How to collect and utilize Customer Feedback in the best way

 “The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.”

Roy H. Williams, Author & founder of the Wizard Academy Institute.

When you think that your product is one of the best among its competitors, you tend to believe that customers should choose your product regardless of the service that you provide.

However, this is not the case for many businesses.

When you believe that you provide a quality service for your customers and take care of their needs and problems in the best way without the need of hearing these needs and problems from your customers, 

you should stop for a moment and realize that there can be a discrepancy between appearance and reality.

If you paid attention to what I said, you also realized that I used the word “believe” to describe this situation.

This is because

You believe in something that you don’t know for sure.

If you know, you know.

In other words, you may believe for yourself that you treat your customers in an exceptional way and you serve their needs perfectly, however, if you want to know that this is the reality of things, then you should definitely collect customer feedback.

Getting customer feedback will benefit your business in various ways!

Now let’s dive deeper into explaining:

• What is customer feedback
• Why you should collect customer feedback
• How and when to collect customer feedback (with examples)
• Best tools to collect customer feedback
• How to utilize customer feedback

What is Customer Feedback?

Customer feedback is any information that you get from your customers regarding how your business, products or services helped or did not help them in any way. Customer feedback can come as a compliment, suggestion, or complaint. To put it differently, customers can tell you what they like or dislike about your product and how you can improve them.

Of course, customer feedback is not a new thing.

We all can guess that customer feedback has been present for thousands of years. 

Yet, the significance of customer feedback has been better realized by many businesses, and now it is changing the game.

Customer feedback helps businesses build a strong base of knowledge about themselves, their products or services, and their customers.

Collecting customer feedback is now more important and competitive than ever before.

It is a mass awakening when it comes to understanding the value of customer feedback.

Why should you collect Customer Feedback?

As I said, customer feedback does not only help you know about the needs and problems of your customers but it also helps you know about your own needs and problems.

By getting customer feedback you can improve yourself, your products, and your services.

Customer feedback can:

• Help you know more about your customers and how they found out about your business. This way you can invest more in improving customer engagement in those areas.
• Give you ideas that you may have never thought of.
• Point out deficiencies of your products or services that you may never be brave enough to accept for yourself.
• Improve your businesses thanks to the suggestions your customers come up with.
• Build a strong relationship between your customers and your business, which in return makes your customers more loyal to your business.
• Give you insight into new customer segments that can help you open up to new markets.

When you collect customer feedback and make adjustments and changes in accordance with the feedback, you will easily build brand loyalty.

This in return, will help you increase retention and decrease churn.

Research by Harvard Business Review suggests that customers who are surveyed for feedback for a U.S. financial services company are three times more likely to have opened new accounts and were less than half as likely to have defected.

When to Collect Customer Feedback

It is a common mistake to ask for feedback only after a product or service launch.

Customer feedback needs to be collected throughout the product or service life cycle.

Ideation Phase

In this phase, potential customers should be consulted during the ideation phase to ensure that the proposed product or service meets a genuine need and solves a real problem.

The consultation will give you a better idea of how your customers intend to use the product or service, and what functionality and features they expect from it.

Collecting feedback in the ideation phase can be practiced with the help of focus groups, interviews, and diary studies. 

These key potential customers can give you a better understanding of the expectations, needs, and problems of your customers.

Development Phase 

In order to understand whether you are on the same page with the potential customers in the ideation phase, the same key customers should continue to be consulted throughout the development phase.

They should be asked to participate in usability testing, as well as A/B testing of specific features of your product or service.

This way it is easier to optimize the service or product for the expected use of key customers.

Improvement Phase

When a product is launched, Product Managers should start to collect feedback from actual users, rather than potential users that participated in the activities in the former phases.

No matter how much you practice the use of a product and whether it meets expectations and needs, real-world use can always come up with a couple more extra needs and expectations.

Looking at these needs and expectations, product managers will be able to know the desired new features that users expect to solve other problems and come up with different needs.

Thanks to this, you will be able to constantly make adjustments and improve your products to satisfy your customers.

How to Collect Customer Feedback (with Examples)

There are various ways to collect customer feedback and each can have a different effect on customers.

The data that you can get from these different ways of collecting feedback can also vary.

Get Feedback via Email

Getting feedback via email is among the most effective ways to ask for feedback.

With the help of emails, you can both invite your customers to a survey or simply start a conversation to ask about their feedback. 

According to a report by Survicate, email-embedded surveys note the highest average completion rate of 74%.

What you want from an email that asks for feedback is that it should be well-designed and clearly put forward.

You should use plain language and find a way to encourage your customers to give feedback.

Here are two good customer feedback examples collected via email:

1- Amazon

One of the most common problems in online shopping is that sometimes clothes just don’t fit.

Amazon knowing that this is a common problem, sends an email to request feedback from its customers.

After collecting enough feedback, Amazon warns its customers by saying that “This shirt is smaller/bigger than average”.

A great way of collecting feedback and utilizing it, isn’t it?

2- Flywheel

“Fill out our content survey + win a free tee!” 

A truly encouraging method to collect feedback via email.

The choice of the image is one of the elements of the email that distinguishes it from other emails that ask for feedback. However, apart from the image, you can see that the email is:

• Well designed
• Clear about why they need the feedback and how they will make use of it
• Providing information about how long the survey will take

Get Feedback via Surveys

HubSpot’s research shows that the most common answer to the question “How does your company actively listen to customers?” involved using surveys.

Surveys are really practical when it comes to collecting feedback from customers. 

As practical as they are, it can also be challenging to form a feedback survey because there are a lot of questions that you can ask, and you may not know which questions your customers would like to take their time to answer.

When you choose the right and appealing questions, surveys can be really attractive to users because of their practicality.

Here are some good examples of customer feedback surveys:

1- Netflix

You can be sure that Netflix asks these questions for a good reason.

With the help of the answers that they collect via these surveys, Netflix can study the behavior of its customers and both produce and recommend movies and shows accordingly.

They know that it is the taste of their customers that matters rather than their own desires to add movies or shows to their platforms.

2-Skype

Since more people are working from home now than ever before, we all either have had issues with online calls or it is highly likely that we will have problems.

In such situations, we only need instant help.

What is good about Skype’s survey is that they instantly request feedback from its customers and they get back to their customers instantly.

You can also see that customers can pinpoint their problems after a call.

Get Feedback in-Product

Collecting feedback within the products is very efficient because you can directly reach your customers for feedback.

Feedback can be asked time-sensitively and at the most relevant point of customers’ journey.

If you want to collect feedback on the product, make sure it is mobile-friendly and it takes little time for your customers to give feedback because your users want to use the product.

Do not annoy them with long surveys or questions.

Here is a good example from Uber

We all know that people choose their Uber drivers by looking at their ratings.

You can instantly rate drivers in the Uber app and leave feedback. 

Other users can have an insight into what they may come up with if they are to take service from that driver.

It is very easy to rate and leave notes.

It is not only the riders who can rate but the drivers can also rate their experience.

It doesn’t take much time and it is useful for all the parties involved in Uber service.

You can read from here the emphasis Uber puts on feedback.

Work is digital and remote now, so how do I collect feedback?

You could be reading this from your home, from the nearest coffee shop, or from the beachside (🤫 we all did it).

And. we all know that all users are looking for the fastest and easiest way in-and-out of anything nowadays - including your product.

The same goes for feedback.

Not everyone is comfortable with sharing what they want to say on a long google form or through long customer success calls.

Don't worry.

We made this process easier for both you and your users.

UserGuiding now offers advanced (but easy-to-use) surveying capabilities.

With UserGuiding, you can not only onboard and engage new and existing users faster and easier, but you can also collect any kind of feedback and conduct any kind of survey easily.

Do you need how your users found the new feature?

Ask them through UserGuiding's star rating survey, or thumbs up-down survey, along with a feedback question.

Do you need to know how satisfied they are with the initial user journey and onboarding?

Let them rate it through 1-5, 1-10, or multiple choice surveys right on the tab they have open.

Make the questions and the feedback system accessible everywhere, on their onboarding checklist, on the resource center, or directly on the screen.

UserGuiding's price starts from $69/month for all features and fast customer support.

Best Tools to Collect Customer Feedback

Here I want to share with you some of the best tools to collect feedback in accordance with their specializations:

1- UserGuiding - Easy Surveys and NPS with Segmentation and User Onboarding

If you value your users' voice, then it makes sense to create surveys with a PLG onboarding tool.

UserGuiding is a no-code digital solution platform that can help you create in-app surveys with user segmentation and calculate your company's NPS.

User segmentation is specifically important because knowing the ideas and emotions of a specific group of your customers about your products or services will help you better identify your weaknesses and strong sides.

With UserGuiding, you can also easily create NPS surveys and focus on what you can do better for different groups of customers in the most efficient way.

This, in return, helps you identify the ways in which you can reduce bounce rates.

2- Qualaroo - Respond to Customer Feedback in Real Time

Qualaroo is among the top customer feedback software. 

Their customizable templates provide you with the ability to create surveys easily.

Thanks to its IBM Watson’s Natural Language Processing capabilities powered by artificial intelligence-based Sentiment Analysis, Qualaroo can help you:

• Automate feedback mining 

They analyze data in the best way possible and this helps you focus on responding to the right customers.

• Respond to Customer feedback in realtime 

You can create unique CTAs based on emotional scores. For example, an angry response could trigger a task for a customer success team member to reach out to the customer.

• Visualize areas for improvement

You can import response data into tools such as Google Data Studio and Tableau to see common keywords, which customers are upset about your product or service, and which customers are happy, and so on and so forth.

3- Hotjar - Better Visualization of Customer Feedback

Hotjar is a great tool for marketers, UX designers, and product managers because it helps visualize behavior to help understand what customers care about.

Through its heat maps, you can see:

• How your customers are moving around, scrolling, and clicking. 
• How your customers navigate through your website.

And also, 

thanks to its conversion funnels, you can see where your customers drop off.

4- ReeVoo - Gather content for Customer Feedback

ReeVoo has revolutionized the way to collect customer feedback in a way that will convince potential customers to buy or not buy a product a service.

Their content-gathering software collects user reviews, customer stories, and similar content for businesses.

Considering that word-of-mouth is one of the most influential aspects in decision-making, I can say that ReeVo can turn into a go-to tool for customer feedback, reviews, and stories.

5- SurveyMonkey - Easy and Cost-Effective Surveys

Even with its free version, you can collect and analyze feedback that can help you identify your customers’ needs and expectations.

The tool helps you customize your surveys in various ways such as including multiple-choice, short answers, and true & false.

You can easily duplicate former surveys and make surveys anonymous, which is also beneficial for many businesses.

Also, the accessibility of its mobile app and its easy-to-use features make it even better.

How to Utilize Customer Feedback

As I wanted to emphasize throughout the article, collecting customer feedback is a win-win practice. 

It does not only help come up with the needs and solve problems of customers but it also helps businesses improve themselves in various ways.

Let’s talk about how you can utilize customer feedback for the good of your business.

1- Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Using testimonial pages is a great way to promote your business through word of mouth. 

The feedback that you collect from your customers can be a perfect tool to attract potential customers to your business.

You should encourage your customers to give feedback because you should know that you will also benefit from this practice.

Research by McKinsey suggests that word of mouth stands as the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions.

2- Improve your Product or Service

Customers can give you a different perspective on your product or service.

They can give feedback with brutal honesty but you should be brave enough to take it all because it is always an opportunity for you to improve yourself.

You should always keep in mind that you produce for customers and you serve customers.

It is for this reason that the feedback that you collect from your customers is the best tip to achieve success in your business.

3- Build a Knowledge Base for Possible Situations in the Future

The knowledge base that you build by listening to customer feedback will not only help you better learn about your own deficiencies but also will give you a better insight into the best way of dealing with problems.

The more you listen to customer feedback, the better you will be able to deal with similar situations.

When your customers see that you are good at solving problems and coming up with solutions, they will be more likely to respect what you do and stay loyal to your business.

4- Know Your Worth

In any business, it is always important and good to hear compliments.

By sharing positive feedback with your colleagues, you can motivate your team and make them realize that what they are doing is actually helping people in their lives and satisfies them.

This will help you know your worth and give you some extra motivation to keep doing what you do better.

Compliments can also help you focus on what you do good and motivate you to do them even in a better way.

Conclusion

Collecting customer feedback should not be seen as extra work for any business.

Throughout the whole article, I wanted to prove that collecting customer feedback is a win-win practice both for customers and businesses.

The better you know when and how to collect customer feedback, the more you will know about how to improve your business.

Applying the data that you collect through customer feedback, you will only get better and better.

Once you internalize the benefits of this practice and turn this practice into a fun process, you will see that any part involved in your business will enjoy doing business with you.