To make better product decisions and build innovative products, you need to make customer feedback the core of your product management strategies.

However, many companies don’t know how to collect customer feedback and gain valuable insights from it. 

A lack of customer feedback data can make a business fall short of customer expectations, leading to unhappy customers. 

According to research, 61% of customers will switch to a competitor after one bad experience. This is why you need customer feedback data to keep track of customer expectations and improve their experience. 

In this article, we'll explain the best ways to collect and maximize customer feedback to make better product decisions and increase customer retention. 

How to collect customer feedback in 13 ways

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A well-defined customer feedback strategy is necessary to get the best out of customer data and apply it to your product development processes.

Keep on reading to learn about 13 powerful ways to collect customer feedback, derive actionable insights and use them to drive product growth.

1. Customer surveys

One of the essential methods for customer feedback collection is customer surveys. The ones to start with are:

1. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) survey is the survey to run after customers have engaged or performed a particular action on your platform. It will help you gain insights into the customer experience and fix any issues that negatively impact it.
2. Net promoter score (NPS) survey is a survey to be conducted every three-six months to collect feedback on how likely the customers are to promote your company. 
3. Customer effort score (CES) will help you determine how easy it is for customers to use your product.

Our AI-powered product discovery tool, Zeda.io, allows you to gather customer feedback from multiple channels like Slack, Zendesk and Intercom. This way, you’ll have a centralized view of feedback data and interpret it accurately. 

You can sign up for a 15-day free trial to see this feature in action.

2. Interviews and focus groups

Interviews and focus groups allow you to ask specific questions and see things from your customers’ perspective.

When conducting interviews and focus groups, keep the following tips in mind:

• Be specific. Rather than asking general questions that will yield insignificant answers, focus on asking specific questions that relate to a customer's experience using a feature, talking to a customer support rep or their overall interaction with your brand.
• Be an active listener. The best way to receive valuable insights that can help your team is by listening carefully to what your customers say and, most importantly, acting on their feedback. Focus on areas where they experience great satisfaction and where they don't so you can make needed changes.
• Prepare ahead and keep the conversation focused. It's essential to prepare and avoid deviating from the topic of discussion. Ensure the dialogue provides the answers you need.

3. Email/SMS feedback

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When using email or SMS, the goal is to take advantage of significant touchpoints in the customer journey and send feedback request messages. While sending emails to your customers, integrate an SPF checker to make sure you have some security in place in your email domains.

For instance, you can send an email or SMS after a customer cancels a subscription, upgrades a subscription plan or speaks to a customer support team.

However, it's one thing to request feedback and another to hear back from the customer. How do you increase the chances of receiving feedback from a customer? Here is what you can do:

• Use personalization. Adding the recipient’s first name, company name, city or some other personal information about them can increase the chances of receiving feedback from them. 
• Keep it simple and focused. Design a concise survey with relevant questions that don’t overwhelm customers or take too much time.
• Ask questions that address customer pain points. The best way to collect honest customer feedback is to ask about their needs and the issues they're struggling with the most. 

4. Social media

Social media provides another means of collecting feedback. Since it focuses on interaction, customers don't hesitate to voice their opinions or concerns about a brand's product or service. 

You can learn what people say about your brand on popular platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Instagram or gather customer preferences and opinions using social media surveys and polls. 

5. Website analytics

How customers interact with your product says much about what they like or don't like. Do they spend longer on particular pages or abandon a product feature altogether?

With website analytics, you can uncover answers to these questions by analyzing every touchpoint in the customer journey. Once you gather analytics data, you can determine areas to improve the customer experience. 

Regarding website analytics, it's essential to use the right tools to help you get the best out of your analytics efforts. Some of these include Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Mixpanel etc.

6. Third-party websites

Your customers leave information about your company on other third-party platforms, and this can serve as a reservoir of customer feedback that you can brainstorm on.

For example, Product Hunt, G2 and Capterra are helpful third-party sites you can use to know what people say about your product. While you may come across positive or negative feedback, the goal is to understand what customers love or hate about your product, identify patterns and use the information to improve product development.

7. Usability testing

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Usability testing enables you to measure how user-friendly your product is. Through a small group of users, you can gather feedback to identify usability defects.  

For instance, when building prototypes or updating your product features, you can use usability testing to adjust your product interface or new features. Your product team can send a beta version to a particular group of customers to explore it so you can get feedback on their experience using it.

8. Embeddable pop-ups

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Embeddable pop-ups provide a great way to collect customer feedback and increase your site’s conversion rate. Research from OptinMonk revealed that the average conversion rate for a pop-up is 11.09%. 

However, when done wrongly, they could annoy your customers rather than engage them. Here are some tips to remember when using embeddable pop-ups on your site:

• Make the pop-ups quick and easy to fill out. Focus on one or two questions so you don't overwhelm the customer.
• Timing is everything when placing pop-ups. Using an exit intent pop-up can help you collect feedback right before users leave your site.
• Consider placing the pop-ups at your website’s bottom left or right corner so they’re not intrusive and users can easily identify them.

9. Live chat data

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Another customer feedback strategy is analyzing live chat data. Live chat tools can serve as helpful customer feedback tools to improve customer service and customer success.

You can review previous chat data with customers, identifying areas where they have expressed challenges with using your product, such as an inability to log in or difficulty navigating your site. 

10. Sales call recordings

Sales call recordings provide one more way to collect indirect feedback from customers. Since your sales team makes a large number of calls every day, why not take advantage of the customer conversations they have? 

This customer data can be invaluable for product development and serve as a basis for eliminating obstacles discouraging other potential customers.

At Zeda.io, our AI-assisted feedback management platform provides an insights dashboard with a comprehensive view of what your customers want and their issues.

With this feature, you can analyze customer feedback, gleaning actionable customer insight to empower your team to make customer-centric product decisions.

11. Incentives for giving feedback

It takes time and energy to participate in customer feedback surveys. When you want to ask for feedback, consider that your customer would take valuable time from their busy schedule to answer your survey questions.

One way to make the process worth their time is by offering incentives. That will increase the chances of getting more respondents and show customers you value their time.

Here are some incentives you can offer:

1. Cash or discounted upgrades
2. Coupons
3. Branded swag
4. Early access to new products
5. Free products

12. Real-time post-purchase feedback

Collecting real-time post-purchase feedback is essential to encourage first-time buyers to become loyal customers. When you learn more about a customer’s purchase experience, you’ll identify customer issues on time and solve them. This, in turn, builds a solid relationship with customers and makes them feel valued.

For instance, after a customer makes a purchase, you can provide a feedback pop-up request, asking the customer about their purchase experience.

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13. Surveys coupled with product updates

Gathering valuable feedback highlighting your customers' experience with your product is essential when releasing product updates. Here are some questions to include in your surveys:

• On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate the quality of our latest feature?
• Will our new product updates help you solve your problems?
• What do you like/dislike about our new features?
• How important are the latest features to you?

How to maximize customer feedback potential with Zeda.io

It is one thing to gather feedback and another to gain valuable insights from the feedback data. Our product discovery platform, Zeda.io, helps you make the best of your customer feedback data. 

It helps your product teams make customer-centric decisions by providing the following:

• A robust feedback collection and management dashboard that shows you a comprehensive view of all the feedback you receive from customers. This way, you can easily view and categorize feedback. 
• AI-powered customer feedback management solution that identifies and connects similar feedback so you can gain powerful insights into the feedback data.
• With Zeda.io, your team can easily interpret customer insights, identify issues and use the data to provide product solutions to increase customer loyalty.
• Zeda.io helps your team uncover and prioritize new product ideas by segmenting feedback data.

Conclusion

The voice of customer data is crucial to drive product growth. With customer feedback, making product decisions that deliver customer value and lead to business growth will be easier. 

The good thing is that there are many methods for collecting customer feedback. However, what you do with feedback data and how you analyze it determines whether you get the best customer insights possible. 

An AI-powered product discovery tool like Zeda.io can help you improve your product management strategies by collecting and analyzing customer feedback. This way, you can address real customer issues and decide what to build next based on customer insights.

Sign up for a free trial to explore this feedback management feature and gain more loyal customers.