How to collect and harness customer feedback to improve your product

We all want to be heard — not just customers but developers, too. Customers want to share their thoughts on a product and have those concerns addressed. And developers hope that the information they share about the product’s worth and function lands with the target audience. 

The best way to respect this reciprocal relationship between creators and consumers? Collect customer feedback — and act on it accordingly. Read on to learn how to get feedback from customers, categorize it, and use it to improve your implementation process.

Why should you collect customer feedback?

Customer feedback is information from people who buy and use your product or service. This information includes suggestions, compliments, and criticism — all sources of vital customer insights. You can use this data to develop and track key metrics including:

• Net promoter score (NPS): How likely a customer is to recommend your product
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): How pleased users are with your product, customer service, and purchasing experience
• Customer effort score (CES): How intuitive or challenging it is to use your product

By requesting feedback and analyzing your findings, you can determine how to pivot and adapt your product to meet customer needs and preferences. Without this data, you’re probably just guessing what to improve, with little evidence. And users might come up with wildly different ideas about your product than you’d anticipated. Rather than struggling against those ideas, figure out how to harness them to improve your product.

How to ask customers for feedback: 4 methods

To collect feedback take a proactive approach. This includes capturing customer reviews, learning from support cases, and talking directly with customers. All these methods will yield vital customer input that can guide your crucial business decisions, like how to design your marketing funnel or when you should refresh the customer experience.

1. Polls and surveys

A customer survey is great for gathering specific information from your customer base. You could send an email or post on social media asking users to rate which feature they most desire.. Or, you could use a customer survey tool, like Zonka or SurveyMonkey. Pose your survey questions to get feedback on your biggest concerns, such as:

• On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product?
• Which features would you like us to add to our product?
• How satisfied are you with the customer service you receive from our company?

2. Customer interviews

Whether over the phone, in-person, or on a video call, interacting with your customers face to face is a helpful way to hear candid opinions. In this live format, take the opportunity to ask clarifying questions and determine the root causes of their complaints and suggestions. If possible, have your users interact with your product during the interview and ask them to think out loud about the experience.

3. Social media

Platforms like Meta and Twitter allow users to record their thoughts openly, making social media an excellent source of honest feedback. Most platforms use tags to make searching for related posts easier. If your product doesn’t have a tag, make one! Craft a post using a tag with your product name to encourage users to use it, too.

4. Email

If you’ve done your email marketing well, you should have a list of people already engaged with your product. Reach out to this audience for feedback, since they’ve already shown at least enough interest to remain subscribed to your emails. These emails can include embedded feedback forms or direct users to customer reviews on a third-party site, like Yelp or Google.

Common types of customer feedback

As you can see, customer insights come in many forms, solicited or unsolicited — and every piece can help you and your team understand the overall user satisfaction picture. 

To understand how all this feedback fits together, organize it into categories. Here are a few common feedback types you’ll want to collect.

Customer satisfaction feedback

This includes comments and ratings that indicate how pleased a customer is with your product. When you ask about satisfaction, try to request hard numbers, such as asking your customers to rate their feedback on a scale of 1 to 10. These numbers will easily translate into your NPS and CSAT. Track this information as you launch new features,adjust your customer service approach, or make other changes.

Sales feedback

Your sales team influences the purchasing experience, so it’s necessary to understand how it’s performing. Send surveys and emails to customers who’ve completed a purchase and those who decided not to. Ask how the sales rep or buying experience informed their choice and encourage them to provide suggestions for improvement.

Preference feedback

Understanding your customers’ preferences can indicate your company’s place in the market and reveal what your product might be missing compared to competitors. To obtain this type of feedback, ask your customers “which” questions, such as “Which product do you prefer?” and “Which feature matters most to you?” 

Support feedback

Even the best product in a given industry will fall flat if it isn’t backed by a robust customer service team that empowers users to navigate challenges. To request feedback on customer service, invite customers to complete a survey after interacting with your support team. Ask questions like “Did the representative help you solve your issue?” and “How well did the representative understand the issue you described?”

How to improve your customer feedback strategy in 4 steps

Collecting feedback can quickly grow overwhelming when user reviews, surveys, and social media posts flood in. Here are four suggestions for building an efficient process for capturing and understanding feedback. 

1. Design a robust process

As your product picks up steam in the market, so will your customers’ opinions. If you aren’t prepared for feedback, you could quickly lose track of valuable data.

Tools like Pendo and HubSpot help you with customer service stages, like intake, triage, and resolution. If you opt for a manual approach to tracking user inquiries and requests, maintain a feedback database (with spreadsheets or another tool). 

Regardless of your method, ensure your process includes a step for scrubbing personally identifiable information (PII), to meet important security standards. Also, establish a retention strategy that adheres to local regulations. Depending on your locale, you might be required to delete customer feedback after you’ve retained it for a certain time.

2. Categorize feedback

Categorization helps you organize feedback into useful buckets. These groupings are typically based on keywords, type, or sentiment. It’s helpful to use a digital whiteboard for this step to visualize how significant some categories are compared to others. 

3. Close any loops

Ensure your feedback strategy creates a closed loop that always ends with the customer. When you follow through with customers, you’ll accomplish two things: 

1. Increased customer satisfaction: When customers feel heard, they tend to feel more satisfied.
2. Reduced duplication: Customers feel less inclined to remind you of their feedback via other channels when they know you heard them the first time.

4. Automate

Wherever possible, find ways to automate steps in the feedback process. You shouldn’t automate everything, especially when communicating directly with individuals, of course. But identifying valuable opportunities to streamline the process can save time and capture more feedback. Consider automation tools, such as:

• Bug-tracking software, like ClickUp or Jira, to track tasks and automate workflows
• AI-powered solutions that can personalize customer experiences and automate A/B testing
• Data analytics tools that help you gather information like crash logs, conversion rates, and response times
• Survey tools that offer survey templates, review examples, and feedback forms, like UseResponse and SurveyMonkey

Elevate your company’s customer experience

Customer feedback and other types of zero-party data allow you to build personalized customer experiences and tailored marketing campaigns. Whether you’re collecting data or aligning user preferences with a great site experience, build an end-to-end digital interaction with your customers with Webflow.

From customized emails to forms and integrations, extract key insights about your audience that enhance your website strategy.