The 5 Best Ways to Get Feedback from Your Customers

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Analytics and data provide valuable insights into customer behavior, but sometimes, don’t you wish you could hear directly from your customers? That’s where customer feedback comes in.

Customer feedback helps us understand the why behind people's actions. Why are certain features used more often than others? Why do so many customers abandon the sign-up process at the last step? Or what causes users to reduce their product usage (and eventually stop using it altogether)?

Combining feedback with analytics gives us a clearer picture of what's happening. It allows us to address issues and seize new opportunities with confidence.

This post will guide you through five effective methods for consistently gathering customer feedback. With these methods, you’ll always stay in tune with what your customers truly want and how their needs evolve.

Here are the five best ways to gather regular (and valuable) feedback from your customers:

Surveys
Feedback boxes
Reach out directly
User Activity
Usability tests

Let’s dive into each one!

1. Surveys

Surveys are one of the most popular methods for collecting feedback, and for good reason. They’re simple to set up, easy to distribute, and straightforward to analyze. Plus, they scale well, making them an ideal choice for gathering feedback from a large audience. However, as with anything, some tips and tricks can improve your survey results. There are two main types of surveys to consider:

Long Surveys

This type of survey is more traditional. After crafting questions, you can send your survey link via email, social media, or any other communication channel. You’ll then wait a few days, check back, and hopefully have many valuable responses.

However, many businesses face challenges with long surveys. Some surveys have low response rates, or the answers received are incomplete or unhelpful. But don’t worry – you can use a few strategies to improve your response rate and get the quality feedback you're after.

Tips for Success with Long Surveys:

Keep it short. We've all been there: completing a survey that drags on for 20 minutes. How many of us finish them? Not many. The key to getting quality responses is simplicity. Keep surveys concise, ideally with five questions. Don't exceed 10 questions.
Ask only necessary questions. Every question should serve a clear purpose. Don’t add unnecessary questions just because "it couldn’t hurt." If you don't plan to use the information, don't ask. Otherwise, you’ll waste both your time and your customer’s time.
Start with open-ended questions. These questions allow customers to share their thoughts and feelings, often offering more insightful feedback than multiple-choice or rating scale questions. When you start asking, you may be surprised by the answers.
Prioritize relevance. Keep questions focused on your product or service. You may receive vague or unhelpful responses if your survey is too broad.

Short Surveys on Your Site

Another way to collect feedback is to place a short survey directly on your website. However, instead of bombarding visitors with a lengthy survey, opt for one or two questions directly relevant to the page they're viewing. It ensures that the feedback you get is more targeted and valuable.

However, be cautious not to rely solely on surveys. While they’re great for quick insights, surveys can’t always explain why people respond the way they do. They’re more of a starting point for further investigation. By combining surveys with other methods, you can better understand your customers' needs and motivations.

2. Feedback Boxes

Businesses need a structured process for receiving customer feedback. Customers often identify areas for improvement, whether it's a feature on the website that doesn’t meet expectations or a minor issue they encounter. However, they may not always contact the support team unless the problem is severe. Customers might simply become frustrated and leave without voicing their concerns for less pressing issues. Surveys can help identify problems if the right questions are asked at the right time, but relying solely on them isn't always practical.

When minor issues are left unresolved, they can accumulate, causing customers to seek alternatives. It can lead to losing valuable customers in the long run. Feedback forms should be designed to make it easy for customers to report issues. They should be readily available when needed and unobtrusive when not. Additionally, feedback forms should collect helpful details like account names, URLs, and browser versions to recreate problems and identify solutions effectively.

Businesses should experiment with different placements of feedback forms to maximize responses. However, the way feedback forms are presented matters significantly. For instance, a feedback form that asks irrelevant questions or presents technical jargon can frustrate users. It may discourage them from sharing their concerns, making the feedback form ineffective.

Feedback boxes must be as simple and user-friendly as possible to ensure effective feedback collection. A complicated form can deter customers from providing insights, preventing valuable feedback that could improve the business.

Once feedback begins coming in, it is essential to respond promptly. Every piece of feedback should receive a response. Even if the feedback seems unclear, acknowledging it helps. Some ways to respond include:

Offering early access to upcoming features in exchange for more feedback.
Directly connecting users to support engineers for technical issues.
Requesting more details about the user’s experience to provide a better solution.
Guiding users on how to use alternative features to achieve the same goal.

Assigning someone on the team to ensure all feedback is addressed within 24 hours will improve the user experience and customer satisfaction.

3. Reach Out Directly

One of the most underrated methods of gaining valuable customer insight is simply conversing. While surveys, emails, and analytics can provide data, they often lack the deeper context to understand your customers truly. For example, a customer may tell you they need more time or money, but what are they truly passionate about? What is their real pain point? You'll only uncover this when you speak to them directly and hear the passion in their voice.

Taking the time to talk with customers allows you to dig deeper into their needs and frustrations. For instance, let’s say your SaaS platform helps freelancers send invoices, and you've received feedback asking for more customization options for invoice designs. The reason behind this request could vary greatly. They might be designers looking for a creative outlet, or your current design isn’t working for them. They could even want small changes, like adding notes at the bottom of the invoice. You could be tackling the wrong problem without speaking directly to your customers or missing the real issue altogether.

You can take it further by meeting your customers to get the most out of this approach. If you have any local customers, invite them to lunch and use the opportunity to dive deeper into their experiences and feedback. This one-on-one conversation can provide more insight in an hour than hundreds of survey responses. By engaging directly, you’ll build stronger relationships with your customers while getting a more accurate understanding of their needs.

4. User Activity from Your Analytics

Knowing which features and sections of a website are used by individual users and how often is valuable for understanding user behavior. Web analytics products provide a general overview of site usage, but they usually don't show the activity of individual users. By using customer analytics, it becomes possible to track the actions of specific users, offering more profound insights into their interactions.

Understanding individual user activity is crucial for identifying the reasons behind specific outcomes. For example, consider a business offering a 30-day free trial to convert users to a paid plan. Tracking an individual user's actions, such as when they signed up, what features they explored, and when their activity dropped off, provides a clearer picture of why they didn’t upgrade. In this case, the user did not find enough value in the product and stopped using it.

This data allows businesses to pinpoint users who did not engage with the product effectively, offering opportunities to understand their reasons for disengagement. With the user's email, further outreach can be made through surveys or direct meetings to gather feedback and refine the product. Tracking user behavior provides valuable context that can lead to better-targeted questions and more actionable insights.

5. Usability Tests

Imagine if you could watch someone interact with your product or website. You can see what sections attract their attention, where they get stuck, and what frustrates them. This kind of information is invaluable when improving user experience.

Fortunately, there are now affordable services that offer exactly this. You can define a task you want users to complete, have someone do it, and get a recorded video of the entire process. This would have cost a fortune in the past through research firms, but now it’s much more budget-friendly.

This approach works exceptionally well for new web apps or signup processes. If you’re rolling out a new feature or product, watching real users navigate it can quickly uncover glaring issues and improve your customer acquisition rate.

A simple “Bootstrap Usability Test” can also be practical if you're on a tight budget. Here’s how you do it: Find someone in your target market who fits the profile of your ideal customer. For example, if you're selling to mommy bloggers, don’t just pick anyone; make sure they fit your target audience.

Offer a small incentive, like a free lunch, and ask them to use your product without providing help or guidance. Just observe them as they try to complete a simple task. Watching them work will expose any immediate flaws that need fixing.

However, avoid using friends or family for this type of test. They’ll likely be overly kind and not give you honest, unbiased feedback. To truly understand how real users will experience your product, you need to get feedback from strangers whose personal relationships haven’t been influenced. This will give you the most valuable insights to refine your product and improve usability.

When to Make Changes Based on Feedback

At this point, you’ve gathered a lot of feedback, which is fantastic. But how do you manage all this information?

When your business starts gaining traction, the feedback will flood in – emails, surveys, and user tests will all pile up. Suddenly, you’ll face far more ideas than you could realistically act on.

No matter how much time and resources you have, addressing every piece of feedback is impossible. And even if you did have unlimited time and money, you probably wouldn’t want to. That’s because some feedback will come from customers trying to do something particular, and making changes for them could unintentionally disrupt the experience for others.

When sifting through all this input, focus on identifying trends. For example, if you notice a recurring issue – one person mentioning it this week, another two weeks later, and then a few more bringing it up within the same week – this is feedback you should pay attention to. Reach out to those customers to fully understand their problem, then work on a solution that addresses their needs. By focusing on these patterns, you can make informed decisions that benefit your user base.

Bottom Line

Consistently collecting customer feedback is key to ensuring your business is heading in the right direction. Experiment with the abovementioned methods and discover the best combination for your business.

Make it a standard practice once you’ve established a process for gathering high-quality, regular feedback. This way, you’ll always be in tune with your customers' needs and can adapt accordingly. Begin by utilizing surveys, feedback boxes, direct outreach, monitoring user activity, and conducting usability tests.