How to get customer feedback: 6 ways to gather unique insights

Developing a product without customer feedback is like painting a portrait in the dark.

You can have all the talent, resources, and strategies you need—but without seeing your customer clearly, you’re going to miss valuable insights and end up painting the wrong picture.

When customer feedback takes center stage in product development, you can see your customer clearly for who they are and what they want, setting you up to craft a first-class customer experience.

But how do you actually get customer feedback?

Good question. Here are six methods to turn the lights on and start hearing from your customers.

Customer feedback constitutes any information, opinions, or insights customers provide regarding their experiences with your product or company. Feedback comes in all shapes and sizes—anything from tweets on your product’s customer care process to insights answered through an annual NPS survey.

For product development leaders, customer feedback is valuable data, helping you understand your customers, improve product offerings, and ultimately make better strategic decisions for product success.

Getting customer feedback doesn’t have to be labor intensive if you have the right tools and strategies in place. Think of it as a two-pronged process:

Typically, most organizations are already gathering some kind of feedback from customers —whether that’s through support tickets, comments on social media, or new product surveys. Even if you’re starting completely from scratch, you can run customer feedback collection initiatives relatively easily once you’ve got the tools and know-how.

It’s the process of getting customers involved that can be more difficult (depending on how engaged your user base is)—think ‘you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink’. You can run in-depth UX research to collect customer feedback, but you can’t make customers share their thoughts and feelings with you.

Read on for tips on tackling both aspects of collecting customer feedback. First, here’s when to ask your customers for input—and why you should.

In the context of wider UX roadmaps and customer experience strategies, there are many occasions where customer feedback provides value and serves as a guiding point:

Customer feedback is the pulse of a healthy product development process. It’s not an exaggeration to say user research and feedback can absolutely transform a product.

There’s a few key benefits that make customer feedback so powerful when it comes to product development:

When it comes to collecting customer feedback, you’re not after just anything. You’re looking for focused customer data, themes, and perspectives that you can translate into insights and trends for improving your product.

Here are six ways you can get game-changing customer insights.

Feedback surveys are a great unmoderated research tool where customers can answer questions about your product at their own pace. Multiple-choice survey questions, open-ended questions, close-ended questions, and rating scales make it easy to get data, trends, and sentiments when it comes to your product. These UX surveys will also help you measure metrics like the customer effort score (CES), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and net promoter score (NPS).

User interviews are a moderated research method that enables you to collect in-depth feedback from customers about any aspect of their experience. They offer customers the opportunity to go into detail and provide narrative context for their opinions and perspectives. Once you receive your responses, thematic analysis helps you extract actionable insights and identify patterns in your customer’s perspectives.

Usability testing allows you to gain direct insights and feedback on specific tasks and features customers use. It involves setting customers tasks to complete within your product—like ‘find the payment settings’ or ‘navigate to X feature’—in order to ascertain how usable and intuitive your product is.

During the test, you’ll be able to see how users interact with your product and uncover friction points—indicating what and where you need to make changes.

This method involves monitoring and analyzing comments, discussions, and posts about your product on various social media platforms. Social listening is a method for watching user experience as it evolves in an organic and unstructured setting, giving you insight into user sentiments, pain points, experiences, and expectations. Product discovery tools focused on Voice of the Customer can ease the manual effort needed for this method.

Product analytics allow you to monitor customers interacting with your product while also giving you structured, quantitative data on usability metrics and bounce rates. With UX research reporting and analysis, you can access heatmaps, user flows, click tests and much more to assess overall customer satisfaction and engagement.

Feedback methods don’t have to be stand-alone. In-app feedback allows for integration within your digital product while your customers are interacting with it. Common examples include small to mid-sized feedback forms after checkout, rating prompts, pop-ups, and bug-reporting tools.

Collecting customer feedback is no small task, but there are lots of tools to help you. For example, the increasing use of AI in UX design has seen a wide variety of AI research tools emerge to help collect, process, and analyze feedback. Harnessing these tools lightens the workload and makes the process a lot quicker.

Now we’ve covered some of the methods you can incorporate into research operations to collect user feedback, it’s time to take a look at the second aspect of getting customer feedback—the act of getting customers involved.

The second step of how to get customer feedback isn’t as clear-cut as the first. Research methods are straightforward processes, while getting users onboard can be a little tricker.

To help engage customers, we spoke to Haley Stracher, CEO and Design Director at Iris Design Collaborative and Scott Hurff, CEO and Founder of Churnkey, for their five best practices when collecting customer feedback.

To ensure your customers provide feedback, it’s important to keep the process as quick and convenient as possible. This reduces the chances of customers abandoning any questions during the process. Asking effective research questions in simple formats and keeping survey times to a minimum is your best bet for quality responses from a wider customer base.

Haley emphasizes how important it is to make feedback easy for customers:

“Customer feedback is notoriously difficult to collect because you’ll often get the polar ends of the spectrum—the really happy customers and the really unhappy customers. It’s hard to get the middle people (who probably make up the majority of your user base) because most people don’t want to stop what they’re doing or spend extra time to take a survey.”

Making customer feedback quick and timely are the two key ingredients for getting a good guage in how your platform is performing. Haley suggests using pre-populated responses:

“This helps them not have to type out responses from scratch and can boost your engagement rate.”

Let's be real—giving feedback takes time and effort. But you know what makes it better? A little reward waiting at the finish line.

While many customers may share feedback freely, others might be tempted with a bit of extra encouragement before they fill out a survey or agree to an interview. Offering incentives when recruiting participants means you recognize the effort they put into providing feedback, while giving them motivation to do so. Incentivizing also ensures you have enough participants for your results to be valid.

Some example incentives can be future purchases, free trials, discounts, loyalty points, or early access to new features.

While general questions can give you an idea of customer sentiment, they don’t provide you with in-depth information about why customers feel the way they do about your product or service. Once customers have agreed to share insights, it’s in your best interest to collect as much information as possible.

You can get into the nitty-gritty by asking follow-up questions, sending secondary questionnaires, or even inviting your users to 1-1 interviews. Doing so, you’ll gain a wealth of information on which features and aspects of your products customers like or don’t particularly care for—and why.

Haley notes “If someone responds with five stars on the app they’re using, it actually doesn’t offer a ton of actionable information without wider context.”

Snapshots of customer sentiment hold a lot of value for monitoring the customer experience, but Hayley says it’s vital to dig deeper: “You may be left wondering ‘what feature did they like?’, ‘Why did they rate it five stars?’”

“One way to minimize unanswered questions is by comparing customer feedback with data you’re collecting (i.e. conversion rates, drop-off points, etc.) and see what correlates.” Using thematic analysis or affinity diagrams, you can draw conclusions from quickfire quantitative data and ascertain whether further follow-up is needed.

Not all customers will be using the full range of your product or service at all times. By asking for feedback right after they use a feature in your platform, you’re ensuring the customer’s perspective is relevant and still fresh in their minds. They’ll also be more inclined to provide feedback when the survey is integrated directly into the product or service.

Haley emphasizes the importance of timing customer feedback methods:

Hayley explains, “That’s why email campaigns asking for general feedback often perform poorly—or the classic ‘stay on the line for a short survey’, where most people hang up! It’s important to time your customer feedback questions to the exact moment they are happening.”

When it comes to getting feedback, Scott Hurff, CEO and Founder of Churnkey suggests targeting long-term customers who regularly use your product or service: "Unless you’re trying to understand why certain segments of your customer base don’t like/value/appreciate you very much, chances are you’re going to want to learn from the customers who value you the most.”

Because of their involvement and customer loyalty, this segment of your customer base is likely to weigh in with their perspective or points of improvement. They’re also more likely to know their way around your offerings, making for relevant and highly valuable responses and insights.

To identify these customers, Scott suggests thinking about “What do these customers look like? They pay you without hesitation. They have the highest usage. They’ve stuck with you for longer than the average customer. They provide feedback already. They get what you’re doing, and they want more."

Navigating the path of connecting with customers is what you’ll spend a lot of your time doing when conducting user research. These five best practices will help guide you towards fruitful customer interactions and feedback sessions.

Using the right tool for collecting customer feedback is essential for optimizing your customer feedback collection process. Here are three customer feedback tools for uncovering insights from your users.

Maze is a comprehensive product discovery and user feedback collection tool that lets you conduct moderated and unmoderated testing through interviews, surveys, and more. With Maze, you can turn customer feedback into actionable insights and in-depth reports for stakeholders.

Whether you’re just getting started with idea validation or conducting pre-launch testing for new features, Maze makes it easy for every phase of the development process.

Some of the main ways Maze helps you get customer feedback include:

Hotjar is a product analytics tool that helps users understand how customers interact with their digital products. Live recordings, heatmaps, and click tracking make Hotjar a tool for improving conversion rates. Hotjar also gives users data reports to identify trends and engagement metrics.

Hotjar offers a suite of product analysis features for collecting customer feedback, including:

Birdeye is a platform for building a positive customer reputation through a focused suite of tools like review management, webchats, and social media engagement. It makes connecting with customers and getting customer opinions easier, with a centralized platform for analytics, reports, and customer ratings.

Birdeye helps collect customer feedback and boost customer reputation in a few distinct ways:

Building a positive customer experience is all about collecting customer feedback, analyzing it, and implementing insight-driven changes for a better product.

There are plenty of customer feedback collection methods to choose from—interviews, surveys, and usability testing just to name a few. Don't forget offering incentives, crafting a customer feedback collection strategy, and creating customer-centric processes are vital to ensure you get relevant insights for product iteration.

Whatever your customer experience goals, you’ll want the right tool for the process.

Maze’s diverse suite of feedback collection tools is exactly what you’re looking for to help uncover customer insights. Whether it’s during concept validation or post-launch, Maze can streamline customer feedback collection and boost engagement.