How to Collect Customer Feedback and What to Do with It

Sometimes customers go out of their way to tell you how they feel about your business. They had a great experience — or a terrible one — and just have to let you know. But more often, it takes an active effort to learn about your customers’ experiences.

Collecting customer feedback is vital for any business. It’s key to innovating, staying competitive, and ultimately ensuring that your product or service is as good as it can be.

In this article, we’ll explore a variety of methods you can use to get customer feedback, as well as how you should use customer feedback once you have it.

Ways to collect customer feedback

The most important thing is to make the feedback collection process easy — for your business and your customers. You don’t want employees to be drowning in feedback and struggling to navigate too many formats, but you also don’t want to limit customers to options that require too much effort on their part.

Thankfully, many common tactics for getting customer feedback involve automated processes that you can set and forget. Aim to find at least one option that lets you solicit feedback with an option that customers can seek out when they have something to share.

Whether your business is on social media or not, customers will talk about you there. But just because people share their thoughts about your business from public accounts doesn’t mean they’ll always tag you. This is where social listening tools like Buzzsumo or Hootsuite can be especially useful.

These solutions let you “listen” for mentions of your brand, product names, branded terms, and other topics that are important to you in publicly accessible social posts. When a term you’re listening for comes up, you get a notification so you can see what people are saying. If you’re not tagged directly, it may not be appropriate to respond to these mentions, but this can be a great way to collect customer feedback and learn what people think of you, your products, and concepts that matter to you.

Google Alerts works similarly, but goes beyond social media to find mentions of specific phrases on webpages, so you can see where people mention you on blogs, forums, and other types of websites.

Customer feedback surveys

Today, it’s a bit unusual to interact with a major business without receiving some sort of automated request for customer feedback. Immediately after transactions, companies send feedback requests in emails or print them on receipts. Any time you talk to a large or mid-sized organization’s customer service, whether that’s via chatbot, text message, or phone call, you’ll be asked to rate your experience. Packaging often includes QR codes or URLs directing customers to feedback surveys. And of course, businesses manually send out customer feedback surveys as well.

These surveys are an excellent way to follow up in the moment, allowing customers to share feedback while their experience is still top of mind. You don’t want to overwhelm customers with survey requests, but you should aim to include them at your major touch points. And while you could use these surveys to learn about any part of the experience, be sure to focus on the insights that matter most to your business.

Here are several well-known and established categories of customer feedback surveys you may wish to use or combine:

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys ask customers to rate their satisfaction with their recent experience (or specific parts of it).
Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys ask customers how likely they are to recommend your business, sometimes for a specific product or service.
Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys ask customers how difficult it was to use a product or service.
Exit-intent surveys ask customers why they’re leaving a particular webpage or site.
Product market fit (PMF) surveys ask customers how they use your product or service, what they think of it, and how it compares to competitors.

Each of these surveys gathers different types of feedback that helps you understand more about the customer experience you’re currently providing. Armed with these insights, you can make more informed decisions about where and how to improve.

Ratings and reviews

While customer feedback surveys are often just for internal use, ratings and reviews ask customers to publicly share about their experience. Customers can decide to review your business, product, or services at any time on third-party platforms like Google, Facebook, or Capterra, but asking for them in the right ways and at the right times helps you get more.

Like surveys, reviews are a form of customer feedback you can easily automate. But while customers can give general feedback immediately after an interaction with you, they typically aren’t ready to rate or review your product until they’ve had more time to use it. If your product is an app or software solution, you can trigger review requests based on specific actions someone takes. For example, if you know that most people see the value of your app after they complete a specific workflow, you might want to trigger a notification requesting that they leave a review after they finish that workflow for the first time.

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If your product or service isn’t software, you’ll want to consider the average time it takes for someone to receive the value it provides, and schedule automated review requests to send around that time, whether it be days or weeks after the initial purchase.

Pro tip: You want to solicit this type of feedback from people who are most likely to leave a positive review. Starting a customer loyalty program can be a good tactic for isolating customers who have had a good experience with your brand.

Since reviews establish trust and influence purchase decisions, you may want to prioritize asking for this type of feedback, especially if you have fewer ratings and reviews than your competitors.

Customer feedback forms

A generic “contact us” form on your website can be a great way to passively collect customer feedback, particularly for smaller businesses that don’t have a lot of customers. These open-ended webpages provide a clear destination for customers who want to share about their experience or ask questions. Adding them is easy, and as long as they’re in your site’s top or bottom nav, there’s always a clear path to feedback.

The downside? Feedback forms like this create the expectation that your business will reply in a timely manner, and you’ll need someone to monitor this feedback. At scale, it can be difficult to manually keep up, and automated replies may not ‌satisfy every customer.

But even at scale, there are certain situations where you may want to point people to a contact form. For example, when someone encounters an error on your site or in your app, the sooner you become aware of the problem, the faster you can troubleshoot it. So if your error messages include a prompt to report bugs or errors, some customers will be more willing to spend a moment describing what went wrong.

The last thing you want is for unknown bugs and dead ends on your site to drive customers away. So it’s worth considering the situations in which you want dedicated paths to feedback.

Customer service calls

Any time you have a customer on the phone, it’s an opportunity to collect feedback. Obviously, automated surveys are a common way to end customer service calls, but the call itself is a valuable learning opportunity, too.

While customers call with a specific objective, the conversation often reveals more about their sentiment toward your brand and their experience with your product or service. People may highlight things that are going well for them while discussing problems with specific use cases, specifications, or unique conditions (such as a factory defect or improper use of the product).

Customers are used to their phone interactions with a brand being recorded, and as long as you state that you’re doing so at the start of the call, continuing the conversation is generally considered giving consent to the recording. Then you can transcribe the call or use AI to summarize the conversation, helping you build a searchable database of feedback from customer calls.

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Sales calls

Sales calls work similarly, but here ‌customer feedback will more likely take the form of objections to your value proposition. (Or agreement with it.) Your sales department likely already records and analyzes inbound and outbound sales calls, but this feedback has applications that extend well beyond sales and should be surfaced throughout your organization. Ideally, you’ll be able to gather enough information about prospects to filter the feedback based on the distinct audiences your sales staff interacts with.

Bug reports and support tickets

With software products, one of the most important sources of customer feedback is bug reports and support tickets. Bug reports enable customers to describe specific problems they’ve encountered while using your product, usually where the software isn’t doing what it should. Support tickets often include bug reports, but they can include broader troubleshooting requests, like issues with configuring the software or navigating a particular use case.

Individual reports and tickets direct your support team and developers to immediate needs and problems, but over time, this feedback can also build a profile of the types of problems your users experience most frequently and how those problems affect their ability to use your software. And just the volume of reports and their distribution across different aspects of your software can give you insights into how you’re doing.

Heat maps

It may seem strange to think of heat maps as a form of customer feedback, but they’re an extremely valuable way to learn about how people interact with your website or software. Customers communicate through their usage: where they tap, hover their cursor, scroll, click, and leave.

A heat map of an individual’s behavior on your site or in your app wouldn’t tell you much, but at scale, this becomes an invaluable feedback tool for learning whether your design and intended usage aligns with how your customers actually behave.

Now let’s talk about how to use the feedback you get.

How to use customer feedback

Feedback isn’t just an outlet for customers to share their frustrations. It should guide optimization, future development efforts, new products or services, and organizational goals. Whenever you collect customer feedback, there are some processes you’ll want to have in place to ensure you get the most from it.

Analyze feedback trends

Every piece of feedback can be valuable. But you don’t want to make conclusions based on a single person’s experience. So what’s the consensus? What do most customers think? What kinds of things do people bring up most often?

Patterns in customer feedback can help you see how people generally describe your product or service, the use cases or benefits people find most (or least) valuable, and things people would like to see changed or added. Some online stores and marketplaces are even beginning to summarize common themes in reviews using AI, helping customers and brands alike see trends faster. But you might also use spreadsheets, word clouds, dedicated tools, and other solutions to explore your feedback.

Analysis is obviously easiest with ratings and multiple-choice surveys, where you can see aggregate feedback and average scores. But even here, it helps to analyze feedback from specific points in time. Suppose your product has thousands of five-star ratings and an average of 4.7 stars overall … but when you isolate ratings to the last three months, it falls to 4.0 or worse. That could be an indicator that something about the typical customer experience has recently changed, and you’ll need to address it before it starts bringing down your overall ratings.

Analyzing feedback may help you discover new ways to describe your product, messaging angles that could be more effective, new products or configurations, features that have significant demand, and the areas where you need to improve your product, operations, or brand.

Showcase positive feedback

Positive feedback is a powerful marketing tool. It builds trust by showing potential customers the kind of experience they should expect to have, and helps customers see that people like them have turned to your brand for situations like theirs.

So when you have strong ratings, high satisfaction scores, and excellent reviews, you want to make sure as many people see that as possible.

Your website is one of the best places to display customer feedback. Quotes from industry experts or major publications might be more persuasive, but customer quotes, average ratings, and raw five-star review counts are the next best thing. These are real experiences from actual people, and you can link directly to any reviews you quote from, so people know they’re authentic. These might live on individual product pages or a general “testimonials” or “reviews” page on your site.

It’s also worth noting: Increasing the visibility of your ratings and reviews could be key to getting mentions from industry publications and thought leaders in your space.

Beyond your website, glowing reviews make great content to share on social media or blog posts, especially if you share about a benefit, feature, or use case mentioned in the review you want to showcase. You don’t need or want to post every positive review, but relevant quotes, ratings, reviews, and survey scores can strengthen your messaging.

Address pain points

Customer feedback can illuminate problems throughout many layers of your business. Once you receive that feedback, your job is to decide whether the significance of the feedback outweighs the effort of resolving it.

Your software may have UI issues that interfere with how people perform specific workflows. Can you update your UI to optimize for these workflows without breaking something else? How popular is the workflow?

Your product may consistently break in particular ways that will require different materials or designs. Will it be an easy modification? Will it fundamentally change your product?

Perhaps there’s an issue with a courier, or your packaging, and products frequently arrive broken. Can you use another, or is the cost of switching too high?

Maybe people think your messaging is misleading. Do you change your messaging, or do more to deliver on the current messaging?

Trends in feedback can help guide where you focus your efforts, but you also can’t discount individual reviews or comments that may reveal more widespread problems. Only a small percentage of your customers will actually provide feedback, so for every complaint about an issue, there are likely many more people who have had the same problem. Negative trends in feedback are obvious red flags you need to address, but one-off reports are certainly worth investigating, too.

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Improve trust with public responses

Many of the places where people review your brand, product, or service allow you to respond directly to customers. While some brands may be tempted to hide and suppress negative feedback wherever they can, it’s important to recognize that this is an opportunity to show people that you’re listening, and you care about your brand’s reputation and integrity.

Potential customers read these public responses, too. They’re exploring whether your public comments reflect the brand you’ve presented in your marketing — does the experience of your actual customers match the experience you tell them to expect with you?

Being publicly flippant or dismissive of customer complaints shows people that you aren’t interested in improving their experience, you won’t take care of them when there’s an issue, and you aren’t receptive to feedback. But when you meet someone’s frustrations with genuine concern and tell them how you aim to do better, you may even earn back the trust of a customer you’d lost. At the very least, you show others that you’ll always make an effort to deliver a quality experience, even if things don’t go as expected.

When appropriate, your response to negative feedback should include an attempt to resolve the customer’s issue directly or “make it right” with some sort of support. And publicly attempting to connect directly with the customer shows others the kind of service they can expect to receive if something goes wrong during their experience with you.

Any time you engage with customer feedback, you should treat it as public communication — because it could easily become public. You don’t want to go viral for a bad response to customer feedback. And if you consistently demonstrate your brand’s values in private and public interactions, that integrity will be on customers’ minds when your brand comes up in conversation.

React to feedback faster with Bubble

Bubble is a no-code development platform that helps experienced developers and novices alike build professional websites, web apps, and mobile apps without touching code. That means fewer bottlenecks, less time spent on development, and faster updates to your software. It’s easy to iterate in response to customer feedback, so you can implement suggestions and quickly see how they react to your changes.

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