Customer feedback refers to the data you collect about your customers' wants and needs, as well as their experiences with your products or services. Customer feedback is a critical part of any CX strategy because it provides many details about your customer’s relationship with your brand, what they want and what they don't like, and gives you the opportunity to find out where you're doing well, not so well, and what steps you can take to make improvements.

Feedback can come in many forms, including surveys, social media posts, call center recordings, and product reviews.

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Why is customer feedback important?

It doesn’t matter what kind of a business you have, you need your customers’ feedback to understand how you’re doing or what your customer thinks of your product or service. A strong customer feedback process can help you make better customer-centric decisions, improve your products or services, optimize internal processes that impact the customer experience, and help build stronger relationships with your customers.

Customer Feedback gives you information about how your products are being used and perceived by customers, what your customers value most about your products and services, and where you have opportunities for improvement.

As part of any CX strategy, collecting customer feedback is important for three reasons:

• It provides an objective point of view on how your products are being received in the market.
• It offers real-time insights into what your customers want and need from you now and in the future.
• It helps you understand how your products compare to competitors' offerings.

Feedback Methods

Now, let’s look at some of the most effective methods for gathering customer feedback.

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Customer Feedback Surveys

Customer surveys are one of the most popular methods for collecting implicit customer feedback as they can help you gather relevant feedback from your customers at each stage of the customer journey.

Short surveys like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT) generally get high response rates because they are simple to understand and require little effort from customers.

Here are a few tips on how to create a good customer feedback survey:

1. Establish clear goal
2. Write a variety of questions
3. Keep it short
4. Distribute surveys through relevant channels
5. Offer rewards
6. Follow up

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Online Reviews

Another method for collecting customer feedback is to collect and analyze customer reviews for your products or services. These reviews may be gathered and displayed with the product on the company’s e-commerce site, retail sites like Amazon, or on a third-party review site, like G2 or Yelp if you are selling a service.

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Social Listening

There is a number of ways you can leverage social media channels to collect valuable customer feedback.

First of all, many social media channels come equipped with built-in survey and polling features. Reading your audience’s responses to polls and surveys on social media will tell you about what your audience is doing, what they care about, and how you can meet their needs.

Another way to use social media to collect customer feedback is through social listening. Going through mentions of your brand and direct comments can give you access to an otherwise untapped reservoir of candid feedback from customers.

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Customer Interviews

Speaking with your customers can be a great way to collect feedback as it allows for a very personal conversation.  While highly this method can provide highly valuable insights, it is also quite high-effort.  

Customer interviews can be perfect for long-term or high-potential clients where you genuinely want to understand the customer’s problem and offer solutions. Be sensitive about the time when you call. Studies have shown that customers are more likely to respond between 8 am and 9 am, and between 4 pm and 5 pm. Lunchtime, between 1 pm and 2 pm is the absolute worst time to reach out to anyone.

When to collect customer feedback

You should collect feedback at different touchpoints during the customer journey. The goal of the feedback should depend on the touchpoint and place in the journey, as your questions and timing could be drastically different, depending on what you’re trying to measure.

Below are some of the most optimal periods to collect customer feedback:

• First-time visit to your website - when the prospect is visiting your website for the first time, it is a good time to understand what their motivations are, what they are looking for, and how they came across your product or service.
• Post-purchase – these kinds of surveys are best delivered within 24 hours of the engagement after the customer completed the purchase or signed up for your product or service.
• Periodic satisfaction surveys – sending surveys from time to time to different customer segments is a great way to stay on top of how your customers feel about dealing with your brand or using your products and services.
• Cancelation of the service or abandonment of the shopping carts - when the customer has decided to cancel their service or did not complete the purchase, is a good time to find out why both to try and mitigate the reason in the future and to provide relevant offers to the customer your are surveying.
• After every support interaction - Collecting feedback after interactions with your customer support team is one of the most common ways to let your customers know that their opinion is valued and gather valuable insights while their interaction with your brand is top of mind.

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How to collect customer feedback

There are a variety of options available today to collect customer feedback of all types and at every customer touchpoint throughout their journey. Below we outline just a few ways you can collect customer feedback.

• Email
• SMS
• Live chat
• Chatbots
• Phone calls
• In-product surveys
• Popup widgets

How to use customer feedback

Now that you're collecting customer feedback, make sure that it is having a meaningful impact on your business.

We recommend taking these four steps to ensure that your customer feedback is helping to drive decisions and make an impact:

1. Make sure your business leaders are paying attention - It can be tempting to collect feedback and only use it for marketing purposes, but business leaders need to know what customers are saying so they can drive change in the organization.
2. Integrate customer feedback into existing processes - While you may not have time to go through all of the feedback you're receiving, you should integrate it into your existing routine. Whether it's a weekly team meeting or a monthly report from another department, customer feedback needs to be included in the conversation.
3. Use visualizations - Customer feedback shouldn't just be numbers on a page. Visualizations like charts and graphs will help you identify trends and spot anomalies in your data.
4. Look for negative trends - Negative feedback should never be ignored. By analyzing the data you've collected, you'll be able to identify trends that could indicate major problems with your product or service.

It’s vital that you are able to use customer feedback to drive positive change in your organization and create better experiences for your customers.

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