You’ve heard it before: Customer feedback is a gift. It’s given to you from your most-valuable business asset, your customers. As HubSpot advises, if you never ask for customer feedback, you’ll never understand what drives customer satisfaction. And, if you don’t know what drives satisfied customers, you can’t create customer loyalty.
Why is Customer Feedback So Invaluable?
Customer feedback is a vital tool for understanding what drives customer satisfaction and loyalty. It serves as a benchmark to evaluate your company’s performance while providing social proof to potential customers. Whether you’re running an eCommerce platform or a brick-and-mortar store, feedback helps refine products, services, and customer experiences to stay competitive. Ignoring feedback can mean losing customers to competitors who better address consumer concerns.
It’s testimony that your products and company were there for customers—or not—however they perceive it. This is particularly true if you have an eCommerce site, as brick-and-mortar businesses still have the luxury of face-to-face communication and interaction with customers. eCommerce businesses must learn how best to gather and assess customer feelings about their experiences without that personal exchange. What’s at risk if you disregard customer feedback?
“Many companies take advantage of their audiences by ignoring their feedback and continuing their processes as usual. All this does is shows consumers how little [a company] cares about their concerns. As a result, they’ll turn to competitors to get what they want,” according to a Forbes article on customer feedback.
That’s it in a nutshell. Customers provide feedback to reinforce good things your business does and call attention to missteps. If your company fails to hear and assess customer feedback, that’s a guaranteed welcome mat for your competitors (unless you’re a monopoly).
Although feedback—good or bad—can be productive for improving business and marketing for a company, it’s better to categorize it and seek it.
Types of Customer Feedback to Collect
- Demographic Information: Insights into customers’ age, location, and other data can guide how you position and market your products. Collect this via post-purchase surveys or website pop-up forms.
- Customer Preferences: Knowing what products or services customers favor—whether yours or a competitor’s—can shape future offerings. Use online forums, trend monitoring, or focus groups to gather this data.
- Customer Satisfaction: This feedback reveals functional (how well your product works) and emotional (how customers feel) metrics. CSAT is the percentage of respondents who select the top satisfaction options on your scale. CSAT (%) = number of satisfied or very satisfied responses divided by total responses, multiplied by 100. Collect through comment boxes, social media, or quick post-purchase surveys.
- Customer Loyalty Metrics: Use tools like Net Promoter Score (NPS®) to evaluate how likely customers are to recommend your business. Calculate NPS as the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of Detractors based on 0 to 10 ratings. The score ranges from negative 100 to positive 100, and NPS should not be averaged across responses. NPS provides both qualitative and quantitative insights for evaluating customer loyalty.
- Customer Service Feedback: Learn how customers perceive your support services and identify recurring issues. This feedback is often provided via reviews, complaints, or direct communication, offering areas for improvement. Track operational KPIs alongside comments, including First Response Time, First Contact Resolution, and Average Handle Time for your support channels. Tag themes consistently and use basic sentiment analysis to uncover patterns and prioritize fixes for your team.
- Customer Effort Score (CES): Ask customers how easy it was to complete a task or resolve an issue, typically on a 5 to 7 point agreement scale. CES highlights friction in support, onboarding, and checkout flows, and complements CSAT and NPS for balance.
Data Privacy and Review Platform Policies
Be transparent about data use, obtain appropriate consent, and honor access or deletion rights under GDPR and CCPA or CPRA when collecting feedback. Avoid incentivized reviews on major platforms like Google and Yelp, and clearly disclose any incentives per the FTC Endorsement Guides.
Store only necessary personal data, limit access to authorized users, and retain it for defined periods. Provide clear opt outs in marketing emails per CAN-SPAM and get proper consent for SMS under the TCPA.
The 5 Best Tools for Collecting Feedback
1. Broadly
- What it does: Broadly collects feedback via email or text and publishes reviews on platforms like Google, Facebook, and Yelp.
- Key features:
- Automatic review publishing
- Real-time feedback and analytics dashboard
- Live web chat integration for direct customer interaction
2. Qualaroo
- What it does: This tool allows you to create targeted surveys for website visitors to gather actionable insights.
- Key features:
- Advanced targeting and behavioral survey customization
- Skip Logic to refine questions based on user responses
- Pricing starts at $99/month, with a 14-day free trial
3. GetFeedback
- What it does: Known for its personable approach, GetFeedback sends visually appealing and interactive surveys to customers.
- Key features:
- Customization options for branded surveys (e.g., fonts, images)
- Built-in templates for CSAT and NPS metrics
- Multi-channel survey distribution (email, website)
- Native Salesforce integration to trigger surveys from events and write results to contact and case records.
4. CustomerSure
- What it does: CustomerSure helps businesses collect actionable feedback to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Key features:
- Simple, user-friendly feedback tools
- Real-time reporting to track customer satisfaction
- Integration with CRM systems like Salesforce
5. Reevoo
- What it does: Reevoo gathers authentic customer reviews and feedback to build trust and drive sales.
- Key features:
- Verified customer reviews and ratings
- Tools to showcase customer opinions across platforms
- Analytics to measure the impact of customer feedback
Final Thoughts
Customer feedback is more than an opinion; it’s a roadmap for future success. By leveraging the right tools to gather insights, you can continually improve your products, services, and customer experience, staying ahead of your competition.
FAQs
Customer feedback is important because it helps you understand what drives customer satisfaction and create customer loyalty. It provides valuable insight into how your products and company perform for customers and can help you improve your business and marketing.
There are several types of customer feedback to consider, including demographic information, customer preference, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty metrics. Each type of feedback can provide different insights into your customers and their experiences with your brand.
You can collect customer feedback through various methods, such as post-purchase or post-service surveys, pop-up forms on your website, online forums, monitoring purchase activity and trends, conducting focus groups, comment boxes, social media comments, and Net Promoter Score surveys. Also consider in-app surveys via mobile SDKs, SMS text surveys, QR codes on receipts, point-of-sale kiosks, and post-call IVR surveys.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric that measures how likely your customers are to recommend your company to someone else. It uses one Likert Scale question to start, such as “On a scale of one to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product or service?” Then you add an open-ended area below for participants to explain their responses and categorize them according to their scores. Detractors have 0-6 scores; Passives have 7-8 scores and Promoters are in the 9-10 group. NPS is calculated as the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of Detractors. Results range from minus 100 to plus 100, and should be reported as a whole number, not an average.
Some useful tools for collecting customer feedback include Broadly, Qualaroo, GetFeedback, CustomerSure, and Reevoo. Each tool has unique features and pricing options, so it’s important to do your research and test-drive different tools to find the one that suits your business needs.
You can use customer feedback to improve your business by analyzing the feedback you receive, identifying recurring comments or grievances, addressing issues, refining your products, and giving customers what they want. Customer feedback can provide valuable insights into how to better serve your customers and improve their overall experience with your brand.
