5 Best Ways to Collect Trustworthy Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is invaluable information your customers provide about their experience with your product or service. Feedback helps your product managers and marketers understand customers’ general experience and make informed product improvements.

Why is customer feedback important?

Collecting customer feedback provides many benefits. It gives you an accurate overview of your customers’ needs and experiences, which you can use to drive product improvements and innovation.

For example, customer feedback can help you understand how customers use your product or service, functions they like and dislike, improvements they’d like to see, their pain points, and more. You can then use this information to make more informed product decisions and prioritize which features to add or roll back.

Requesting input can also make your customers feel valued by showing that you care about their opinions and want to improve their experience. Acting on their feedback helps them feel involved in your creative process, increasing customer loyalty, satisfaction, and user retention.

According to 2020 research by Podium, trusted reviews help about 88% of customers discover a business. So, positive customer reviews about how you listen to and act on their feedback can help you gain new customers.

When to collect customer feedback

There are optimal times in the customer journey to collect user feedback to get the most insightful, reliable, and valuable results. Two good times to request feedback are during your post-purchase process and after customers have spent time on your website.

Asking for feedback after purchase confirmation or product delivery provides insight into customer satisfaction with the order experience. In addition, they can share information about how long it took to complete the transaction and make recommendations to make the process simpler while it’s fresh in their mind.

Another optimal time to ask for customer feedback is when they have quickly navigated several pages on your app or website. Quickly moving through pages often means the customer is searching for something specific and hasn’t found it yet. It’s an excellent time to ask about their interests or reasons for visiting to enable you to improve and personalize their experience.

You can also collect feedback when a customer abandons their cart. Asking about their shopping experience can help you determine what might have gone wrong and, in turn, offer the best solution. To improve your chances of getting valuable responses, ask for feedback within 24 hours after a customer has completed an action.

Which customers to collect data from

It’s important to collect feedback from all your customers, both active and inactive, to stay competitive. Depending on your goals, you might request input from distinct groups on different topics to get specific insight. Targeting specific groups when collecting feedback helps ensure accurate and valuable responses.

For example, you may want to know what influences customer inactivity, so you collect feedback from customers who’ve been inactive for a specific period.

If you want to know customer sentiment about a new product feature, you could collect feedback from those who’ve already used the feature for some time.

You can also send periodic feedback surveys to better understand the customer journey, enabling every customer to share their experience and thoughts about your product.

How to collect customer feedback

Collecting valuable customer information starts with a good customer feedback strategy to inform your goals, the types of feedback you need, and the best methods to collect that feedback.

The first step is to identify and define the purpose of the feedback. For example, are you measuring your app’s customer satisfaction score (CSAT)? Or are you trying to understand how your new customers use a product feature? Defining SMART customer feedback goals will help determine the right customers to target.

Next, list the questions you need to ask based on your goal. For example, you’d want to use different questions for a survey about a new feature vs. feedback on customer support conversations. It’s also best practice to consider how long a customer will take to complete the survey. SurveyMonkey found that “abandon rates increase for surveys that took more than 7-8 minutes to complete.”

Finally, choose a feedback collection technique that best suits your defined goal.

Customer feedback methods

You can collect feedback on any platform you use to communicate with customers. The customer feedback method you choose will depend on the type of feedback you're looking for and your budget, timeframe, and overall goals.

1. Email

Email is one of the most popular and inexpensive ways to gather customer feedback. Because many businesses use email to interact with customers for marketing, notifications, etc., collecting feedback by email is easy. In addition, email enables you to collect feedback through personalized short and long-form surveys.

Ideally, send a personalized message telling the customer how crucial their feedback is and include a link to the feedback form for the customer to complete. The clearer and shorter your email survey is, the higher your response rate will be.

The most successful email feedback campaigns avoid using “survey” in the email subject line or body content. Avoiding this word ensures your email doesn’t fall into the spam folder and increases the likelihood that the customer will open and read it.

Once you’ve collected the feedback, it’s best practice to send an email thanking the customer for their time. You can also inform the customer once you’ve acted on their feedback to complete the feedback loop and further build customer loyalty.

2. In-app popups

As a customer performs a transaction or views information on your app, a popup can open, prompting them to provide feedback about their experience. Your popup might include a few questions or a long-form customer satisfaction survey link. On web apps, you can add a popup to collect feedback about a live chat with customer success or get their reaction to help documentation they just read. Another great example would be a popup enabling them to rate your mobile app in the app store.

Adding too many popups can frustrate your customers, so limit it to one or two per session. Questions should also be concise and actionable. For instance, your app popup could include a yes or no question to check if your product meets the customer’s expectations and a field to explain what they like or dislike about it.

When creating in-app popups, you should also consider the user flow or experience. For example, you might change the layout when asking more than three survey questions to avoid having the customer scroll vertically or overwhelming them with the number of questions.

3. In-product behavioral data

You can send a multitude of surveys, but the most honest measure of your customer’s experience is their user behavior in your digital product. And if you’re like most companies, you have a wealth of customer feedback within your product in the form of behavioral data.

Analyzing this data can help you identify the user actions that bring about friction or delight. You can then turn these insights into data-driven actions to improve the customer experience, like making it easier to sign up for an app or faster to complete an ecommerce transaction. Using behavioral data is particularly valuable as your customer base grows and the number of items you need to get feedback on increases.

Today’s best digital analytics platforms give you a 360-degree view of your customer experience, providing visibility along the entire user journey. Performing a comprehensive customer journey analysis enables you to pinpoint where you can enhance customer experiences.

In addition to being an intrinsic form of feedback, behavioral analytics also enables you to segment your customer base and be more precise in who to target with surveys on different topics.

4. Social media

With about 4.7 billion people using social media, you can reach your customers and collect feedback organically through questions, polls, and built-in social platform features.

Instagram, for instance, enables you to use Stories to create polls and use a sliding scale feature to ask users to rate a product.

With Twitter, you can share thoughts and receive comments and recommendations through its reply or quote feature. You can also run polls for up to seven days on Twitter.

Social media also provides feedback without any prompting from your team. A customer may tag your brand in a comment and post about a product or service.

Businesses that use social media as a major part of their go-to-market strategy should regularly monitor social feedback because that’s where most of their current and potential customers are. Promptly following up on feedback and reviews shows you care about your customers.

5. Customer interviews

Interviews allow you to ask as many questions as possible and get valuable responses. Customer interviews are helpful for marketing purposes and can make the customer feel special. However, interviews require a lot of preparation from both parties, so they’re not a great fit for all customers.

When interviewing, start with light conversation to make the customer comfortable and then move on to questions designed to get the information you want. You might ask follow-up questions to show you’re actively listening to them.

Finally, remember to thank the customer for their time and effort. A simple note or some compensation in vouchers are great options.

How to analyze customer feedback to identify key insights

There are three ways to analyze your customer and product feedback: manually, using scripts or code snippets, or utilizing product intelligence tools.

Manually analyzing customer feedback is tedious and involves collating the data in one place and laboriously grouping it into themes and sub-themes. This method may be effective when your response volume is low, but with large amounts of data, manual analysis could also lead to errors, rendering the data inaccurate.

You can also add code to group feedback based on set keywords. Instead of categorizing the data manually, the scripts automatically loop through each input to extract the keywords and classify them appropriately.

Digital analytics tools like Amplitude Analytics make it easy to analyze feedback, translating qualitative data into actionable customer insights.

When to follow up on customer feedback

Your follow-up time frame depends on the type of feedback you request and how customers respond.

For example, a month or two may be suitable for general customer experience feedback follow-ups. But three days might be best if following up on post-delivery feedback because customers are more likely to quickly forget about their recent purchase experience than about the general app experience.

Other factors influencing follow-up time include negative feedback, unhappy customers, or publicity. You don’t want to wait a week to follow up on a negative social media review. Instead, you likely want to respond within hours.

You can also use customer feedback tools like SupportLogic that automatically flag urgent feedback that needs a quick response.

Adopt a winning customer feedback program with Amplitude

Gathering and acting on customer feedback is key to creating a high-value product or service that attracts new customers, keeps your existing ones returning, and builds trust. And while we’ve covered various mechanisms for capturing that customer feedback, you don’t have to tackle it alone.

Amplitude Analytics can help you make sense of your product data and customer feedback to streamline and improve your customer journey. And by analyzing how customers behave within your product, you can proactively spot trends and potential issues—before you hear about them from customers.