How to Collect Customer Feedback to Improve your CX?

⏱ Reading Time: 4 minutes

Since nowadays everything revolves around customer experience, businesses are mostly focusing on providing the best possible experience in every sense. During that process, companies are learning that customer feedback matters more than they thought in the past. 

For those reasons, they started to put a lot of effort to gain customer feedback, as they are becoming aware that the best way to improve CX, products or services is exactly using the feedback of the end-users.  

 🚀Read Customer Service: A Guide for Successful Business Growth 🚀

But before you start collecting a large amount of data in the form of user feedback, it is important to find the main goal or the focus point. Is it because you are planning to release a new feature? Would you like to improve your current product? Maybe you are chasing to downsize the swamp of complaints you are getting lately? After answering these questions, companies will have a clear goal of what questions to ask, behaviors to track and metrics that are to be used.

Read the second part of our Feedback series of articles! 

There are many methods to collect feedback from customers, but each of the solutions is not universal for every case and company. That is why it is important to find the one that fits the company, the goal and the metrics you’d like to track. In this article, we are going to explain several methods, but first, let’s start with the basics. 

What Is Customer Feedback? 

Customer feedback is information gathered from customers about their experience with products and services a company offers. Whether customers are satisfied or dissatisfied, it is a great resource that can help to improve both customer experience of the company, its products or services.

Picture 1. Customer feedback 

Why is Customer Feedback Important? 

Beside it is a great resource for improving CX, it can also help companies to identify and eliminate problems much faster. Customers that complain about the products and services or CX are pointing out their pain-points and concerns with a company. Those complaints exactly are directions that a company needs to follow to become more customer-centric and to meet customer’s needs.

And every business that can make their customers happy and satisfied by solving their problems, is on a great road to get good referrals. According to HubSpot: “The #1 most common source of new leads are referrals.”

Losing customers is much of a bigger problem today, then it was in the past. Companies competing with you will gladly welcome your disappointed customers, and they’ll do it with care and a huge discount. Besides losing customers, companies can also lose their good reputation, if they are not seeking feedback to listen to it. Moreover, your customers that were disappointed or dissatisfied will share their bad experience with their friends, colleagues and social media. That is why good customer feedback truly matters.

Picture 2. Ventana Research

What is the Company Perspective on Customer Feedback? 

Companies that listen to the feedback of their customers have a great chance to be highly successful in their field and win the hearts of their customers. Designing customer journey, marketing content and new products/features according to the feedback of your loyal customers, will get the company on the right track for success.

The ultimate goal of customer-centricity is to give customers exactly what they are searching for, wrapped up in the experience that suits them best. While it may sound complicated, customer-centric companies are not solely the ones with a large number of resources on their hands. Quite the opposite. Everyone in the field has the same opportunity. And that is to listen and act according to the feedback of the customers. 

How to Collect Customer Feedback?

It is important to realize that collecting customer feedback is a fundamental part of growing any business. It helps to build a complete picture of the experience each company is delivering to its customers and to better understand customer expectations. Once customer feedback is collected, it can be an insight into creating a better customer experience, design of the new marketing materials, or to serve as a breaking point for the strategic decision-making.

Collecting customer feedback, when done right, can be a sort of the brand campaign where companies reward the time and effort customers put into writing their opinion. Small incentives like discounts and freebies will get you places!

To help you get started, here is the list of the most common ways to collect customer feedback.

Customer Feedback Surveys

The easiest way to collect feedback is by using surveys. Online surveys are one of the most popular and used techniques because they provide immediate, real-time feedback. Customers prefer simple and short ones, so it is important to sit down with the customer support team and write the exact questions they want answers from. 

For simple and short surveys, there are a few tools out there to use, such as Qualaroo. And for longer-form surveys, we recommend Typeform, GetFeedback and Survey Monkey.

Picture 3. Types of feedback 

Paldesk Feedback Form

Leading brands and companies all want to gather customer feedback in order to create a more seamless customer experience. Companies use feedback not only to collect feedback but to engage with customers and find out more about the experience they have with a certain brand.

And one of the best ways to gather that feedback is by implementing a feedback widget on your website. Paldesk Feedback widget is a responsive website widget used to collect user feedback directly from the website. By creating a feedback widget you can customize form colors and messages to fit your web, and have a detailed look at all the feedback you receive.

Since Paldesk loves to make things simple when it comes to customer service, the installation of this widget is also simple and fast, as you can install it in just a few minutes. Also, the widget is free. 

Picture 4. Collect customer-feedback with Paldesk

Collect Customer Feedback Using Live-chat 

According to a study, 44% of online buyers claim that live chat for e-commerce is a feature they gladly use while shopping. Having a live chat is an amazing way to assist your customers in real-time. Plus, collecting feedback through live-chat will seem much more natural, then sending a bulk e-mail to the entire e-mail database. 

For example, the Paldesk customer success team surveyed each of the e-commerce clients about their vision of live-chat and how it helps them improve the experience of their website and online shopping experience. 

The feedback was collected through live chat, during the 30 days campaign and with the incentive of free Paldesk license for one additional customer service agent. The feedback we collected through live chat support has given us an insight into customers’ vision of live chat which is:

1. Live chat helps companies convert e-commerce website visitors into buyers

2. Live chat helps track intent and improve sales funnel

Using this data, Paldesk’s marketing team has created new landing page messages, and key live-chat advantages became our selling points! 

Picture 5. Paldesk eCommerce Landing Page 

Social Media Feedback Collection

We are all witnessing the powerful impact of social media on business communication and customer feedback. Channels such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn are powerful resources for gaining customer feedback. And according to a Marketing Land study: “71% of all complaints on social media are posted on Facebook.”

Feedbacks from social media can help to improve customer experience, and to quickly respond to any complaints customer have.  The core strength of social media is allowing businesses to have a more direct and real-time conversation with their customers or potential customers. 

Customer’s Website Behavior

Besides all the things mentioned above, businesses can also analyze visitors’ behavior on their websites in order to collect customer feedback. 

Some of the most familiar analyzing tools are heatmaps, scrolls and visitors recordings. You can have insight into all these metrics with Hotjar – a powerful customer journey tool. 

Online Customer Reviews

Did you know that 86% of visitors hesitate to purchase from a business that has online negative or bad reviews? Online reputation is and should be very important for every business. 

With online reviews sites like Capterra, G2 Crowd, Finance Online and many more, it is very important to understand the impact they can have when it comes to reviewing products and services. And what companies should have in mind – when they are looking for feedback, potential customers are looking for that same feedback too. 

After Collecting Customer Feedback 

Customer feedback is as good as you interpret it. Have a deeper insight into the minds of your customers by categorizing gathered feedback and cross-referencing it with your NET promoter score, website data, and available website analytics. 

While it might take some time, it will help you improve your customer experience!