Using surveys, interviews, community forums, and social media can help you to interact with and understand your customers. When you pay attention to what customers say, address their needs, and meet their expectations, you build trust. With that trust, you will get feedback that is useful and actionable. 

In this post, we’ll discuss different ways that you can gather customer feedback. Let’s dive in.

Why is user feedback important?

Being successful means you need to know your customers. You can’t know your customers if you don’t interact with them. Getting useful feedback from customers should help you to understand how they use your product, what they would like about the product, what they don’t like about your product, what they expect you to deliver, and why they continue to use your product.

Getting customer feedback is essential to growing your company and maintaining a loyal customer base. Knowing your customers’ wants and needs can help you to develop products that solve their problems and meet their expectations. You don’t need to throw in a feature that nobody asked for. Instead, go to your customers to find out what you can do to meet their needs. 

Types of user feedback

There are several different types of feedback you can collect. To help you figure out what type to gather, you need to know why you want the feedback in the first place. Do you want to explore your product’s user experience and look for ways to improve it? Are you looking for features that will help your customers do their work more efficiently? 

Knowing why you want the feedback will help you to ask the questions that will get the information you are seeking. Let’s discuss what type of feedback you can collect to align with your goals.

Customer satisfaction survey (CSAT)

This is simply a measurement of customer satisfaction after an interaction with your product or organization. This information is often expressed on a scale between 1 and 5, with 1 meaning very dissatisfied and 5 meaning very satisfied. For example, after your support team has spent some time on the phone or in a chat session with a customer, you might send a short survey asking them to rank their satisfaction with the service and help they received.

Net promoter score (NPS)

This type of feedback gives you insight into customer loyalty with your product and brands. The goal is to see how likely your current customers are to recommend your products and services to friends, family, and colleagues. For example, after completing a transaction online, you might ask your customer how likely on a scale of 1 to 10 they would be to recommend your business to a friend.

Customer effort score (CES)

CES can give you insight into how much effort the customer had to expend to achieve a goal. Essentially, you want to know how easy it is for customers to interact with your products or organization (making a purchase, getting a solution from customer support, etc.). This information is valuable because too much effort can translate to low customer satisfaction and loyalty. For example, after a customer has made a purchase on your website, you might ask how easy it was for them to find the product and make the purchase.

Feature requests

This is a good way for your customers to let you know what they need from your products. Feedback about new functionality and feature enhancement can help you to identify trends and gauge market demand as you determine what to release in each iteration.

How to get user feedback

There are many different ways to get user feedback. And each one serves a different purpose and targets different types of users. Before you start, you need to know the purpose of the survey. What do you want to learn from the questions you ask? 

User feedback surveys

Surveys are a popular way to get user feedback. And there are many different types of surveys you can use. One of the most important things to remember about surveys is to keep them short. Long surveys tend to discourage users from starting the survey, or they abandon the survey if it takes too long to answer.

Here are a few ways to deliver user feedback surveys:

• In-app surveys: This is a request for user feedback that is deployed in the app they are currently using. Customers can easily answer questions related to their real-time, in-app experience. Because they don’t have to leave the app, and there are fewer steps to complete the survey, user response is sometimes higher than with other conventional surveys.
• Email surveys: An email asking a customer to complete a survey typically involves a link to an external website. This can be a good way to contact potential customers or current customers who haven’t visited or used your app for a while. However, email can often be ignored and surveys might go unanswered.
• Pulse surveys: Pulse surveys are short questions sent out on a regular basis to gauge customer satisfaction, and engagement, and to identify current issues and problems they might be facing. You can track customer sentiment over time and identify trends or problem areas.

There are several tools that can help you create meaningful surveys including:

• SurveyMonkey
• SoGoSurvey
• Qualtrics
• Qualaroo
• Google Forms
• ProProfs Survey Maker

User feedback interviews

These are one-on-one interviews that let you capture candid and unfiltered user thoughts and impressions about your products and brands. Here are some tips for conducting user feedback interviews:

• Have a goal in mind. For example, your goal might be to understand a user’s feelings about your website.
• Interact with the user before the interview to let them know what to expect and to put them at ease.
• Start with easy questions to help your interviewee relax.
• Don’t interrupt. Let them complete their thoughts before moving on.
• Slow down. Don’t make your interviewee feel rushed.

One-on-one interviews can be more time-consuming—and it might be difficult to get some customers to participate—but what you learn from them can be really invaluable going forward.

Review sites

Review sites like Capterra, G2, TrustRadius, Trustpilot, etc. are important for you and for potential customers. Read your negative and positive reviews on these sites. Negative reviews might be painful, but they can help you to identify problem areas so you can quickly come up with solutions to keep customers happy.

Social media

With millions of people interacting with social media daily, what customers say about your products and brand can have a huge influence. It’s important for you to understand the good and bad things being said about your company. This information can give you insight into how well you are delivering what customers want and need.  

There are a number of social listening tools that can help you to monitor and track what people say about your company. Each of these software packages lets you monitor mentions of your brands, interact with current and potential customers, and join conversations across multiple social media platforms.

• HubSpot 
• Sprout Social
• Hootsuite
• TweetReach

Community forums

A community forum brings together people who already use your products. Customers can interact with other users, share their experiences with a product, offer advice, and ask questions. The nice thing about a community forum is that users can generally find answers quickly because it’s likely that other users have run into similar issues. In addition, your employees can easily interact with customers, answer questions, address concerns, and consider feature requests.