

How to collect feedback from the customers

How to collect feedback from the customers

Kasia Perzynska

Head of Content & SEO @ Survicate. Hey there! I plan a content strategy for Survicate and guide the content team towards execution. You can see me create some content for Survicate Blog from time to time! :)