How to Collect Customer Feedback in 2024

Now more than ever, the tech industry is changing and evolving at break-neck speeds, but what will never change is just how important it is to collect customer feedback. Finding out what people think about your product is vital, be it from loyal advocates, potential adopters, and even the inevitable but never-fun unhappy customers.

Frustratingly, getting feedback from customers when you manage a digital product can be tricky. There are so many various ways to gather it, and then, once you have it… what do you do with it?

If you’re a Product Manager or Product Owner in charge of the development of a digital product, you need to be operating in a process of continuous discovery. Gathering regular feedback can help you see what’s working, what’s not, and how your product could stand to improve.

Luckily, there are tons of ways to solicit useful feedback from the people using your product every day. So, let’s explore them. Join us for a deep dive into the methodology behind collecting customer feedback online – including why it matters, and what to do once you’ve collated those all-important insights.

In this article we’ll cover:

• What is customer feedback?
• Why is gathering customer feedback so important?
• What are the best ways to collect customer feedback online?
• What should you do next with your customer feedback?

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is any information, good or bad, that you receive about the quality of your products or services from the people paying money to use them.

Sometimes you’ll find it really easy to collect customer feedback – especially when you’re doing things badly. People are naturally more inclined to leave negative reviews than positive ones. In fact, people are 1.7 times more likely to give feedback following a bad experience than a ‘normal’ one. 

So, if something’s really broken, you’ll probably already know about it thanks to some vocal, unhappy customers. But here’s the thing: negative customer feedback is actually a golden opportunity. It’s ironclad proof that something isn’t working; it removes assumptions and shows you exactly what needs to change.

Why is collecting customer feedback so important?

Nobody likes criticism, so it’s tempting to steer clear of willingly soliciting negative feedback. But living in a bubble won’t help your product grow and evolve, and not listening to your customers is a surefire way to frustrate them.

Besides, customers want to be heard, and they trust each other more than they trust you. In 2019, SurveyMonkey found that some 91% of people feel that product innovation should come as a result of listening to customers, versus just 31% who think a team of in-house experts can achieve the same thing.

And you know what else? Any customer feedback you did manage to gather is a powerful indicator of the feedback you didn’t. A recent ThinkJar survey found that only one in 26 customers will voice their complaints; the rest will just up and leave without so much as a murmur.

That means that for every negative piece of customer feedback you manage to collect, 25 other people feel the same but have already moved on to a competitor, without telling you why.

Oh, and another added bonus to sending out those survey questions: if customer feedback is really positive, then you can use what people write as testimonials, both on your site’s product page and in your social media activity.

What are the best ways to collect customer feedback online?

It’s never been easier to understand what people think about your products and services, and it’s never been more important to understand what your customer experience is really like. You need to know what people are thinking if you’re going to have an effective customer feedback strategy.

Here are the top 10 digitally-focussed ways to collect customer feedback:

1. In-app popups
2. in-app feedback widget
3. Customer feedback surveys
4. Customer feedback portal
5. Review sites
6. Live chat
7. Social media
8. Heatmaps
9. Product adoption analytics
10. Be easily contactable

1. In-app popups

If you have customers working within the confines of your tool, you have a captive audience that you can occasionally prod for feedback. A pop-up window in your product – perhaps set to appear after customers have been using it for a certain number of days – can be used to ask them for many different types of responses.

You might ask for:

• direct ratings out of five or ten
• qualitative “tell us what you think” feedback
• reviews on relevant app store pages

Just remember not to bug people too much; with great power, comes great responsibility. You don’t want to end up getting bad feedback about how you collect customer feedback.

2. In-app widget

One top trick is to make it as easy as possible for your users to provide you with their feedback. By including an in-app button that your users can seamlessly use to tell you what they’re thinking, you make it more likely that they will. You can even encourage increased engagement by offering incentives, and thanks to the added convenience you’ll be collecting more valuable customer feedback and gathering actionable insights.

You’ll get real-time information about issues as soon as they occur, which means you can get on with fixing them sooner, and avoid more unhappy customers reporting the same issue.

So many tools out there can help you do this, but we recommend you try using ProdPad to collect your customer feedback. Our in-app widget works hand in hand with our customer feedback portal (more on those below), and together they’re seamless and convenient.

They’re also fully customizable. You can adjust them to fit your branding, increasing trust and credibility with your customers, and providing a more cohesive user experience. It’s a great way to see how well certain parts of your app feed into your overall understanding of your customer satisfaction levels. The widget’s also a smart replacement for live chat if you don’t have the staff to make that work.

3. Customer feedback surveys

There are loads of online survey providers out there, from paid services like SurveyMonkey, or Typeform to free resources like Google Forms. Most are incredibly customizable and easy to use, and they all collate feedback in one place for easy analysis – or let you export it into other formats.

Remember to keep surveys relatively short. Unless you’re offering an incentive like money off a subscription or a prize giveaway, customers will soon tire of filling out questions and are likely to stop answering with any care or accuracy if things drag on.

It’s a good idea to try mixing multiple choice with a few longer-form open-ended question text fields, as well as asking the industry-standard NPS and CSAT questions. 

Customer surveys, whether you use a tool or send out a simple email survey, are a great way to get quantitative and qualitative data about customer satisfaction. Perfect if you want to dig in right in and see how your customers really feel about your product.

4. Customer feedback portal

Having a branded customer feedback portal on your website means your customers can come and ask for features they want and tell you what they think about the ones they’ve been using. This’ll give your product team a clear understanding of what the people who use your product want you to build next, and what needs fixing.

This is an invaluable way to get some good use out of the customer feedback you’re collecting, to close the feedback loop, and to make sure that you’re building things that will boost customer loyalty. 

Using something like ProdPad means you’re not just housing a feedback form on your website. We already mentioned that ProdPad has a customizable feedback portal, but it’s more than just that. You’ll also be collecting those feature requests into a place that helps you to do something useful with them.

You can link specific pieces of feedback directly into your Ideas in your ProdPad backlog, providing valuable insights on which features or fixes your customer base actually wants. That makes it much easier to prioritize the best thing to build that’ll improve your user experience.

PRO TIP – If you collect feedback with ProdPad, your Customer Support team is going to love you. They will know when the requested feature has gone live, so they can quickly email everyone who requested it. As the famous old saying goes, “Happy customers and a happy Customer Support team mean a happy life for a Product Manager.” Or something like that, anyway…

5. Review sites

According to eMarketer, a Bizrate Insights survey showed that a massive 98% of buyers scour online reviews before making a purchase. Like, that’s pretty much everyone.

So, it’s important to know what those reviews are saying about you online. That way you can fix any common concerns and reply to any particularly aggrieved users. In fact, there’s a solid argument to be made for replying to every single review you find, whether it’s good or bad.

The best way to keep on top of reviews on third-party sites is to employ a listening suite that can scour everything from reviews to tweets and aggregate them for you. The best customer experience management suites can collate this with feedback from any other source you can think of, and suggest actions and next steps.

If you work in SaaS in particular, you’ll be no stranger to sites like G2. Generating positive reviews there is a great way to get yourself some of those oh-so-recognizable badges. They’re a wonderful way to show that your product gets so much positive feedback that your customers love you enough to leave you a glowing review. 

6. Live chat

Live chat is a great way to answer customer questions and queries instantly, and it doesn’t require them to hang around on the phone because follow-up replies can happen throughout the day. Even better, live chat can also become a powerful feedback engine.

The end of every live chat is an opportunity to ask for the customer’s opinion – and not just about how their customer support query went. You can take the chance to ask them if they’d be willing to provide a quick review of your product or give insight into what they do or don’t like about it.

As with any method of collecting customer feedback, not everyone will bother. But if you automate the ask, you lose nothing and stand to gain a ton of valuable opinions.

7. Social media

According to Sprout Social, 47% of customers with a complaint to air will do so on social media. If almost half of your negative feedback is plastered over Facebook and Twitter, it pays to be on the lookout for it. Social listening tools (like Sprout Social) can do this for you, while also flagging priority messages that need to be actioned first.

But you can be proactive, too. Why not occasionally run polls in Tweets or Instagram Stories? Or explicitly ask people what they’d like to see in future updates? You’d be surprised how many great ideas and keen advisors there are out there.

The response rate on social media platforms is a real draw too: it’s virtually instantaneous and easy for your customers to leave. You’ll likely be amazed by how much information you gather, especially if you have a large audience on your social media channels. Just ask Wendy’s.

So remember – social media isn’t all eccentric billionaires and cats playing pianos. It’s actually a wonderful way to get direct feedback from an online community of super-engaged people!

8. Heatmaps

Heatmapping technology is a pretty technical way to understand how people are using your product, though it can also pick out any issues they might be facing with it – even ones they might not be able to articulate themselves.

By embedding tools like Smartlook into your product, you can get an aggregate view of scrolling, cursor, and click/tap behavior across all your users. One valuable insight you’ll get from using a heat mapping tool is seeing something in the user flow that you might not have picked up before the feature went live,

For example, you might see that your users are rage-clicking in a particular place, or bouncing when you don’t expect them to. Then, when you look into it a bit further, you might realize that a pop-up is blocking the next action, or that your CTA copy is misleading.

The catch here is that you can’t see individual journeys, and understanding what it all means requires a bit of lateral thinking.

9. Product analytics

Like heatmap tools, product analytics suites are platforms that monitor usage across your entire product. They can track a whole heap of product adoption metrics with feature-level granularity, making them a passive method of collecting customer feedback that doesn’t bother the user for input.

Let’s say you’ve released a new feature in the latest version of your product. Product analytics suites can look at metrics like feature adoption rate, time-to-first-action, and active users, to help you figure out if that new tool is landing how you’d like.

Product analytics tools can be really comprehensive, but they also suffer from the same major drawback as any analytics suite: you need someone who knows how to interpret data in order to derive actionable insight. After all, generating a bunch of stats around product adoption is great for morale, but what’s even better is the ability to learn as much from those metrics as you would from a piece of written feedback.

We’ve actually got a breakdown of the 7 best product analytics suites right here to save you the trouble of searching them down yourself.

10. Be easily contactable!

How many times have you had to dive several clicks deep into a website to find actual contact details for a company? It’s infuriating, right? So, don’t do that.

The humble email is still an excellent way to garner feedback from your customers, so don’t make it difficult for them to reach you.

Have a good long think about how quick and easy it is for users to send you an email. Maybe there should be a button in plain sight somewhere in the product itself? Or perhaps an email link in the footer of your website?

We’d advise cutting down on the required form fields, and maybe even using a dropdown list for possible topics, which are then delivered to separate inboxes.

What are the best ways to collect customer feedback in person?

While we do of course live in a digital age, there’s no better way to be sure of getting some feedback than having your customers there in the room with you.

Here are some of the best ways to collect some direct user feedback:

1. Interviews
2. Focus groups
3. Customer advisory board
4. User testing sessions

1. Interviews

Interviews are a fantastic way to get deep, personal insights into what your customers are thinking and feeling about your product. Start by carefully choosing a diverse mix of users, ensuring you hear from different perspectives. Flexibility in scheduling and creating a comfortable environment (be it in-person or online) is important if you want to encourage people to engage.

You’ll need to have skilled interviewers who can steer the conversation effectively, ask open-ended questions, and really listen, encouraging interviewees to share detailed experiences and ideas. And after each interview, make sure to send a heartfelt “thank you”! It’s more than just good manners; it’s about showing appreciation for their valuable time and thoughts, and building an even more personal connection between them and your product.

Sometimes, you might want to follow up for more clarity, but only if they’re comfortable with it. This follow-up can shed more light on the initial feedback, adding even more value to what you’ve learned. Either way, dive into the data from these interviews, looking for patterns, pain points, and other golden nuggets to build out your user stories. Then, it’s all about turning these insights into action.

2. Focus groups

In a similar vein to interviews, focus groups can be goldmines for getting diverse, in-depth customer feedback, by bringing together a small group of people from different backgrounds and walks of life to talk about your product. It’s fascinating how a mix of perspectives can shed light on things you might not have considered.

Again, make sure to have a skilled moderator to lead the discussion. They’re like the conductor of an orchestra, ensuring everyone’s voice is heard and keeping the conversation flowing and on point.

Preparation is key to getting the most from the process. Set clear goals for what you want to learn from each group. It’s not just a casual chat; you’ll need to have specific topics and questions in mind to steer the conversation. But there’s always room for spontaneity – sometimes the most unexpected insights come from just letting the conversation take its own course.

Try to create a comfortable and inviting atmosphere. You want your participants to open up, share their honest thoughts, and interact with each other. That’s where the magic happens – when people start bouncing ideas off each other, so it can help to use icebreakers to lighten the mood and get everyone talking.

3. Customer Advisory Board

Your Customer Advisory Board (CAB) is like the Small Council from Game of Thrones, made up of your most engaged and influential customers. These members should be hand-picked for their diverse experiences and deep understanding of the market. The idea is to keep this group tight-knit, usually around 10-15 members, to foster meaningful discussions and easy management.

CAB meetings are like regular check-ins, usually happening every quarter or so. Again, you should always be clear about what you want to get out of these sessions – it could be anything from feedback on a new feature to strategies for tackling market changes. The key is to have structured agendas but also leave room for open, candid conversations.

These sessions aren’t just about you talking at your customers. It’s a two-way street, giving you space to dive into problem-solving, and tapping into the diverse expertise of your board members. Their unique perspectives often lead you to innovative solutions you might not have considered otherwise.

Post-meeting, don’t just pat yourself on the back and call it a day though. Follow up with a summary of what was discussed and the action points you plan to tackle. This follow-through is the whole point. It shows your CAB members that their input isn’t just valued, it’s instrumental. And, by implementing their feedback, you’re not just fine-tuning your product; you’re building a partnership with some of your most valuable customers.

4. User testing sessions

User testing sessions make for great reality checks. Bring in people who represent your actual users – you’ll want some that are already customers, and some that might be potential users. The goal is to see your product through their eyes.

It’s all about understanding how your product fits into their daily lives. By creating realistic scenarios for them to work through, you get a window into how intuitive and user-friendly your product really is. After all, you probably know your product inside and out, which means you’re probably not a good judge of how new or less experienced users approach it.

Note where they stumble, what makes them pause, and when those ‘Aha!’ moments crop up. It’s a fascinating process and can be super informative. Encourage them to think out loud as they navigate, giving you a peek into their thought process. This fresh, immediate feedback is gold – it’s raw and often points out things you might not have noticed with your burden of product knowledge.

Next, sift through it all, looking for patterns and key takeaways, then turn these into action points for your team. It’s an ongoing cycle – test, learn, improve, and test again. And again we make sure to loop back with our participants, showing them how their input is shaping our product. It’s not just about finding flaws; it’s about constantly evolving and making our product the best it can be for those who use it.

What should you do next with your customer feedback?

Ok, so you’ve got ears and eyes all over collecting customer feedback, and you’re running feedback sessions and interviews. If what you’re hearing is positive, you proudly display what’s been said on your website as customer testimonials, and share it with your team as a morale boost. But… what if it’s negative?

Well, that’s when you act. Don’t get mad, get fixing! You need to take what people are saying and turn it into improvements that positively impact every customer – not just the ones giving feedback.

Let’s look at a few examples:

“I like what the product does but it’s too pricey for me in the long term.”

If this is a one-off criticism, you might be able to take it with a pinch of salt. But if you hear this a lot, you need to think about your pricing structure. Maybe you can offer a stripped-back free tier or a student rate, or maybe you need to reassess your entire pricing strategy. You could do worse than use this feedback as a jumping-off point to run a focus group on pricing.

“Too complicated. The app has way too much going on.”

You’ve got navigation issues. Sometimes what seems obvious to the team making the product seems alien and confusing to outsiders, and it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees. It would be worth combining this written feedback with some technical insight via eye-tracking software to see how people are navigating your app. Alongside this, why not workshop a more user-friendly set of tutorial screens?

“Crashes all the time.”

Red alert! Even one user claiming that your product is unstable should be enough to launch a full-scale QA investigation. If your product crashes regularly you need to find out what the variables are, and whether it’s a specific browser, chipset, or OS that’s rubbing up against your architecture the wrong way.

What’s crucial is that this becomes a cyclical process. You should be aiming to collect customer feedback as often as humanly possible without it becoming a burden on your target audience.

The aim of the game is to collect feedback and opinions, act on what you learn, and then ask again. If you’re receiving fewer complaints about that issue, you can move on to a different priority on the roadmap.

Developing a product is an infinitely long process, and customer feedback plays a vital role when it comes to closing experience gaps that you might otherwise miss.

And once you’ve used your new feedback-fu, and identified those experience gaps? It’s time to update your roadmap so that the whole team knows what needs to be tackled Now, Next, and Later. 

Top tips for collecting customer feedback

Finally, before we leave you to go listen really hard to your customers to find out exactly how to make them happy, here are a few final ideas to help you nail your feedback loop:

1. Timing is everything: Request feedback following an interaction or at relevant moments. Avoid times when it might be intrusive or irrelevant.
2. Incentivize responses: Offering rewards or incentives can help to increase response rates.
3. Target a diverse audience: Ensure you’re gathering feedback from a wide range of users to avoid biased insights. Consider different user types, demographics, and levels of engagement with your product.
4. Context is king: Choose the right medium (in-app, email, social media) based on the context and nature of the feedback you’re seeking.
5. Keep it short and simple: Lengthy surveys or complicated feedback mechanisms can deter users. Aim for clarity and brevity.
6. Acknowledge and act: Show users that their feedback is valued by acknowledging their contributions and, where feasible, implementing changes based on their input.
7. Continuous process: Regularly update your feedback mechanisms and keep the process ongoing, adapting to changes in user behavior and preferences.
8. Privacy and transparency: Assure users of their privacy and be transparent about how their feedback will be used.
9. Respond quickly to feedback: Reply swiftly to feedback, especially if it’s negative. This shows customers that their opinions are valued and taken seriously, and can turn a negative experience into a positive one.

Now go forth, intrepid feedback hoovers! Unleash the power of your newfound knowledge, engage with your customers in meaningful ways, and turn their complaints and praise into the golden keys that unlock the potential of your product.