7 Methods To Collect Customer Feedback for SaaS [+ Examples]

Want to know whether your product is delivering value to customers? The best solution is to ask them directly.

Customer feedback is the key to developing a customer-centric business. In this article, we’ll discuss 7 ways you can collect customer feedback to understand user sentiment.

TL;DR

• Customer feedback is any information gathered about the customer experience with your product or service.
• There are two main types of customer feedback: direct and indirect.
• You can use surveys like CSAT, CES, and NPS surveys are used to collect customer feedback from each user segment in-app.
• Feedback widgets allow you to get feedback passively on topics like feature requests and prompt smiley face surveys to measure customer satisfaction.
• Email surveys let you understand customer experience at different stages of the user journey and after specific interactions.
• Interviews and focus group discussions are typically used for market research to ask individuals or small groups specific questions.
• Listen to the voice of the customer through social listening and tracking social channels to collect customer feedback.
• Perform product analytics to analyze feature usage and identify patterns, use heatmaps to gather user behavior insights, and track session recordings to find friction points.
• Check review platforms like Product Hunt and G2 to get direct feedback without asking customers.
• Collect both qualitative and quantitative feedback, group the data into the two categories of feedback, and conduct analysis.
• Userpilot is the best tool for collecting user feedback and measuring customer satisfaction. Brand24 is the best for collecting feedback from social media, and SurveyMonkey is the best for sending email surveys.
• If you want to see how Userpilot can help you gather in-app feedback for actionable insights, book a demo today!

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is any information a customer provides about their experience with your product or service. The feedback insights let you know exactly what your customer needs and expects from your brand.

Why is customer feedback important?

Customer feedback is one of the main drivers of the long-term growth of a business. It serves as a guide for continuously improving the customer experience, especially when the feedback is negative. Therefore, customer feedback helps reduce customer churn.

Types of customer feedback

There are two main forms of customer feedback:

• Direct feedback – This is the feedback you get by directly asking your customers via surveys, interviews, and focus groups. You are more in control of the communication and thus can select the themes and format.
• Indirect feedback – This is the feedback you need to actively look for without directly asking for information, such as from social media and product reviews.

7 Methods for collecting customer feedback

There’s no one-size-fits-all method for collecting user feedback. You have to utilize different channels for gathering feedback in different situations to chart a growth trajectory for your business.

Let’s look at the 7 methods for collecting customer feedback.

In-app customer feedback surveys

You can trigger in-app surveys to collect contextual feedback right inside the app. They are highly targeted and actionable. Because users are more likely to offer immediate feedback, the high response rates.

In-app surveys can be used to learn customers’ opinions about their overall satisfaction with your product or their experience with specific features.

You can trigger customized in-app surveys for certain users using customer segmentation. By analyzing such feedback, you can gain actionable insights that help you personalize the customer experience for every segment.

Use NPS surveys to understand customer loyalty

NPS surveys deal with the overall customer sentiment about your product and are very popular for measuring customer loyalty.

An NPS survey asks customers to rate their likelihood of recommending your product to friends or colleagues on a scale of 1 to 10. Tracking NPS scores gives you three customer segments:

• Promoters – They are your loyal power users who rate you 9 or 10.
• Passives – They are indifferent to your product and rate you 7 or 8.
• Detractors – They are unhappy customers at risk of churn and rate you 6 or below.

You should add a qualitative follow-up question to NPS surveys to better understand user sentiment and identify improvement opportunities. You can then proactively reach out to detractors with customized solutions and may even convert them to promoters.

It’s also important to learn what promoters love the most about your product so that you can replicate those positive experiences for passives and detractors.

Measure customer satisfaction score with CSAT surveys

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) surveys typically ask customers to rate their satisfaction level with your product, features, or team interactions, eg. with the support team.

You can trigger CSAT surveys at critical points that specify entry into or exit from a certain user journey stage. Additionally, you can refer to the survey responses to track a customer’s progress across the stages.

Moreover, this also allows you to identify areas of friction that you can remove to create a smooth customer journey ahead.

CSAT in-app survey example in Userpilot

Collect feedback to improve customer experience

Customer experience surveys collect customer feedback to assess the user experience with your product. You can actively trigger surveys with open-ended questions like the one in the image below.

These surveys offer actionable data for generating positive customer experiences and hence improve customer retention and loyalty.

For example, you can use the insights to personalize the onboarding process for new users and increase the trial-to-paid conversion rates.

Open-ended UX survey question in Userpilot

Feedback widgets

Use in-app feedback widgets to continuously collect customer feedback without interrupting the user experience.

While you can send targeted in-app surveys to find specific problems you’re looking to solve, you may miss out on some questions customers may have strong feelings about.

You can keep an ‘always-on’ button or widget that users can click on to prompt microsurveys. This lets them share their opinions on a specific feature or the overall product.

Feedback widget to gather customer feedback on product improvements

Here’s an example of a feature request survey. A feedback widget is visible to everyone in the app and people find it easy to click on the widget and to submit a request whenever they want to.

Hence, you can make product improvements to add more value to customers. The new feature might even benefit customers who did not open this survey.

Collect customer feedback with passive surveys

Passive surveys are smiley face surveys that use emoticons to measure customer satisfaction. Such surveys are usually on a 3-point or 5-point scale, and the emoticons range from an angry/sad face to a smiling/happy one.

These surveys are self-explanatory, engaging, and effective, as customers can express their reactions using emoticons.

Here’s an example of a passive survey by Miro that allows users to rate every experience they have with the product. It uses a ‘Rate your experience’ button that customers can actively click on when they feel like giving feedback.

Email surveys for collecting customer feedback

Send automated email surveys at significant touchpoints, such as after interacting with a core feature.

The email survey should be embedded so users don’t have to click through to a different page. This ensures high response rates. You can also follow up on each customer individually through an email.

Understand customer experience at critical points in the user journey

Like in-app surveys, you can send email surveys at critical touchpoints across the customer journey. This lets you identify friction and potential drop-off points and address these areas to improve the customer experience.

The survey below highlights the company’s importance to customers’ opinions and makes them feel heard. Emoticons make it easier for customers to give feedback by creating a feeling that it doesn’t cost much time to rate their experience. Users are thus more likely to respond than for, let’s say, text input surveys.

Understand customer experience after a specific interaction

Some in-app interactions are crucial for delivering value to customers. Therefore, you should focus on them to prevent any bad experience that may lead to churn.

As with in-app surveys, you can send automated email surveys after a particular team interaction. For instance, Wise sends email surveys after a support ticket is resolved. The feedback data helps them improve customer service.

Interviews and focus groups

Take one-on-one interviews or question small groups of people about your product. You can also conduct focus group discussions, where you act as a moderator and ask a group for their perceptions, attitudes, or opinions about your product.

These are typically used to conduct market research. For example, you can host focus groups with experts to get their opinions on product development or design.

Prepare appropriate questions to ask for feedback

Interviews and focus groups allow you to collect detailed feedback from a specific set of people who well-represent your target market. Therefore, you should ask questions that will provide concrete facts.

For instance, you can ask people to share specific examples from their past experiences with your product or a similar product. Avoid collecting bad data by fishing for compliments and making generic claims or fluffy promises.

Some examples of appropriate questions include:

• How have you been using our [product name]?
• What improvement does our product need?
• What can each of us do to make the product better?
• Suppose you were in charge and could make one change to improve our product. What would that be?

Social media channels

Customers tend to share in-depth reviews on social media platforms that they don’t get to share through customer surveys. However, it’s essential to Listen to the voice of the customer from all sides.

Monitor social media via social media interactions, brand mentions, hashtag mentions, etc., to collect valuable feedback and make proactive product improvements.

Do social listening for customer satisfaction feedback

Social listening helps you monitor your brand’s growth. You will likely come across conversations highlighting any problems with your product or revealing opportunities for further development.

Customers appreciate it when brands respond to their concerns raised on social channels. The following is Brand24’s report on keyword mentions. It lets you analyze positive and negative user sentiment around the mentions and make data-driven decisions.

Use social channels for gathering feedback

How can you use social channels to seek customer feedback actively?

Here’s a screenshot showing how you can use your brand’s Instagram page to engage your customers in conversations about your product and let them make suggestions.

The ‘Ask’ widget for Instagram Stories lets you interact with customers and get individual feedback and opinions.

Product analytics

Use product analytics to gather insights on in-app user behavior.

You can monitor, record, and attribute every user interaction with your product. It will give you an elaborate account of how different user segments behave, what tasks they struggle with, and why some features show high or low engagement.

Analyze feature usage to identify usage patterns

Track and analyze feature usage to understand how customers are using your product. This reveals important usage patterns.

For example, you may find your core features are being underused. This could be because users are either not aware of the feature yet or the feature did not live up to their expectations.

Therefore, you would have to trigger in-app guidance to offer help in using the feature and provide more value to customers.

By analyzing feature usage over time, you can also check the progress of your marketing campaigns and product improvement efforts.

Use heatmaps for collecting user behavior insights

Heatmaps are visual representations of user interactions in your app. Analyzing heatmap data lets you identify patterns in user behavior and discover the parts of your product that customers engage with the most.

With Userpilot, you can tag features to monitor hovers, clicks, and text inputs. This offers feature engagement insights that can be used to generate more value from features.

Use screen recordings to collect customer feedback on friction

Session recordings allow you to see users in action. Thus, they help you understand the reason behind each user interaction, like clicks and hovers.

You can also distinguish between normal clicks and rage clicks. This lets you identify the causes of frustration and eliminate them to improve user experience.

Review platforms

Users leave feedback on review platforms based on their experiences with your product. That’s why tracking these detailed reviews regularly is essential to capture changes in customer perceptions and expectations that you may otherwise not find through surveys.

Product hunt for product launch reviews

A great platform for spreading the word about your new product is Product Hunt. This platform consists of a large community of buyers and sellers, thus offering great traction.

You can analyze the votes and reviews, especially during the early stages of product development. It ensures your product is viable for the target market before launching.

G2’s reviews for gathering direct feedback from customers

Popular review sites like G2 provide feedback directly from customers without asking them yourself.

G2 helps you find your loyal customers as well as the dissatisfied ones. You can see what people like and dislike about your product and what changes they expect to see in it.

How to analyze customer feedback?

For feedback analysis, you should first collect both qualitative & quantitative data. Quantitative data analysis helps you identify trends across periods or customer segments. In comparison, qualitative data analysis offers deep insights into user perceptions.

After collection, group the data according to the different categories of feedback. You can sub-categorize them to get more specific insights, such as by dividing product-related feedback into usability, feature usage, etc.

You may analyze the feedback manually, which is time-consuming and requires much effort. Automated third-party software, on the other hand, helps to analyze feedback much faster and more efficiently.

It does the analysis for you and offers detailed reporting in easy-to-understand dashboards. Some software, like Userpilot, offers code-free solutions so there’s no need to be tech-savvy to use the platform.

Best tools for your customer feedback strategy

Now let’s check out the best tools for feedback analysis.

Userpilot – Best for gathering customer feedback and measuring customer satisfaction score

An onboarding and product adoption platform, Userpilot will help you achieve product growth through its wide array of functionalities, including feedback analysis.

Userpilot lets you create surveys code-free from the available templates. You can even design your own from scratch and customize them to suit your brand’s style.

Survey template library in Userpilot

Furthermore, its advanced segmentation lets you use multiple criteria to segment customers. You can then trigger surveys contextually to relevant segments and use the insights to provide hyper-personalized solutions to each group.

For instance, Userpilot lets you analyze the NPS scores and tag qualitative responses to pinpoint customers’ issues. This makes it easier to customize the user experience for every customer segment.

Tag NPS responses in Userpilot

Brand24 – Best for collecting feedback on social media

Brand24 can help you monitor brand mentions across all social media channels if you want to improve your social listening efforts.

You can track trends associated with specific hashtags or keywords entitled to the brand and understand what customers want from your product.

SurveyMonkey – Best for sending email surveys

SurveyMonkey is the best tool for sending customized email invitations for surveys.

You can embed surveys in the email and track the responses to see how many people opened the invitation, clicked through to the surveys, and answered them.

Conclusion

Now that you know the seven effective customer feedback methods, understand the appropriate situation to use each. With Userpilot, you can gather feedback and perform in-depth analytics to get product growth insights.

Want to collect customer feedback for your SaaS product? Get a Userpilot demo and achieve customer success.