Learning how to collect customer feedback is essential for any business aiming to grow and improve. But what is the best way to get this data?
In this blog, BSS Commerce will go through 12 ways to collect customer feedback, from online surveys to social media listening and how your customers can be used to create action plans. These tips will help you connect with your customers and offer better experiences. Let’s dive in!
Contents
What is Customer Feedback?
Customer feedback is information or opinions from customers about a product or service. It comes in three forms: direct, indirect, and inferred.
Direct feedback refers to when customers interact with the company directly, over emails, phone calls or face-to-face.
Negative indirect feedback is much more subtle because it doesn’t come directly from the company but from social media, review websites or people that talk about it to their friends.
The most subtle of all is inferred feedback, based on data about customer behavior on the website, such as browsing patterns, purchase habits, or usage statistics.
Why Should You Collect Customer Feedback
Collecting customer feedback is so important for your business. Let’s explain why it really matters:
What if you’re a chef, and you are always cooking up new dishes in the kitchen? Without any feedback from your diners, how would you know what they really like? What businesses have to do is the same thing – we need to understand how our customers feel about our products and services.
- Get customer insights: You can collect customer feedback which gives you a window into their experiences. You can even see what’s delighting them and what’s leaving them disappointed. This is invaluable insight because you can then improve and refine things and better serve their needs.
- Find Pain Points: It’s also like having a personal tour guide for your customers’ pain points. They start to give you feedback on what they don’t like and what they feel unhappy with, and when you listen to their feedback, you start to identify the areas where they’re struggling. Now is your cue to change and to come up with new solutions to ease their lives.
- Reduce Churn: Customer feedback can also help you reduce churn and build an excellent reputation. This fosters loyalty because when you show customers you’re really listening and making improvements based on their input, it’s a win for everyone. This will keep them around longer and they’ll even become advocates for your brand, bringing in new customers through word of mouth.
So how to collect customer feedback easily and effectively? Below, let’s take a look at 12 common ways.
12 Ways to Effectively Collect Customer Feedback
Survey
One of the most common ways of collecting customer feedback is doing a survey. Customers share their experience, perceptions and suggestions in a survey. It brings a lot of information that you can use to drive real improvements in products and services, and even the whole customer experience.
From post purchase emails, website popups or in-app messages, you can survey through multiple touch points. You can collect feedback at each stage of the customer journey to understand what they need and where they’re hurting.
There are many analytics tools you can use like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms and Typeform to collect data. You can quickly identify patterns and draw actionable insights from data which are collected from these tools.
Interview
Interviewing customers to collect feedback is great. You’ll have direct conversations with your customers and rich insights you wouldn’t get from surveys or other ways.
When conducting customer interviews, it’s important to:
- Make your customers feel comfortable to share their thoughts.
- Don’t interrupt customers and listen actively.
- Record the interview and take detailed notes.
To answer the question “How to collect customer feedback effectively?”, the interview method is a good choice.
Feedback Form
Next is another common way to collect customer feedback – feedback form. You can see it easily every single day. With feedback forms, you can smoothly know your customers what they think and what they would like to see.
Using feedback form is convenient and accessible. Adding feedback forms to your website is so easy that customers can easily access them when they want to give you feedback. This helps you to ask certain questions and get a structured response.
Let’s see a simple feedback form that asks customers to rate their experience on a scale of 1-5 below:
You can create a feedback form after a customer completes a purchase, asking them to rate their overall shopping experience.
Using Heatmap
You just need to look at customer’s actions through heatmap to know their feedback. Heatmaps give you a great insight into how customers use your website. Using heatmap lets you figure out where you can improve and make data-driven decisions.
Discover: Shopify Heatmap Apps: Top 10+ Picks to boost Conversion
By analyzing data from heatmap, you can learn:
- What parts of your website are the most engaging or frustrating to customers.
- Where customers are clicking, scrolling, or losing interest.
- Potential pain points in the customer’s journey.
This will offer you additional information or help you optimize your website and improve the overall customer experience.
MIDA Session Recording Replay is one tool that can use heatmap data. With MIDA you can record and replay customer sessions to understand what they are doing on your website. By combining heatmap analysis with session recordings, you can see the whole journey of the customer and see what can be improved.
Using MIDA, you can:
- See how customers move through your site and find confusion or friction points.
- Learn about user intent and decision-making process in terms of actions they take, for example, they click something, scroll to a position or move a cursor in a specific manner.
- Replay sessions to discover particular issues or pain points customers met through their visits.
- Observe customer reactions and behavior in real-time and gather qualitative feedback.
If you don’t know exactly how to collect customer feedback, let MIDA make it easier. Read Explore MIDA Recording Replay app for more.
Email is a very direct and personal way to gather important customer insights. So how to collect customer feedback through email?
- Post-Purchase Emails: After a purchase, send a follow-up email asking for feedback on the experience.
- Onboarding Emails: After you have new customers all set up, ask them for feedback regarding onboarding.
- Periodic Feedback Requests: Regular email surveys to your customer base can help you check satisfaction over time.
- Targeted Feedback Emails: Get customer feedback on whether they have used a given product feature.
- Incentivized Feedback Emails: Offer a discount or reward to encourage customers to complete your feedback surveys.
Live Chat Session
One way to collect customer feedback is through live chat. This method is usually used on social media and e-commerce platforms.
Customers are able to give feedback via live chat, and they can do it immediately, so you can capture their experiences and their insights while they’re still fresh.
The live chat allows for more personalized and more interactive feedback, representing much clearer and deeper customer feedback.
You may need: Top 5 Shopify Session Recording Apps: An In-Depth Review
Social Media Listening
Social media listening helps you to track what people are talking about your brand online. You can watch the real, unfiltered feedback by monitoring mentions, hashtags and comments on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
Social media listening brings you benefits:
- Find out without asking for surveys.
- Find spot trends and common issues.
- Help to build stronger customer relationships.
You’ll always find a lot of customer feedback through social media.
Focus Group
A focus group is a small, friendly gathering where you bring together a handful of customers to share their thoughts and opinions about your product or service. It gives you a chance to dig into their experiences to learn things that you might not see in surveys or online reviews.
You invite a group of 6–10 people, who are usually your target audience, to discuss open or specific questions. It’s a nice way to understand not only what customers think but also why they think like that. Focus groups can help you point out detailed insights of your audience.
Feedback Widget
Feedback widgets are little pop-ups on websites or apps where customers can give their opinion in an instant.
A widget would be placed onto a webpage or app asking questions such as “Did this page help?”, or allow users to rate their experience to the thumbs up and down.
Feedback widget is quick, anonymous, and convenient for users. It also is an efficient way to improve your service based on real user input.
Offer a prize or gift
Offering a prize or sending a gift to customers can be a great way to collect customer feedback. You can use this method by offering discounts, freebies, or entry in a giveaway in place of providing survey inputs or feedback.
For example, a clothing brand gives a 10% discount code to customers who fill out a post-purchase feedback form.
The reward is what makes this approach work and it increases engagement rates. At the same time, it helps you to gather valuable insights, especially if the reward is something the target audience is interested in.
Online Poll
If you want to ask a specific question and get quick responses from your audience, online poll can help you. You can get real-time insights into what customers want or think by being embedded on a website, shared through email, or posted on social media.
For example, what if you run a coffee shop and want to launch a new seasonal drink? You can post a poll on your social media page, “Which flavor would you love to see next: Caramel Apple, Hazelnut Mocha or Pumpkin Spice?” Your decision-making is driven by what customers vote for.
Polls are fast and user-friendly, which means they are a great way to collect feedback with very little effort from the participants. It’s perfect for understanding preferences, testing ideas, or gathering opinions on specific topics.
To keep customers engaged and get useful insights, you can use tools like Instagram polls, or even website widgets.
Online Ratings & Review
It’s the best way to get feedback. When customers leave online ratings and reviews, their trust in your brand will increase.
Reviews and ratings are easily available, honest and influential. Feedback from potential customers is often what they look at when making a decision, so not only does it help you improve your product or service, but it also helps to build your credibility.
It’s easy to manage reviews on platforms like Google, Trustpilot, and Amazon. You can also automate requests post-purchase to make sure you get consistent, valuable feedback.
How to Analyze Customer Feedback?
You can’t gather customer feedback, but you can’t do much with it unless you analyze and act on it. Analyzing the feedback you get can give you a pattern, understand the customer needs and make the right decisions to improve the customer experience.
There are some benefits to analyzing feedback. This helps you to find trends, understand customer sentiment, get to know what to improve and how to improve, and also how to retain customers by addressing pain points. Categorizing or grouping similar survey responses in order to group similar customer feedback and identify common themes can make it easier to actually analyze the customer feedback. Use analytical tools to watch and visualize the data to continuously analyze feedback.
But most importantly, you need to act on the insights gathered from the first feedback by developing a set of clear action plans that contains all the necessary changes.
What to do with Negative Feedback?
Negative feedback is difficult to deal with but it’s an invaluable resource for growth. Here’s how to effectively handle and act upon negative customer feedback:
- Acknowledge and Thank: Say thank you to the customer for taking the time to give their feedback. Admitting your concern validates that they are actually heard and that their input is cared for, and sometimes they can be taken seriously.
- Stay Calm and Empathetic: When you get negative feedback, don’t take it personally and respond from a place of calm and empathy. Show them you understand just how frustrated the customer is and that you don’t want them to leave.
- Investigate the Issue: You have to investigate the situation in depth to find out what went wrong and what worked to cause the dissatisfaction of the customer.
- Take Immediate Action: Based on your investigation, you should implement changes, and do whatever you need to in order to solve the problem. It could be something as straightforward as improving a product with a process, or process with better customers.
- Follow-Up: Following your action, have the customer follow up to inform them that you took the steps to resolve their issue. The customer must be happy with the result.
- Identify Trends: If a number of customers do provide similar negative feedback it’s a clear sign that there is some issue that needs to be solved.
Wrapping Up
Collecting customer feedback is the first step to understanding your audience, and improving for the better. By mastering how to collect customer feedback, you can uncover valuable insights that enhance customer satisfaction and build loyalty.
There are a variety of methods such as quick online polls, and in-depth focus groups that will each benefit your business. Remember to select the right methods to grow your business through more powerful connections and smarter decisions.
