Customer feedback: How to collect & utilize it

Customer feedback is information customers provide about their experiences with a product, service, or company. This feedback can be positive, negative, or neutral and may include customers’ complaints, opinions, feelings, comments, and suggestions.

There are two types of customer feedback: direct and indirect. Direct customer feedback is feedback that you specifically ask your customers for via surveys, interviews, focus groups, and more. Indirect customer feedback is feedback you haven’t asked for and is received through online reviews, social media comments or posts.

With the help of customer feedback, you can make data-driven decisions that put your customers first to enhance your offerings and boost satisfaction. More specifically, when you collect customer feedback, you can:

• Understand customers’ pain points, needs, and expectations

• Identify product or service flaws and shortcomings

• Know what you’re doing right, identify happy customers, and develop effective retention strategies

• Receive innovative ideas and suggestions from your customers

• Refine the customer support process

• Improve your marketing efforts

It’s also worth noting that gathering customer feedback can raise customers’ opinions of you and increase customer loyalty and retention, as 77% of consumers think more highly of companies that ask for feedback and act on it.

When it comes to collecting customer feedback, you have a lot of options. In fact, there are so many feedback channels you might feel overwhelmed. Just remember there is no single best way to get customer feedback. It all depends on the nature of your business, your target audience, and the specific insights you need, so choose the feedback collection method that best aligns with your goals.

Here’s a list of some common ways to collect customer feedback:

1. Branded communities

Branded communities can be a game changer when gathering customer feedback. By creating an exclusive space where customers can interact with your brand and each other, you can encourage a stronger sense of community, loyalty, and even brand advocacy. Within these communities, customers will often feel more comfortable sharing their opinions and experiences openly, providing you with candid feedback that may not surface through traditional channels.

Brand communities allow for real-time discussions, enabling you to address concerns promptly and gain immediate insights into customer sentiment. By engaging actively in these communities, you can ask targeted questions, conduct surveys, and encourage discussions that generate valuable feedback for product improvements and enhanced customer experiences.

When it comes to community management, you can’t do better than Khoros Communities. Designed to help brands build strong, high-performing communities, Khoros Communities can increase customer lifetime value and help your business grow organically, all while reducing your support and marketing costs. Not only can Khoros Communities provide your customers with a space to connect, thus fostering a stronger sense of loyalty and belonging, but it can also allow you to gather feedback about your products and services and facilitate knowledge sharing and self-service.

2. Surveys

Surveys are another excellent way of quickly gathering feedback from several customers — and you have plenty of survey formats at your disposal. You might use a:

Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT)

If you want to get feedback on a specific part of the customer experience, send out a CSAT after the touchpoint you’d like to learn more about. For example, send out a CSAT right after your product is delivered, a new feature has been added, or a customer representative has provided assistance to get a sense of the customer’s satisfaction at that point.

CSAT surveys are relatively easy to implement and simple for respondents to complete, yet they still provide valuable insights into how customers feel about interactions with your company.

Long-Form Survey

While long-form surveys require more time and effort than CSATs, they often yield rich and actionable feedback that can drive strategic decision-making. Long-form surveys can be a powerful tool for understanding your customers’ preferences, pain points, and expectations in greater detail. However, customers may be reluctant to complete these due to their complexity and length, so you may need to offer a reward such as a free product, exclusive discount, or gift card to entice them.

In-App Survey

If you have an app, a short, in-app survey can enable you to collect customers’ feedback about specifics regarding the app. You can learn about desired features, design and user experience problems, and even glitches. Trigger the survey to begin when the user completes an action.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey

NPS surveys can be deployed throughout the customer lifecycle via various channels, from email to text. You can better understand customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your company to others.

You may need to make significant changes if you have more detractors than promoters. If you have a lot of passives but very few promoters, you’ll know you’re not quite hitting the mark and may need to tweak some things. However, having numerous advocates, some passives, and only a few dissatisfied customers indicates you’re on the right track.

Customer Effort Score (CES) Survey

CES surveys can provide insights into the user-friendliness of your products and services. By asking customers to rate the ease of using your products or services, you can discover and fix areas where users experience friction. Include a healthy mixture of open-ended, yes/no, and qualitative, close-ended questions.

Exit-Intent Survey

Exit-intent surveys will appear as visitors leave your website, allowing you to ask why they’re leaving, pinpoint where your website could be improved, and ultimately reduce bounce rates and improve conversion.

3. Emails

After someone purchases one of your products, cancels their subscription, receives assistance, or passes another significant touchpoint, you can solicit feedback over email when the experience is still fresh in their mind. You can ask for feedback directly in the email, or link to surveys or questionnaires available on an external website. Luckily, you can automate these emails to gather feedback with minimal effort. When it comes to how to track customer feedback gained through email, you can either manually sort and analyze responses or use dedicated tools to automate some of this process.

4. Interviews

Interviews are another excellent way to gather customer feedback. Instead of getting multiple choice survey answers or carefully composed answers to questions, you can hear the words directly from the customers in real-time. Interviews can be done over the phone, on video calls, or even in person. Interviewing both new and longtime customers can yield insights about customer sentiment at different stages in their relationship with your business.

5. Focus groups

Similarly, focus groups offer insights into your customers’ perspectives and experiences. By gathering a small, representative group of individuals who are your target audience or have interacted with your products or services, you create a structured yet interactive environment for participants to share their thoughts, preferences, and opinions.

Include a diverse and representative group of participants and a skilled moderator who can effectively guide the discussion by asking open-ended rather than yes or no questions. Not only does this help you avoid asking leading or biased questions, but it can also allow your customers to share more detailed and candid opinions.

6. Social media

Social media isn’t just good for establishing an online presence and increasing brand awareness. It’s also a powerful platform for engaging with customers and hearing their opinions.

Monitoring and listening what customers are saying about your brand across social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X can help you understand customer sentiment and preferences. This real-time feedback lets you respond promptly to inquiries, address customers’ concerns, and identify trends and emerging issues with your products or services.

7. Online Reviews

Online reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, or even your own website are another treasure trove of customer feedback. These testimonials offer unfiltered insights into customers’ experiences, meaning you can understand how customers feel about your company and confidently make decisions that will improve their overall experience.

Online reviews are also the perfect time to interact with customers. Thank them for sharing their thoughts, or reach out and ask what you can do better next time. By engaging with positive and negative reviews, you can demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction and build better customer loyalty and trust.

8. Website Analytics

You can also learn a lot from your website and customers’ traffic patterns, including the pages they visit, the links they click, and where they leave the site. For example, you can tell which parts of your website are most interesting and which areas cause customers to lose interest, giving you an idea of what your customers like and dislike.

Advanced website analytics tools may also use heatmaps and session recordings, allowing you to better understand customer experiences based on their activity. Some tools also allow you to track behavior metrics like rage clicks, which occur when users repeatedly click an element (generally indicating frustration). By analyzing your website analytics, you can understand customer feedback based on their interaction with your site.

Now you’ve got the data — what do you do with it? Let’s explore the ways you can make the most of the insights you’ve gathered.

1. Identify product improvement opportunities

Sometimes, users will tell you exactly what your product or service is missing. However, even if they don’t directly say what they’re looking for, you can discover areas for improvement by carefully analyzing customer feedback and reading between the lines. Customer feedback can help ensure your product or service evolves to meet and exceed customer demands.

2. Apply feedback to your product roadmap

A product roadmap is the perfect place to apply customer feedback. For example, if multiple customers request a particular feature or improvement, prioritize it in your development plan. This ensures that your product aligns with customer preferences and market demands and demonstrates your commitment to your customers.

3. Discover and nurture potential advocates

Getting the word out about your product or service doesn’t always have to fall on you. Instead, you can use your customer feedback to identify potential advocates (the happiest of your users) and nurture them. Whether that means sending handwritten thank-you notes, offering exclusive access to new features or products, or inviting them to participate in beta testing programs, nurturing happy customers can turn them into advocates who rave about your company.

4. Optimize your website’s conversion path

Feedback can also help you identify bottlenecks or friction points in your website visitors’ journeys. By listening to customer experiences and analyzing their feedback, you can pinpoint areas where visitors might be dropping off or facing difficulties. This insight enables you to refine and streamline the conversion path, making it easier for potential customers to navigate and complete actions like signing up, making a purchase, or requesting information. The result is an improved user experience that enhances your website’s conversion rates, reduces bounce rates, and drives business growth.

5. Adjust your marketing and sales strategies

By listening to feedback and tracking what links users click the most and what elements they interact with, you can gain an understanding of what resonates with your target audience and what doesn’t. As a result, you can more easily refine your messaging, targeting, and customer engagement tactics as well as your advertising campaigns, content, and sales approaches to better align with customer preferences and expectations. For example, you might offer specific discounts around popular features, or you could create custom email marketing campaigns for certain segments.

6. Reduce customer churn

When you pay attention to what your customers are saying, you can save yourself high customer churn. After all, you can easily identify unhappy customers, enabling you to reach out to make things right, potentially leading to a long-term relationship. Plus, once you understand where customers are having negative interactions, you can make changes to prevent future customers from having the same experience.

7. Provide top-tier customer service

Customer service matters. By actively listening to your customers’ concerns and suggestions, you can identify areas of improvement. You can use this feedback as a guide while you implement changes, streamline processes, and issue training programs to improve the customer experience.

Customer feedback can make a world of difference — and Khoros Communities and Khoros Social Media Management can help you harness its full potential. Our comprehensive solutions provide the tools to actively collect and analyze customer feedback from various channels, providing a glimpse into your audience’s sentiments and giving you a true understanding of the voice of the customer. 

If you’re ready to take your customer feedback to the next level, request a demo today!