Different Types of Customer Feedback & Tips to Collect Them

In the scenario of harsh competition from many market participants, companies should never overlook the importance of customer feedback collection. But sometimes enterprises are trapped in many types of customer feedback. Understanding that struggle, in this article, we will introduce you to some most popular kinds of customer feedback and ways of gathering them.

Why is Customer Feedback Important?

Customer feedback is crucial to the success of any business. It provides precious information about customer satisfaction, identifies sectors that need improvement, and builds strong relationships with customers. 

Customer feedback will allow companies to understand customers’ preferences and insights. By proactively seeking feedback, companies can learn more about what customers talk highly of, the troubles they encounter, and the weaknesses and strengths of the enterprises. This data can later be used to make well-informed and intelligent decisions to change the products or services or increase the comprehensive customer experience.

Find out more: The Importance of customer feedback to SaaS Founders

2 Main Types of Customer Feedback

Your companies may come across two main types of customer feedback: solicited and unsolicited.

Feedback You Reach out for - Solicited Feedback

The first component in the list of types of customer feedback is solicited feedback, or it can be understood as active feedback. Solicited feedback can be collected through NPS surveys or feature surveys triggered in-app.

Feedback You Get Without Request - Unsolicited Feedback

Unsolicited feedback is gathered when the customers wish to share their thoughts, such as proposing a feature or reporting a problem. This action can be done through a feedback widget in your resource center or somewhere in your product dashboard that is easy to notice. This unsolicited feedback can be called “passive” feedback.

How to Get Started with Customer Feedback Collection?

We have gone through 2 different types of customer feedback, so how can we collect the proper feedback we aspire for? Here are some recommended methods that you might want to get to know!

Online Chat

This method directly connects the company and the customer by putting two sides in a live chat box. A live chat box is a quick and easy way to ask for feedback from your target customers. Instead of having to go through thousands of emails, online chat enables companies to speak directly and dig deeper into customers’ insights and preferences. 

There has been a lot of research into the use of online chat as a method to collect a variety of types of customer feedback. According to Harris Research, 53% of customers would opt for online chat to solve their problems first before making a call to the brand. Or a report from Econsultancy has proved that live chat is the type that has the highest satisfaction level among other customer support channels, at 73%. In comparison, email and phone are 61% and 44%, respectively.

Pop-ups Inquiries

A pop-up is ideal if the visitors to your websites are not proactively leaving any feedback. 

A short and prompt message asking about how they want to rate their experience will increase the likelihood of getting the decent amount of feedback that you hope for. If you want to ask for more explicit details about their reasons for ratings, you can kindly ask them to give out more detailed reviews in a few words. The point here is that all has to be done most conveniently for customers and don’t give out any burden for them to rate your products or services.

Why shouldn’t we “force” customers to leave feedback? Brian Clifton once stated in his blog that a bad deployment of customer feedback strategies using pop-ups might lead to negative feedback because the customers are annoyed. As a result, a key to implementing a pop-up on your website is “the right time and the right place.” 

Make sure that you keep these notes in mind before using pop-ups: 

• The pop-up should only appear when the customers intend to leave your website.

• Show the pop-up after navigating between pages so as not to interrupt the experience.

• Highlight the close button on the pop-up, and don’t put any hidden links in it.

• Pop-ups should only appear after a certain scroll depth. More to read: 30 Must-have Customer Feedback Survey Questions

Automatic Email

If you already have an existing email list of your target audience, you shouldn’t waste this resource. An automatic email is one of the most outstanding feedback collection methods in case you are under no urgency.

When the customers have decided to leave their contact details, this means that they are interested in your product or service and hope to be kept updated with any changes and news. This can be understood that they would love to contribute their ideas on improving your website.

It is well-known that the customer feedback experience must be made as easy and convenient as possible to lighten customers’ workload. You can use some tools or programs to personalize emails sent to customers by addressing their names at the beginning of the email. Although this effort is simple, extra personalization will enhance the customers’ experience.

Social Media

Social media can be the location for different types of customer feedback. Consequently, this is definitely the most valuable and powerful tool in the present time for customer feedback collection. Below are some options that can be executed on this channel:

• Create polls

• Talk to customers directly by chatting

• Collect reactions to your posts

• Push the customers to comment on your post

One significant aspect of applying social media to customer feedback collection is that people don’t have to go to your website to make their comments.

Through advertisements, customers can easily leave feedback without much effort and time, which can even be normalized as part of the social media experience.

With the rapid development of business and technology, companies can collect different types of customer feedback through various platforms. By identifying pertinent data from customers, companies can decide which method should be used and how the plans should be implemented so as not to disturb the customers and leave bad impressions on them.