5 Practical Ways to Get Better Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is what people share about their experience with your product or service. This is usually what they liked, what they didn’t, and what could be improved. When you know how to collect it (and better yet, how to use it), feedback gives your business a goldmine of insights to improve the customer experience.

Obtaining customer feedback can become a code word for “chore” for businesses, largely because it can be challenging to get customers to play ball. However, this is because organisations often go about collecting feedback in the wrong way.

To help you get started, we’ve put together this guide detailing five strategies that work particularly well for getting more customers to engage with your feedback. First, though, let’s explore why customer feedback is so beneficial in the first place.

Why customer feedback matters

What would happen in a world without customer feedback?

For a start, businesses would never know whether buyers actually liked the products they’d purchased. This means R&D departments wouldn’t know where to invest their resources, sales teams would lack the knowledge to resolve common issues, and marketers wouldn’t know whether to focus on acquisition or nurture loyal customers.

Customer feedback is more than a way to secure new customers through word-of-mouth recommendations. It’s a treasure trove of information that can inform every aspect of your business strategy. Here are four reasons your business should make feedback a priority.

• Customer satisfaction – Collecting feedback lets you measure customer satisfaction and implement changes based on those sentiments. When your customers see you’re taking their ideas on board, it increases satisfaction and fosters brand loyalty. 
• Improving your products or services – Understanding what customers like and dislike about your product or service makes it much easier to tweak and tailor your offer to be more appealing. As a plus, you can also relay these improvements back to your audience, closing the feedback loop. 
• Marketing and sales decisions – The data you gather from customer feedback is helpful for optimising your marketing and sales strategies. For example, if you know which elements of your product your ideal customers love, you’ll know which features to highlight in your next sales call or marketing campaign. 
• Identifying new opportunities – Feedback can also help to reveal additional pain points and audience needs that you may not have considered. Ultimately, this will help you identify new sales, product development, and marketing opportunities as you continue to learn more about your ideal customer.

Take BizCover as an example of why feedback is so powerful. By incorporating Marketing Cloud into their tech stack, the brand unified its customer data in one place. This allowed BizCover to review feedback in real time, collect valuable data, and address all concerns in under 24 hours, contributing to an average NPS of +74 over the first 6-month period.

How can you successfully get more customer feedback?

Next, let’s get into how customer feedback works, from gathering information and analysing for insights to implementing changes based on the data you possess.

1. Gather the feedback

Before you can gather insights, you need to collect customer feedback. 

To be clear, getting feedback isn’t just about sending out a one-off survey. It requires a sustained strategy with opportunities for feedback collection across several different touchpoints. For instance, common types of customer feedback methods include:

• Review portals: Dedicated places where your customers can visit and leave their feedback on different products and services you offer.
• Surveys and customer interviews: More comprehensive methods to collect data. You can structure customer surveys and interviews to gain specific insights on your products, or simply to gain a general indication of CSAT and NPS. 
• Social media – Using social listening on platforms like Facebook and Instagram can be an excellent way to gather honest feedback.

Each type of feedback strategy has its place. What’s important is to employ several at once to give your customers more opportunities to provide their genuine opinions.

2. Analyse the feedback

Next, it’s time to put your collected feedback to use. There are two broad approaches you can take here: quantitative and qualitative.

• Quantitative data analysis involves looking at the data to find numerical trends and patterns, such as counting each time a specific feedback point is mentioned. This approach is limited in scope, but you can be sure the information you gather is reliable. 
• Qualitative data analysis looks beyond the numbers to answer the who, how, and why of customer feedback. It’s the best way to understand the complete picture, but there’s always the risk of interpreting the feedback the wrong way.

We suggest using both of these techniques to analyse your feedback. Start with quantitative analysis to build a solid foundation of customer feedback data. Then, where needed, dive deeper into trends to uncover the reason behind them.

Feedback analytics tools and platforms can also help you identify trends, such as recurring pain points and new opportunities. For instance, Salesforce’s Feedback Management solution will give you a unified view of all customer feedback and then help you extract valuable insights from the data you possess, powered by Salesforce AI.

3. Act on the feedback

Once you’ve gathered the customer feedback and analysed it, you’re ready to take action. To start, prioritise the improvements you need to make. Here are three ways to do so:

• Frequency of the issue: You could prioritise improvements based on how often the issue is mentioned in feedback from customers.
• Severity of the issue: Alternatively, evaluate different issues to understand which are the most dangerous to your business growth, and tackle these problems first.
• Feasibility – Lastly, you might look to fix the simplest issues quickly to improve the customer experience ASAP, while taking more time to address bigger concerns.

Once you’ve decided on your priorities, create an action plan outlining how you’ll address each point. Remember to set clear goals and then distribute responsibility across teams. Cross-collaboration will ensure feedback isn’t siloed and that all departments are aligned on customer objectives.

4. Close the feedback loop

Lastly, remember to follow up with your audience once you’ve implemented a change. Customers want to know that they’re being listened to. If you can show them that their feedback is making a difference, this will:

• Show the customer that you care about their opinions
• Encourage more customers to leave feedback in the future

All of this leads to higher customer satisfaction, increased brand loyalty, and, hopefully, more feedback that you can use to continually improve your strategy in the future

5. strategies to help you collect better customer feedback

A robust customer feedback system is essential if you’re trying to optimise your operation, but it’s no secret that it can be hard to get customers to give you the information you need. 

According to a report from Customer Thermometer, 45% of respondents say they usually ignore customer feedback surveys, and only 9% fill them out thoughtfully. This is one of the reasons why customer feedback can become such a chore for businesses.

So, what’s the solution? In a nutshell, you need to find ways to make your feedback requests less burdensome for customers and more valuable to your business. Fortunately, there are multiple ways to achieve this. Here are a few feedback methods to consider:

1. Treat surveys as content you’re co-creating

If the first page of your survey says “Customer Feedback Survey,” you’ve already missed an opportunity.

The smartest companies don’t just gather opinions about how well they’re doing, but about issues that affect their target market. As such, it should be crafted with the same effort to be “on brand” as any other form of advertising or content marketing. That way, people feel like they’re contributing to something important, rather than merely giving a series of ratings from one to five.

Action item: You’d give a specific name to an eBook, white paper or blog post. Why not develop a title for your customer feedback survey that captures their interest and sparks their imagination? “What You Want From The Automotive Supply Industry,” might work in one B2B sector, for example, while “Transform The Future Of Health-Care Services” might work in another.

2. Aim for one-to-one invitations

When some companies send a customer feedback form with an email that begins, “We appreciate you,” customers don’t necessarily feel as though you’re addressing them personally.

One of the biggest opportunities with marketing automation is to bring greater contextualisation around all customer interactions, using data pulled from CRM or other sources. Your goal should be to get important stats from customers without making them feel like just another number.

Action item: Think about how you’d talk to a customer if they were in front of you. You might ask about how they enjoyed that last item they bought, how they’re dealing with some other challenge they were tackling or news related to their organisation or industry.

You probably have all this information already, so it can be applied to the email messages you send out to solicit customer feedback. This goes well beyond using the person’s first and last name in the message. It’s a matter of using personalised details to show the answers they give will be thoughtfully considered as a way to assist with their personal pain points.

3. Annotate your progress bar

There are only so many customer feedback questions you can ask before people’s patience wears thin. That’s why many surveys incorporate a “progress bar” that visibly illustrates how much longer they can expect to spend answering “yes,” “no,” or some other form of feedback.

Depending on how it’s set up, though, customers could work through five or even 10 questions and see they’ve only progressed 25 percent of the way. A numerical approach alone may be discouraging versus something that shows them the logic of your approach.

Action item: Consider labelling portions of your progress bar with brief descriptions such as “Working With Us,” “Your Biggest Priorities,” “Important Considerations” or anything else that gives them an intellectual incentive to keep making their way to the next area of the form. These could also be lighthearted such as “The next section’s shorter!” or “We’re almost done!” if that makes sense for your audience.

4. Be clear about how you’ll use and share the feedback

Customers already realise that you’re hoping to get good scores from them that can be used to make marketing and other departments look good to the CEO or other stakeholders. They may also appreciate that you’re interested in constructive criticism. Beyond that, though, the customer feedback endgame is often somewhat mysterious to an outsider. It doesn’t have to be.

Action item: Coming back to that idea of “What’s in it for me?”, think about what you could comfortably tell recipients about your approach to applying their insights. Will the data possibly be used in retraining members of your sales, marketing or customer service teams? Will it be woven into the development process for a forthcoming new product or service? Will it be reviewed by the most senior members of the organisation?

Next, consider whether you could provide a snapshot of what you’ve learned after the fact, maybe in the form of an infographic or chart they can use to benchmark themselves against their peers.

5. Use customer feedback to build loyalty

Depending on when they’re sent out and what the email message says, customer feedback surveys sometimes look and feel like they’ve come out of the blue, or from a completely different and unfamiliar part of the business. That’s a big miss — as is failing to reward those who fill out a form with new opportunities to help them solve problems.

Action item: Beyond a sincere thank-you, make sure your customer feedback form or survey ends with a call to action to learn more, to contact someone directly or to further their investment with your firm. This could include links to other content marketing resources, special promotions and discounts, or invitations to a webinar or live event to meet more of the team.

How to use customer feedback

Let’s finish up by reiterating some of the different ways you can use customer feedback to innovate, strengthen relationships, and make data-driven decisions.

• Identify and fix pain points: Use your feedback from customers to uncover recurring issues with your product or service that you can prioritise and address.
• Find new opportunities: Discover product gaps by determining what your customers wish you were offering.
• Innovate: Take customer suggestions seriously and use them to spark new ideas for products, features, marketing, and content.
• Reposition: See how customers are describing your product online and then use this to refine your messaging and targeting. 
• Training: Relay customer feedback to your teams as a basis for training to help frontline staff improve their performance.
• Connect with your customers: Show you’re listening by telling customers when and how their feedback has been implemented. 
• Track customer satisfaction over time: Keep tabs on long-term metrics like CSAT and NPS to check long-term business performance.

Lastly, don’t forget to use customer feedback to celebrate your successes internally. If you’re performing well, let your teams know. Doing so keeps everyone motivated and looking for new ways to improve the customer experience.

Summing up

Collecting, analysing, and actioning feedback is the one true king of continuous CX improvement, but it can be difficult to get right if you don’t know where to start. 

Be candid when asking your customers to give their insights, explain why you need the information, and tailor outreach so they feel like you’re talking directly to them rather than batch-and-blasting to your email list. All of this reduces friction and makes it more likely your customers will leave detailed feedback that drives innovation and improvement. 

If you’d like to learn how to get the most out of feedback, start with our Survey Basics course on Trailhead. The course will teach you everything you need to prepare, build, and track a well-designed survey to get real results. 

Want to take the busywork out of collecting and exploring feedback? Salesforce’s Customer Feedback software will help you create complex satisfaction surveys, collect feedback, visualise the data, and make smarter AI-driven decisions to enhance the customer experience. 
Watch the demo today to learn more about our feedback management system.

FAQ

What are some good customer feedback examples?

That depends on your definition of ‘good’. While positive reviews feel nice, they’re often light on actionable insights. The best types of customer feedback are constructive, offering specific, clear ideas your team can use to improve your products or services. 

For example, a customer using a feedback button to submit a feature request or sharing detailed comments via an in-app survey provides valuable input you can act on. These insights help close the customer feedback loop.

What is NPS?

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score (NPS). It’s one of the most common ways to measure customer sentiment and loyalty. Customers are asked how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others on a scale of 0–10.

It’s a useful quantitative feedback metric that helps assess customer satisfaction (CSAT) and overall brand perception. Many businesses regularly send NPS surveys via survey tools, email, or in-app feedback to get a pulse on their customer base.

Is there a limit to how many questions I should ask in my survey?

There’s no strict rule, but too many survey questions can lead to unhappy customers abandoning the form. For best results, keep your customer satisfaction surveys short and focused. Use a proven survey template, avoid too many open-ended questions, and align your questions with the goal of your experience management plan.