In our day and age, the customer is king. For quite some time now, customers’ expectations have been rising due to advancements in consumer technology. They are asking for ease, involvement, and consistency. Consequently, user satisfaction and business growth now depend heavily on user feedback.
Accordingly, businesses are asking their customers directly what they think, how they feel about their online experiences, and what could be better rather than making assumptions and experimenting with different strategies until something succeeds. Many ways exist to collect and evaluate user feedback; these strategies vary depending on your organization’s goals, the digital channels you use (such as email, mobile, and website feedback), and how you respond to the feedback you receive.
The theory behind feedback is that they set the standards you will follow all along the way. Let us decode user feedback here so you can proceed with ease on your business path.
What is User Feedback
User feedback is any information that you receive from your users on how your business, products, or services have benefited them. Usually, it consists of how satisfied they are with you and what makes them happy or disappointed.
It is ultimately described as a combination of quantitative data and qualitative insights acquired from real users regarding their preferences, dislikes, impressions, and needs for a product. To develop new products or enhance current ones in accordance with customer wants, gathering and analyzing user feedback is essential.
User feedback data is a highly beneficial tool for identifying barriers that your customers encounter when using your digital channels. There’s no better way to learn what people think of your business than to ask them directly. This customer-centric approach is a great way to gain raw feedback and actionable insights from your consumers.
What are the Different Types of User Feedback
It takes some science and strategy to create convincing user feedback surveys, specifically when there are several objectives for feedback gathering in the first place.
Do you want to know how well your email marketing is performing? Or would you instead learn more about your website’s general user experience? Businesses can employ a variety of user feedback survey formats to gain further insights into their user base.
Here are some different types of user feedback-
Customer Experience Feedback
Loyalty Feedback
Email Campaign Feedback
Mobile App Feedback
Website Content Feedback
User Experience Feedback
Why is User Feedback Important
There are several reasons why feedback from customers matters. User feedback first highlights areas where your product or service needs to be improved.
Although you might spend all day making assumptions about what your users want and how you will get it to them, in the end, it is their voice that counts most, and they are the ones who will provide you with the information your business needs to make significant improvements to the products and services you offer.
Customers are more likely to return to your business when you take care of them in this way because it makes them feel valued and involved. Ultimately, hearing what your users say about you fosters customer loyalty.
Here are 7 compelling reasons why you should begin gathering customer feedback immediately:
Customer-Centric Approach
Boosts Product Improvement
Enhanced User Experience
Encourages Innovation
Builds Brand Loyalty and Trust
Present your Case with Actual Data
Leverage Negative Feedback
Let’s check up on them in this section:
7 Compelling Reasons in Favor of User Feedback
1. Customer-Centric Approach
User feedback puts your users at the center of all your strategies. It assists businesses to understand their target audience. Moreover, businesses can understand their users’ pain points. And so, businesses can make products tailored to user expectations.
2. Boosts Product Improvement
Making a product and releasing it is just the beginning. A business can improve a product for its customers by incorporating feedback. User feedback allows for multiple revisions and transformations to the product. Furthermore, feedback supports prioritizing changes, fixing bugs, and feature additions and takes the guesswork out of creating or improving products.
3. Enhanced User Experience
Practising active listening to users’ opinions helps optimize the user experience. Further, adapting feedback makes the product intuitive. And the more easy and enjoyable the process is, the more user retention.
4. Encourages Innovation
Feedback has two roles here. The first is to help in idea generation. Users can contribute by suggesting useful features and changes. And the second is streamlining the innovation process. The development team will have several ideas on their plate. But it is near impossible to execute them at once. But, that’s where feedback helps a business in prioritizing innovation. Furthermore, regularly gathering feedback provides a foundation for improving your messaging, product, and other areas.
5. Builds Brand Loyalty and Trust
For a successful business, long-lasting user relationships are crucial. And for that, trust is essential. When users see that businesses value and act on their feedback, it fosters trust. This means user feedback is the key to happy customers. And happy customers become the biggest brand advocates promoting organic growth.
6. Present your Case with Actual Data
Coming up with a convincing argument for the rest of your team is one of the difficulties of working on user experience. Having facts to support your modifications to a product makes it much easier to advocate for such changes, and correctly acquired user data can help you in this regard.
7. Leverage Negative Feedback
The primary benefit of product feedback—reducing churn—will be lost if you only consider the opinions of satisfied customers. It is important to use even unfavorable comments to enhance services. Pay attention to disappointed customers to find out what steps you can take to ensure that no one else has to deal with the same problem they did or will.
When to Collect User Feedback
There are several implications to consider when gathering feedback. There are two perspectives to approach this question: the user journey and the product life-cycle standpoint.
When it comes to the product life-cycle, we advise asking questions at the following stages: ideation (the research phase before you begin building your product); prototype (based on mockups so you can improve them); validation (the stage where you verify design concepts and conduct A/B testing); and iteration (the process of continuously keeping the product satisfying and usable).
Besides, one of the best ways to determine when to request feedback is through trigger behaviors. Here are a few well-known instances of triggers that call for questioning:
Duration of work on a specific page or step: Depending on the kind of content offered on a given page, time spent on it may indicate engagement or uncertainty. Consider asking questions like- “Did you find everything you were looking for on this page?” or “Did anything surprise you?” or “What caught your attention?” This will let you know how interested this specific visitor is in your website.
Exit Intent:: Another typical trigger is exit intent. Actions that indicate a visitor is ready to leave your website, such as scrolling toward the exit button, result in these kinds of queries. These inquiries can be about how satisfied users are with your service or whether they need assistance deciding how to move on with a conversion objective.
If a visitor has come back to your website after leaving a shopping basket empty: Asking feedback queries to a returning user who left your shopping basket is a good idea because it shows that they were a high-intent visitor. One way to get some interesting information is to ask, “Why did you decide not to purchase [item from cart]?” A different approach would be to find out which other brands they have previously evaluated.
When asking for feedback, choose a natural moment in their user journey that doesn’t interfere with meaningful tasks. While it’s critical to know when to request user feedback, it’s just as necessary to know when not to.
Learn when not to ask for feedback.
When to Avoid Requesting Feedback
For instance, by asking a user for feedback on the shopping cart page, you don’t want to prevent a high-intent user from converting or making a purchase. This also holds for other conversion acts, such as subscribing to newsletters. If you make this blunder, it will restrain your business objectives.
Furthermore, you should avoid asking first-time visitors for feedback. It can be disruptive to ask too soon because you won’t know much about them at this stage.
Having discussed the fundamentals of user feedback, let’s move on to the collection of user feedback.
What are the Best Ways to Gather User Feedback
The following is a list of popular ways to get user feedback:
Conducting Surveys
Utilizing survey forms enables businesses to assess user experience and identify areas of concern. In-app surveys are one of the most straightforward and efficient methods to get user feedback throughout the improvement phase. These let customers inform the business of what is and isn’t working for them at different times.
New users should receive a survey three to four months after using the product. This provides them with enough time to adjust to the product, evaluate their usage, and determine what functions well for them and what doesn’t.
Responses from surveys of loyal consumers should be divided into categories to make the data useful. Besides, a survey may be given to loyal customers around every six months or approximately one month following the release of new features. It’s also vital to get feedback from users when they stop using the product.
Leveraging In-app or Website Feedback Forms
You can opt to collect feedback after a specific action on the website or application. It can provide fresh and to-the-point data related to a specific point in the user journey. This type of feedback helps a business perfect user experience, one part at a time.
Using Interviews and Focus Groups
This feedback is beneficial if your goal is to acquire a thorough grasp of your target market. You’ll learn more about the subject of your inquiry from this type of feedback, and you can also get nonverbal clues, additional information, etc. Further, it is also easier to understand complex development areas with focus groups and interviews.
Incorporating Social media listening
You can track social media channels to understand what people say about your brand. Social media listening tools help track user sentiments and feedback on public forums.
Leveraging User Feedback Tools
Using exceptional characteristics of growth-boosting platforms like Feedspace in your marketing stack might assist you in gathering a variety of feedback. Feedspace allows you to gather audio, video, and text feedback. Additionally, using its social feed feature, you may import user reviews from Google and product hunt.
Utilize Website analytics
To provide data-driven responses to user needs, you can examine website data, such as user behavior, navigation patterns, conversion rates, etc. It also offers a better experience and boosts traffic and engagement.
Please Take Note: Each of these many techniques fulfills a distinct function in gathering user feedback. As a result, selecting the best method for gathering user feedback is impossible. However, you get better results when you choose the approach that best fits your needs.
Some Smart Tips and Tricks for Improving User Feedback Collection
It is easy to get lost in user reviews. But if you manage it right, it’s also easy to take definite actions that meet your customers’ needs and make your business profitable. To make your users feel valued, let them know you respect their opinions and are willing to hear them by following these tips below-
Never hesitate to request feedback
Incorporate the net promoter score
Make meaningful groupings out of your consumer segments.
Never fail to inquire as to why a consumer is leaving.
The loud voices should not mislead you.
Always remember to observe and collect user feedback frequently.
Final Words
Establishing the ultimate objective for gathering user feedback will help you create specific inquiries. Make sure you understand the feedback campaign’s goal. Is the purpose to understand how well a particular feature works? Or is it to get a thorough grasp of what the users need?
Hopefully, this post has been helpful or at least inspired you to get your new user feedback program off the ground. There are several factors to take into account. Nevertheless, you’ll be happy you started once your feedback program is up and going. User feedback is extremely essential for the long-term success of your digital channels and for building a devoted clientele!
Gaining a thorough understanding of your user’s behavior and developing a better sense of compassion for them starts with gathering feedback from them. Among the most straightforward—yet effective—methods for gathering reciprocally beneficial qualitative insights that let you deliver a customer-focused, human-led experience are feedback tools.
Are you prepared to begin utilizing user feedback for your optimizations? For insightful information on the user experience and to connect with the customers behind the data, check out Feedspace.
