Customer feedback is a vital tool for any business looking to improve and grow.
Examining customer feedback examples helps you uncover actionable insights to improve your products, services, and overall customer experience.
For a customer-centric business, every piece of feedback, whether positive or negative, serves as a guide to adapting and refining strategies. From customer surveys and online reviews to direct comments and suggestions, each example provides a learning opportunity to meet your customers' evolving needs.
With a practical focus, we want to show you the most popular customer feedback examples, how to collect feedback, and act on it effectively.
But first ⤵️
What is customer feedback?
Customer feedback is everything your customers share about their experiences with your company, products, or services. It can come from various sources, such as customer interviews, sales calls, survey responses, support chats, or online reviews.
Customer feedback provides insights into the thoughts and experiences of those using our products or services. It's essential for adapting and improving to effectively meet customer needs.
Why is customer feedback important?
⭐️ It can influence purchase decisions
Customer reviews and feedback play a crucial role in influencing potential buyers. A staggering 95% of buyers read online reviews before making a purchase decision, and 58% declare they would pay more for the products of a brand with good reviews. This underscores the power of positive customer experiences in attracting new customers.
⭐️ It fosters a positive brand perception
Proactive engagement with customers through feedback mechanisms improves brand perception. Research shows that 77% of consumers view brands more favorably if they proactively seek and apply customer feedback.
This engagement not only builds trust but also encourages word-of-mouth marketing, where satisfied customers become brand advocates.
⭐️ It can improve customer retention
Gathering and acting on customer feedback can significantly improve retention rates. Studies show that 70% of customers who have a positive experience after providing feedback are more likely to become loyal advocates for the brand.
Additionally, businesses that close the feedback loop are 2.5 times more likely to retain their customers. And a 5% improvement in customer retention could increase profitability by 25%.
Types of customer feedback examples and how to make the most of them
Gathering customer feedback is vital for understanding our customers’ needs and improving our services.
Different methods can be used to collect valuable insights, each offering unique benefits. Let’s explore some of these approaches in detail.
1. Online surveys
Online surveys and questionnaires are among the most common feedback collection methods. They allow you to reach a large audience quickly through email, website pop-ups, in-product widgets, or linked anywhere you wish.
To capture detailed responses, we can use multiple-choice questions, rating scales (such as the Likert scale), matrix questions, and open-ended questions.
Designing them with clear, concise questions helps ensure that the data collected is relevant and easy to analyze. A well-designed survey can be the key to research success, but what if you're not a seasoned researcher? Or not a researcher at all?
💡Tip: Survicate facilitates survey creation in several different ways. You can create a survey from scratch using our question bank, choose one of dozens of survey templates, or leave it to the AI survey generator that creates the survey you describe.
2. Feedback button
A feedback button or widget is a simple but effective tool for gathering unsolicited feedback.
They are often placed at physical locations or integrated into websites to capture ongoing feedback. This method gives customers the freedom to share their thoughts whenever they choose and helps to share feature requests, issues, or any other feedback examples.
While the responses might not be as structured as surveys, they can highlight unexpected issues or suggestions important to customer experience.
“If we hadn't been hearing it bubble up through the Feedback Button, we wouldn't have had any way of knowing about the problem.”
- Katherine Crutchfield, Former UXR Lead at Landing
💡Tip: With Survicate's Feedback Button, you can use all available question types, use triggers such as events, page load, and page scrolling, target your audience, and change the Feedback Button’s frequency settings to ensure your surveys reach the right people and appear at the right time.
What's more, you can place multiple feedback buttons on one page. And you can easily connect it with your other tools, such as Google Analytics, Intercom, Marketo, Slack, Fullstory, and more.
3. Online customer reviews
Online customer reviews are powerful platforms for spontaneous feedback collection.
Customers often share their experiences on social media or leave reviews on platforms like Google or Trustpilot. Monitoring these channels can provide immediate and candid insights.
Positive review examples and how to respond to a good review [ Source: HubSpot Marketplace]
Don't be afraid to handle negative reviews. They're not only valuable feedback but also an excellent source of information on what your users need (and/or lack). Act quickly and respond professionally to all of them.
It will show your excellent customer service skills, and if you manage to solve the issues, you demonstrate your commitment to continuous improvement. This can help you turn negative feedback into positive reviews.
The usual problem Survicate customers share with us is keeping up with the incoming reviews on a daily basis, but there's a way to manage reviews from all review sites in one place. ⤵️
💡Tip: You can connect Survicate's Insights Hub with Google Reviews, Google Play, or App Store (or endless other apps through Zapier) to automatically categorize your customer reviews into topics. You can also gauge their sentiment or ask specific questions about it with an AI chat called Research Assistant.
4. Customer support interactions
Customer support interactions are valuable opportunities to collect feedback directly from your customers.
Every phone call, email, chat, or in-person conversation helps you understand the customer's perspective and identify areas for improvement. Encouraging your customer service team to ask for feedback can reveal common pain points.
This real-time feedback loop is crucial for swiftly addressing issues and improving service quality on an ongoing basis.
Now, the thing is, most of this feedback usually doesn't get to see daylight and gets "buried" in the Intercom's archive. Although it's a common scenario, you can easily deal with it.
💡Tip: Connect your customer support app, such as Intercom or Zendesk, to Insights Hub, and you're ready to go. You can categorize topics, gauge overall sentiment, and detect insights that you might never have discovered otherwise.
5. Customer calls and user interviews
User interviews and calls provide deeper insights into customer opinions. These methods let you engage in meaningful conversations with your customers, exploring their experiences and expectations.
Though time-consuming, these approaches offer rich qualitative data that is invaluable for understanding deeper customer sentiments.
It's important not to keep them in silos of certain teams but to share those insights democratically within your organization.
💡Tip: You can add videos as another feedback source in Insights Hub. You can upload them directly or use integrations with Gong or Tl;dv.
6. In-app feedback
Mobile in-app surveys can help you collect feedback from your users within the app's context. It can help you assess the adoption of new features or gauge the general user's satisfaction.
"Survicate allows us to get feedback on the particular experience of the site or the app as the user is experiencing it, which makes the answers much more contextual and accurate."
Sandrine Veillet, VP of Global Product at Medscape
💡Tip: Keep it simple, keep it short. Disrupting the app experience is one of the risks you take by running in-app surveys, so don't make them longer than necessary.
As a general rule of thumb, three to four short questions are the maximum you can afford with in-app feedback. Want more? Redirect users to an email survey or, if it's worth it, to an interview, just like Medscape:
"We also use Survicate as a tool to recruit users for interviews. There’s usually one question popping up on the site or the app asking if a user would be okay to spend 30 minutes with the Product Manager. It gives us a continuous flow of users who book slots with us. And as the survey has just one question, it's not too disruptive to the experience. This works really great.”
Sandrine Veillet, VP of Global Product at Medscape
7. Social media interactions
You can use social media platforms to gather valuable, unprompted customer feedback. The first step? Engage with customers—respond promptly, thank them for positive feedback, and address any concerns or issues.
By actively monitoring and engaging with customers on social media, businesses can gather valuable insights and feedback to improve their offerings and customer experience.
💡 Tip: You can set up alerts for brand mentions and receive notifications whenever your brand is mentioned on social media. Track hashtags related to your industry, products, or services to discover what customers are saying about your brand or competitors.
How to analyze customer feedback?
To gain valuable insights into customer needs, you have to start by analyzing the feedback you collected. By using both qualitative and quantitative methods, you can get a detailed view of customer opinions and concerns.
Qualitative data includes individual comments and narratives. It's open-ended and can reveal unique insights into customer experiences, like specific pain points or suggestions. We might use techniques like thematic analysis to categorize these insights.
Quantitative data, on the other hand, involves numbers and ratings. This can include scores from surveys or ratings from app reviews. Quantitative data helps us measure satisfaction levels or track changes over time.
Combining these approaches allows for getting a full picture and identifying patterns, sentiments, and trends.
💡Tip: Use a tool that facilitates effortless analysis of qualitative feedback. For example, Survicate uses AI to quickly categorize and analyze customer feedback from different sources, so you don't have to spend hours over spreadsheets.
Quantitative feedback analysis
Usually, you can analyze quantifiable survey results within your survey software. You should be able to create automatic reports showing how your respondents answered.
For specific surveys, such as NPS, you should automatically receive the score and the distribution between promoters, passives, and detractors. Such data can be easily downloaded and used in larger customer feedback reports.
Open-text feedback categorization
To successfully analyze qualitative feedback, it's essential to organize it into categories (user experience, technical issues, pricing, etc.). You don't want to get overwhelmed with unstructured qualitative data. With the progress of AI-powered technologies, you can automate this task.
💡 Tip: It's important to make sure your tool gives you the flexibility to modify the categories or create custom ones to suit your specific needs.
Customer feedback sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis evaluates feedback to determine the emotions or attitudes your customers express in their feedback.
By using natural language processing, you can automatically analyze large volumes of text to label sentiments as positive, negative, or neutral. This helps understand how customers feel about your brand or product.
💡 Tip: If a significant portion of feedback is marked as negative, it might indicate widespread issues that need urgent attention. This technique provides a high-level view of customer mood and directs us to areas requiring deeper exploration.
Acting on customer feedback
Collecting customer feedback is just the beginning, but if you don't address it, you might be doing more harm than good.
Acting upon customer feedback should be embedded in your customer experience strategy and should entail
- effectively responding to negative feedback
- using positive feedback for growth
- closing the feedback loop to enhance your services.
Addressing negative feedback
When you receive negative feedback, it's important to take action swiftly. Acknowledge the issue by thanking customers for their input, which shows that we value their opinions.
Apologizing for any inconvenience is essential, but it's also important to offer a solution. This could mean a replacement product, a refund, or a promise to address the matter internally.
Ultimately, how you handle negative feedback can improve customer loyalty and satisfaction...or ruin it.
Using positive feedback
Positive feedback is not just a pat on the back; it’s a strategic tool for growth.
You can use it to build an ambassador program like Pranamat, which turned 32% of its NPS promoters into ambassador program affiliates and boosted its Facebook review rating to 4.9/5.
"We see growth in our affiliate network because we automatically invite all the Net Promoter Score survey promoters to become our ambassadors and promote our product. We also ask them to leave reviews on Facebook."
Aleksejs Krūmiņš, Head of Growth Marketing at Pranamat
Identifying what you do well helps you refine your strengths. Additionally, using testimonials and success stories from satisfied clients can build credibility and trust with potential customers. This can be integrated into our marketing messages to attract more customers. For example, Wahi, a Canadian prop-tech company, created such a workflow using HubSpot and Survicate integration ⤵️
"With all the integrations we have, we can know firsthand when really good feedback has been given and act upon it very quickly."
Lydia Ku, Head of Marketing at Wahi
Improving through a feedback loop
Listening carefully to what customers say is the right step, but it's just one step of many. You need to build a well-oiled feedback loop strategy to make customer feedback drive your product or service growth.
A customer feedback loop is a continuous process of collecting feedback from customers, analyzing it, and using it to improve products, services, or the overall customer experience.
As continuous improvement is the heart of using customer feedback effectively it is crucial to end each iteration by closing the gap between the customer feedback you received and your product or service.
💡For example, Hitta, a Swedish search engine that specializes in providing comprehensive information about individuals, businesses, and locations, identified gaps in their onboarding process while analyzing its NPS surveys. They decided to redesign the onboarding experience to discover any unmet expectations or onboarding issues faster. Three months after the change, Hitta noted a 35% increase in the NPS score.
Case studies: customer feedback in action
Many businesses have successfully improved their operations by acting on customer feedback.
In this section, we'll explore real-life examples of how businesses have effectively used customer feedback to drive success and learn valuable lessons.
Intergiro validates features 2x faster
Intergiro, a Swedish fintech startup, recognized the limitations of relying solely on quantitative data and turned to customer feedback to refine its business banking platform. By embedding surveys directly into the product, Intergiro increased user engagement by 54% and accelerated its feature validation process by 50%.
For example, when users requested a bulk payment feature, Intergiro gathered qualitative feedback to improve the offering. They ultimately developed an API for automating payment flows, saving users hours of manual effort. According to Celina Cabral, Product Lead at Intergiro:
“Our feature validation became two times faster because now we can reach out to customers even in one week and get feedback. Before, we had to wait for weeks until we got access to the data or scheduled interviews.”
Fortive improved customer satisfaction score by 35%
Fortive, an industrial technology leader, implemented Survicate to integrate customer feedback into its digital improvement strategy. Through 35 workspaces across its portfolio companies, Fortive collected over 51,000 survey responses. These insights helped identify user pain points and design intuitive solutions, leading to a 20% portfolio-wide customer satisfaction score improvement in just three months, with one company achieving a 50% increase.
According to Glen Hamilton, Senior Director of Digital Growth at Fortive:
“When drawing conclusions based on Survicate data, the sample size is usually in the thousands, which gives us confidence in the positive impact these changes will have on our customers.”
By combining Survicate with session analytics from FullStory, Fortive built an integrated system to improve its digital experience continuously.
Skuola.net builds trust through student-centric feedback
As Italy’s leading educational portal, Skuola.net enhanced user satisfaction by strategically collecting feedback. By measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS) for its tutoring platform, Skuola.net identified areas for improvement and achieved a 130% YoY increase in NPS among tutors.
Simone Franconieri, Head of Product at Skuola.net, highlighted the transformative impact of Survicate:
“We needed a tool that simplifies the collection and analysis of user feedback and enhances our ability to act on that data swiftly. Survicate has allowed us to streamline processes, turning user insights into actionable improvements.”
Through targeted surveys and regular feedback loops, Skuola.net improved content relevance and user experience, solidifying its reputation as a trusted educational resource.
Landing improved its product-market fit to +60%
Landing, a Gen Z-focused creative platform, pivoted from a furniture design tool to a thriving community space by leveraging customer feedback. Using a product-market fit survey, Landing improved its PMF score from 35% to over 60%, identifying key features like a mobile app and a cropping tool, which became user favorites.
Liz Friedland, former Head of Community at Landing, emphasized the importance of their feedback-driven strategy:
“We truly do build with our community, and so the tools that help us do that are so precious to us. Without this feedback, we’d be looking at an ocean through a straw.”
Survicate also revealed key marketing insights, such as TikTok and Pinterest being significant referral sources, helping Landing refine its outreach strategies and grow its loyal user base.
Collect different types of customer feedback examples
It's crucial that you encourage customers to share their opinions with you. You have to make sure that customers know their feedback leads to real changes. This transparency can enhance brand reputation and encourage further customer interaction.
Remember that valuable customer feedback comes from different sources and might be unsolicited. You need to have it under control, as 96% of unhappy customers don’t complain; however, 91% of those will simply leave and never come back. So, transactional CSAT and recurrent NPS are great, but customer support calls can provide valuable insights and constructive feedback as well.
If you're on the path to becoming more customer-centric, consider customer feedback software like Survicate, which is up for the challenge.
Survicate is so much more than just surveys. With AI-powered features such as Insights Hub and Research Assistant, it can gain insights in seconds, identify trends, and help you understand customer feedback better and faster.
Start the test drive now with the 10-day free trial of the Best Plan. Taste how effortless dealing with customer feedback can be.