Top 5 Methods for Collecting Customer Feedback Effectively

It's no secret that customer feedback is key to helping your business grow and improve, but getting customers to share their thoughts can be a challenge. Fortunately, with the right approach, you can gather honest and valuable customer feedback that makes a real difference for your business.

What’s the right approach, though? Today, we’ll show you five methods you can use to make your customers open up. 

How to get more customer feedback

Firstly, to get more customer feedback, you need to be asking your audience the right questions at the right time.

This is not enough, though. 

You also need to create a seamless experience for your customers. If they have to put too much effort into providing feedback, most of them won’t even bother.

According to our report:

email surveys note the highest average completion rate of 74%.

You can use surveys to get accurate and honest customer feedback because they’re quick and easy to answer. In fact, Hubspot has asked its customers:

"How does your company actively listen to customers?"

Four out of the five most popular answers involved using surveys.

The best survey tool will allow you to run surveys across various channels like websites, email, mobile apps, or in your chat.

Most importantly, you’ll reach customers where they are most engaged. If you’re getting a lot of traffic to your website and would like to ask about website feedback, you should go with website surveys. If you have an amazing open rate over your email newsletters, try embedding email surveys in your next newsletter edition. Your customers already interact with your brand in these channels—why wouldn’t they share their feedback right there? 

To get a taste of what these surveys can be like, take a look at the website survey template below. It’s easy to add to any page on your website. You can use it to find out why customers leave your website so you can improve your overall UX and customer journey.

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for customer satisfaction feedback, you should go with chat surveys instead.

Surveys enable you to collect meaningful customer feedback because you can use them for laser precision targeting.

For example, imagine a visitor is just about to leave your website. You’d like to know why. Easy! You could show them a subtle exit-intent survey that triggers only if someone wants to leave your page.

In short, different situations require different methods of collecting customer feedback. It's important to find the best customer feedback tool that will let you do the job.

‍Read more: Survey Questions 101: Types of Surveys & Survey Question Examples

Customer feedback methods based on business goals

In the list below, you’ll find different scenarios and the best way to collect feedback. The formatting is as follows:

Business goal ➡️ Recommended method of collecting customer feedback

‍‍Create a better-converting website and build better products ➡️ Website surveys and In-product surveys
You might find this survey template handy in this situation:

Gather new content ideas and improve your blog ➡️ Website surveys and In-product surveys
This is a great template that you can use today:

‍Ask for feedback on your pricing page ➡️ Website surveys and In-product surveys ‍
Or you can use this template to quickly gauge how (potential) customers react to your pricing:

‍Find out how people find your website ➡️ Website surveys and In-product surveys ‍

‍‍Discover new feature requests and prioritize product roadmap ➡️ Website surveys and In-product surveys or Mobile app surveys ‍
A survey template can be handy here and we suggest grabbing this one:

‍‍Get feedback on a new design and features releases ➡️Website surveys and In-product surveys or Mobile app surveys

‍‍Let your users quickly share their ideas, bugs and concerns ➡️ Feedback Button ‍

‍Get feedback on your newsletter ➡️ Email and link surveys ‍

‍Research your Product-Market Fit ➡️ Email and link surveys ‍
If you’ve never run this survey type before, you might feel stuck. This is how you can get moving:

‍Measure CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) ➡️ Email and link surveys or Website surveys and In-product surveys ‍

‍‍Track your CES (Customer Effort Score) ➡️ Email and link surveys or Website surveys and In-product surveys ‍
You can use this survey too with just a few clicks:

‍‍Measure NPS (Net Promoter Score) ➡️ Email and link surveys or Website surveys and In-product surveys ‍
This is one of the most important survey types and you can use it too by clicking on the link below:

‍‍See why users cancel and improve your retention ➡️ Email and link surveys or Website surveys and In-product surveys ‍
Churn is the silent killer of many businesses, but you can see the reasons why your customers may be churning with this survey template:

‍

‍‍Improve your mobile app’s usability ➡️ Mobile app surveys
Coming up with questions for this survey type can be challenging, so we’ve done it for you:

Identify promoters and get more positive reviews of your mobile app ➡️ Mobile app surveys
You can use this survey template in your mobile app as a great way to get answers to this question:

‍‍Get customer feedback after closing a ticket ➡️ Chat surveys or Email and link surveys
Once the customer is done getting help, you might want to ask them how they found the process using this template:

If you want to capture any other type of feedback, we have your back. Just check our library of survey templates, with more than 125 of them ready for use.

1. Website surveys and in-product surveys

Website and in-product surveys are a great way to get accurate customer feedback. Why? Because you can target them to appear only to the relevant visitors and users. The available targeting options include:

• Where visitors and users are: display on all pages, display on specific pages, domains, subdomains
• When surveys appear: exit intent, visit duration, scroll progress, event-triggered, and more

• Who the visitors and users are: sampling, traffic source, location, logged in status, device, cookies, and more
• Survey frequency: automated recurring surveys, display once per visit, once per visitor
• When surveys start and stop: scheduled start & stop date, manual start & stop, a target number of responses

This makes website and web surveys the most convenient way of collecting feedback on a website.

Survey examples: Exit-Intent survey, "How did you hear about us?" survey, Website feedback survey, Pricing feedback survey.

‍👍 Pros:

• target specific website visitors and product users
• install once, survey forever without your developers’ assistance
• create a user-friendly design with customized colors, logos, fonts, and custom CSS
• subtle and easy to answer

👎 Cons:

• limited respondent availability, you need to draw people to your website first
• might be seen as disruptive by some visitors

Hint: Think about which group of users you’d like to survey and the information you want to get from them. Then target your survey accordingly.

2. Feedback button

It’s an always-visible, static button that floats on the side of your website.

As such, the Feedback Button is the fastest way to get actionable in-app feedback. And the best part is, you can do it without boring your users to tears with long surveys.

However, it only consists of two questions.

So you can’t really use it for more detailed research. If you’re looking for quick website or product feedback, though, the Feedback Button is your best bet.

People love sharing feedback but hate wasting their time. The Feedback Button helps you overcome this hurdle as it makes collecting feedback fast and fun.

‍Usage examples:

• get users to share bugs, ideas, and concerns
• identify usability issues
• measure and analyze customer sentiments over time

👍 Pros:

• quick and easy to install and answer, multi-language options
• shows your company welcomes customer feedback
• your visitors don’t have to search for a place to provide feedback - it’s always visible
• you can add your logo and customize colors, making the survey appear like a part of your website

👎 Cons:

• consists of only two questions - Smiley Scale and Text Answer
• targeting is limited to page targeting (where to show Feedback Button)

Hint: When you get customer feedback via the Feedback Button, you can forward it to your mailbox or a Slack channel. You can also ask users for their email addresses to follow up with them afterward.

3. Email-embedded and link surveys

Email and link surveys are by far the most flexible way to gather customer feedback. And here’s why.

You can embed an email survey directly into the email body. This results in increased response rates as your audience can answer the survey straight from their mailbox.

Take a look at this NPS email survey example. This is a template that you too can use right away. All you have to do is start our 10-days free business trial and you can use it in your emails today.

Users usually expect email surveys to be short which is why you can get completion rates of up to 83%. If there’s more than one question in a survey, though, users will answer it in a new browser tab.

Alternatively, you can use link surveys. They’re great for sharing via social media, email, chat, or any other method. You just need to provide your respondents with a link to the survey, and that’s it!

When you send such surveys with Survicate, you unlock even more data. 

That’s because Survicate surveys integrate with many marketing tools including HubSpot, Intercom, Mailchimp, Drift, and more. This means that once you send surveys via these tools, you can identify who gave you each response.

How is it helpful to know who answered your survey? You can then respond to customer feedback and follow up with your customers.

But if you’d like your surveys to be anonymous, that’s also possible.

Also, you can choose from a wide range of native integrations with CRMs, marketing automation, collaboration, and customer support tools.

It’s worth integrating email and link surveys with the tools you’re already using. As a result, you can trigger custom workflows based on the customer feedback you’ll get.

‍Remember: customer feedback is only as useful as you make it. To truly capitalize on customer feedback, you need to take action after receiving it. For example, when you get a high CSAT or NPS score, it’s worth asking the user for a positive review, testimonial, or case study.

Here are some survey examples that you can use straight away: NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey, Customer Effort Score (CES) survey, Churn survey, Product-Market Fit survey

And if you’re looking for a practical example of how to use NPS for collecting feedback, check out a story from PowerUs, who collected more than 2,000 survey responses. As a result, they improved their product market fit and their NPS score by 40%.

‍👍 Pros:

• send email and link surveys via any tool you’re using
• users can answer email surveys straight from the email
• use 318 possible survey questions in Survicate (in 4 different languages) and support the most common use cases
• identify survey respondents and follow up with your customers

👎 Cons:

• if your survey has too many questions, people might abandon it
• you need to craft email copy and subject lines to send an email survey

Hint: For up to four-question surveys, use email-embedded surveys. For more surveys with more than four questions, share the link instead.

That’s because when you embed a survey into an email, users expect it to be rather short. If the survey turns out to have multiple questions, some people will feel deceived and abort the survey.

If you want to use an NPS survey in your customer feedback collection but you don’t know where to start, just use the template below.

‍4. Mobile app surveys

So how do you boost your mobile app to 5 stars? Well, for one thing, you can collect user feedback directly inside your Android or iOS mobile app. Mobile surveys help improve your mobile app’s usability.

For example, imagine you can get feedback on new designs and feature releases within your mobile app. Or discover new feature requests and prioritize product roadmap. In fact, you don’t have to imagine. You can achieve all of this with mobile app surveys!

Most importantly, you can target mobile app surveys to appear only to a certain group of users. This lets you collect customer feedback that’s actually valuable to you in a particular context.

Suppose you want to ask your users how they like your mobile app after a recent update.

Of course, you don’t want to target the users who just installed your app. After all, they don’t know how the app worked before the update. So their opinion won’t be valuable in this case and it could skew your results.

That’s why you need to ask only the right users for feedback. And to help you with that, you can trigger mobile app surveys based on:

• specific screens, events, and users’ custom attributes or actions
• show surveys only to a percentage of users meeting targeting rules (sampling)

Also, mobile app surveys don’t require leaving, relaunching, or updating the app. Talk about making it easy for users to provide feedback and offering a fatigue-free experience!

Survey examples: User experience survey and Software evaluation survey

‍👍 Pros:

• Target specific mobile app users
• Install with a developer once, survey forever without developers’ assistance
• Create a user-friendly design with customized colors
• Capture negative reviews before they appear in app stores

👎 Cons:

• might be seen as disruptive

Hint: Use mobile app surveys when the context of using the mobile app at the time of surveying is important. For example, when asking “How helpful do you find this new button?”.

For more extended product feedback, use email and link surveys instead.

5. Chat surveys

There are a couple of ways to run chat surveys. If you’re an Intercom user, you can run surveys directly in the Intercom Messenger.

If, on the other hand, you’re using a different tool, you can share a link to the survey in the chat window.

Chat surveys are great for measuring customer satisfaction or researching your NPS (Net Promoter Score).

For example, here at Survicate, we use chat surveys to encourage NPS feedback.

If the customer doesn’t reply, we tend to send them the same survey by email.

Moreover, chat surveys help you get real-time customer feedback while talking with your customers. They are also more engaging, personal, and fun for people to take than traditional questionnaires.

‍Survey examples: NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey, Customer Effort Score (CES) survey.

‍‍👍 Pros:

• Feel more personal and fun
• Get real-time feedback

‍👎 Cons:

• Not all chat providers allow adding HTML to messages. If they don’t, share a link to the survey instead.

The final verdict

And here is an overall comparison of all the survey types:

Get started with gathering customer feedback

To collect more customer feedback, follow these steps:

1. Decide what is your goal in collecting customer feedback. For example, it can be improving your newsletter or measuring Net Promoter Score.
2. Choose the most suitable survey distribution method. For example, email and link surveys.
3. Sign up for Survicate.
4. Create your survey from scratch or choose a survey template from the library.
5. Launch your survey!

With Survicate, collecting and analyzing customer feedback is not a chore. It’s a task that your team and your customers will love because of how effortless it is. Don’t just take our word for it. Get your free trial and start today! Also, you can foster your decision making checking our newst ranking of best customer satisfaction tools.