The best ways to collect customer feedback
Give customers a way to contact you, then listen
First and foremost, make sure you have an easy way for customers to get in touch with you. There are many ways that customers might want to communicate: email, live chat, phone, social media, and more. Choose at least one channel and display your contact information clearly on your website, social media profiles, packaging materials, and wherever customers come into contact with your brand.
When customers reach out to get answers to their questions and voice their opinions, they’ll also be providing you with valuable feedback. Listen to them and record what they have to say.
As you receive more and more feedback, you may need to implement a ticket tagging process to help you flag common issues and collect and combine everything into a cohesive picture - and we’ll cover how to do that later! But you can’t create a tagging process without understanding common themes in your customer feedback, so start by enabling your customers to reach out to you and listening to get a sense for the things that are important to them.
Ask for feedback
Many customers will openly share their feedback when they contact you for help. But there are many other customers who may not need to contact you, but who also have valuable opinions. To get more and different viewpoints on your customer experience, reach out to your customers and proactively solicit their feedback through surveys.
You can survey your customers to ask them about anything you’d like to know more about like:
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Why they chose your product
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How they found you (e.g. search, social media, word of mouth, blog post)
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What they think about the price and quality of your product
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Their service experience (e.g. navigability of your website, delivery time, frequency of communication)
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What features they’d like you to develop
Be careful not to ask too many questions in one survey. Otherwise, it may be difficult to get customers to complete the survey. Also, asking too many questions may also result in your customers rushing through their answers, affecting the quality and reliability of their responses.
Another thing to be mindful about when surveying customers is timing and whether or not it makes sense to ask a particular customer about a certain experience. For example, if you’d like to survey your customer about the ease of the ordering process and speed of shipping, then wait until that customer has placed an order and received their merchandise before surveying them. Finally, don’t survey the same set of customers too often. Otherwise, customers may get tired of filling them out and it may be difficult to collect data as your survey completion rates drop.
Learn how to structure your survey questions
There are many ways to structure your survey questions, for example, multiple choice, rating scale, rank order, and closed-ended. If you haven’t done much surveying of your customer base, then a good place to start is by using open-ended questions. Other question types may be affected by your own assumptions since you’ll be providing customers with a limited set of answers.
On the other hand, open-ended questions will give you a broad perspective on what your customers think. Bear in mind, however, that a lot of open-ended data can be unruly, so proceed with caution. Start with a small audience when sending such open-ended surveys to ensure you can process all the feedback you receive in a timely manner.
The NPS Survey
One popular survey standard is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. NPS is meant to measure customer experience based on their likelihood to recommend your brand to others. To make it a true NPS survey, you should always ask, “How likely is it that you would recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?”
Scoring options should be arranged from 0-10, from left to right, with a text marker at 0 indicating “not at all likely,” a text marker at 5 indicating “neutral,” and a text marker at 10 indicating “extremely likely.”
Customers who rate you between 0-6 are considered “detractors,” meaning they’re unhappy and can negatively impact your business. Those who rate between 7-8 are called “passive,” and are generally satisfied but not extremely loyal. And those who rate a 9 or 10 are termed “promoters,” and they’ll keep buying from you and telling others about you.
You can include supplementary questions like “How likely are you to recommend our company based on the speed of our website?” to learn more about specific elements of the customer experience. Be sure to include a comment field after each question to gather qualitative insight and help you understand the reason behind each rating. By grouping comments with their NPS score, you can understand what drives customers to become promoters, or what’s causing customers to identify as detractors.
NPS will help you discover how loyal your customer base is feeling, reveal opportunities to improve the customer experience, and allow you to compare yourself to other businesses in your industry.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys
A slightly different way to survey your customers than discussed above is to send something right after a customer has interacted with your customer support team. A popular standard is the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey, which you can use to gauge how your customers feel about their experiences communicating with your support team.
With CSAT, you can ask the question, “How was your support experience?” and provide customers with a range of options to assess their opinion. For example, you could include a five-point scale starting with “Very Bad” and ending in “Very Good.” You might also choose a ten-point scale for more granularity or a set of emoji for a fun customer base who might enjoy rating in that way.
You can send a CSAT survey via email as a follow up after closing a conversation with a customer. You can also embed the survey in your email signature to give customers an evergreen way to rate how they feel about your support. Either way, keep your survey short to encourage high response rates. But be sure to include a comment field so you can understand the reason for the rating.
With CSAT surveys, you’ll uncover valuable information about how customers feel about their interactions with your support team, which is a big factor that contributes to the overall customer experience.
In-app surveys
Aside from email, you can also send short surveys from within your website. These are particularly helpful for gauging how customers feel about your overall website experience: the navigability, the design, and the functionality. You can also drill into a particular feature by sending a survey while a customer is using that feature or right after they’ve finished using it.
Freshdesk’s feedback widget can be embedded anywhere on your website or in-product to drive feedback responses where your customers already are. This results in great, in-the-moment insights, which can often be more honest than follow up surveys.
Keep these in-app surveys even shorter than the ones you’d send through email. Your customers are using your website to achieve a goal, perhaps even to buy your product, so it’s best not to take them too far away from what they set out to do on your site.