10 Types of User Feedback & How to Make the Best of It

Did you know that a shocking 35% of businesses don't survey their customers? Yet, it's hard to find a company that doesn't brag about “putting their customers first.” What's particularly disappointing about that statistic is that it's never been easier to track customer satisfaction than it is today.

You can use a customer feedback tool like Zeda.io to gather many types of comments and opinions, but on top of that, you've also got review sites and social media at your disposal entirely for free.

Still, it's not just about how you collect customer feedback – it's more about what you do with it. Let's see how you can make the best of it, i.e., build customer loyalty, edge out competition, reduce cost and risk, drive growth and innovation and meet your customers' needs, resolving each pesky pain point as you go.

10 types of user feedback + actionable insights

Why are there so many user feedback types? Each variety answers a distinct kind of question for your company and requires slightly different data collection methods. Such a broad perspective on customer satisfaction means more chances to grow – in smart, strategic ways and without wasting resources.

Quantitative types of user feedback

This type provides numerical ratings, scores and user feedback metrics for statistical data analysis. It enables tracking trends, making comparisons and data-driven decisions. Most subtypes listed below are proactive feedback – meaning you must ask for it.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The NPS is typically insight collected via a single-question user feedback survey. Your net promoter score measures how likely customers are to recommend your service or product to someone else. Its advantage is that it's easy to implement and fast to answer.

The most popular method is to set up the active feedback answer with a 0-10 scale. You can sort the respondents into three categories:

1. Promoters (9-10): People passionate about your brand and likely to support you
2. Passives (7-8): Generally satisfied customers but not likely to recommend you
3. Detractors (0-6): Those likely to churn and dissuade others from buying from you

Note that this isn't a particularly exact complaint tracking tool, but it's an easy way to understand if you're improving or worsening over time.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

You can use this rating to measure customer satisfaction during different interactions. The client gets a specific question with the option to rate their happiness level with a number, emoji, phrase, word or star. Unlike the more general NPS, a customer satisfaction survey is a great way to gauge the contentment levels about a particular part of your business.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

The customer effort score judges how easily users can complete tasks on your website or app. You want to make sure your services are as low-effort as possible. The rating would be a variation of a scale from “very easy” to “extremely difficult”, and you should ask for it immediately after a process (e.g., sales feedback after completing a purchase).

CES gives you information about the quality of your UX – but not so much about how to improve it.

Goal Completion Rate (GCR)

The GCR metric shows how successfully users interact with your site or app. For example – if you're running a blog, you want users to subscribe to your newsletter or premium content for a $3 monthly fee.

To calculate the GCR, you should track the total number of visitors against the number of new subscribers acquired. This isn't something you need a survey for. Instead, you need to track:

• The number of page loads
• Popular destinations on your site
• Browsing sessions durations
• Number of pages visited per session
• The number of times a specific event occurs

Improving your GCR gets you better at converting leads into paying customers.

Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

This type of user feedback shows what percentage of customers continue using your product after a specific time. CRR is a crucial statistic since experts agree that retaining customers takes much less effort, resources and money than attracting new ones.

Try sending out user feedback surveys when your clients downgrade their subscription or cancel it entirely to see how to avoid this in the future.

Qualitative types of user feedback

Qualitative feedback is descriptive and offers textual, open-ended responses. These user feedback types provide context and deeper insights – the “why” behind the numbers. Qualitative data is particularly valuable for uncovering specific issues, the root causes of setbacks and customer experience nuances.

User Experience (UX) feedback

“The user is the focal point of UX design, and designing with empathy and understanding is crucial in creating a successful product. […] Usability testing throughout the design process is essential to ensure that every design element has a clear purpose and meaning, guiding the user toward their goals.”, says Rajesh Bandila of Impelsys.

UX feedback is your users' insights on your digital product or service. These types of customer feedback forms give designers, developers and product managers insight into how to improve the user experience and work on product differentiation.

Knowing this is particularly important because people probably never use your product exactly as you intended, resulting in unexpected errors.

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To use it to your best advantage, create a set of questions that get as much into the details as possible. Ask specific questions like:

• What do you find the most frustrating about our new interface?
• Are all the words and characters on the screen easy to read?
• Is the presented information easy to read?
• If you could improve one thing in the product, what would it be?
• How easy is it to navigate the menu and find what you're looking for?

Bug feedback

Did you know there are bug bounty programs that offer cash and rewards for reporting flaws? This type of negative feedback is super valuable because it helps you find problems without spending additional time on testing.

It's also one of the few types of user feedback generated organically as complaints (passive feedback). Still, we recommend setting up a bug bounty program each time after launching a new addition to your service offerings.

Feature requests

These types of customer feedback are exactly what it sounds like – when someone specifically asks for a new feature, product or a change to the existing one.

The most valuable feature requests come from your existing customers and loyal clients, but you can also collect them from other focus groups. Consider sending them a short feature request survey in an email newsletter or on social media when you have doubts about where to head next with your product discovery and growth.

Online reviews

Whether it's on your website, Google or popular review sites like Trustpilot or Capterra, it's good to ask for such actionable feedback. Many user opinions make your company look more trustworthy – this can be seen especially well in the world's biggest e-commerce stores like Amazon or eBay. Ratings and user satisfaction feedback have become influential factors in the decision-making process of potential buyers.

A Medill Spiegel Research Center study shows that even just the first five reviews increase the likelihood of someone purchasing your product by 270%. The conversion rate is even more astounding for higher-priced categories.

Image source: G2

Public sites list businesses grouped by type and industry, so you can easily compare yourself to competitors – see where you can improve and leverage what your potential customers value.

Chances are, you'll organically get such feedback from either loyal or extremely unhappy customers. Try to always respond to those negative customer reviews – the worst you can do is delete them (5.0-star ratings are much less reliable than 4.0-4.7 scores).

However, if someone had a good or mediocre experience with your services, they probably won't remember to review you unless you ask. So, send out those requests because those are equally valuable.

Customer support interactions

Businesses can easily overlook this valuable feedback type – it doesn't contribute to any user feedback metrics and isn't visible as a comment on a website. Such interactions include phone calls, text messages, social media chats, self-service portals or chatbots. A high level of communication across these channels is what builds trust and loyalty.

Content marketing specialists at G2 highlight that there's much more to it than that, though. A good customer support team is what helps you:

• Understand customer behavior like pain points and purchasing habits
• Reduce your customers' churn rate by making them feel heard
• Refine business operations by understanding your clients' likes and dislikes
• Increase customer loyalty and priceless word-of-mouth referrals

Making the best of the 10 types of user feedback with Zeda.io

Collecting user feedback is one thing – but using it to your advantage is another aspect entirely. By that, we mean implementing the gathered data into action that will help your company dynamically grow.

The Zeda.io user feedback tool focuses on data-based product discovery. That means your product teams will be able to define goals, create roadmaps and write clear specifications, all based on customer requests, bug reports, complaints and requests.

Our AI-powered solution helps to identify market trends, user behavior and customer preferences. However, it doesn't just collect user feedback – it's a centralized platform for collaborating, communicating and executing your vision.

The dedicated feedback panel allows you to drill down into the specifics of how what your customers feel impacts your business. Customize and share feedback forms you'll send out anywhere with our smooth integrations.

You can even connect your business's revenue data to understand how customers' experience impacts it.

Zeda.io also has filters that let you organize, prioritize, and understand the results of your customer feedback survey. These will help you address the most urgent customers' problems and close the feedback loop faster.

Conclusion

With these ten types of user feedback, you'll stop wandering in the dark, trying to mold your business into a more successful form. Instead, you'll be able to start implementing product development and feature discovery based on real customer needs.

That means outrunning your competition and delivering solutions that will attract many happy customers.

Collect and analyze feedback with Zeda.io to solve any problems arising along the customer journey. You'll watch your business outcomes grow in no time, together with the customer satisfaction score.

Sign up for a free trial to start collecting customer feedback and growing your company smarter.