Analytics and data gives us all sorts of insights into what our customers want from our business. But sometimes… don’t you wish you could get an answer straight from your customers?

That’s what customer feedback is all about.

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It helps us understand the WHY behind what people are doing. Why are people using one feature three times as often as another? Why do most of your customers stop creating accounts on the last step? Or what causes customers to use your product less frequently (and eventually stop altogether)?

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When we match customer feedback to what we’re seeing in our analytics, we get a much clearer picture of what’s going on. Then we’ll know how to fix problems and go after the right opportunities.

I’m going to show you how to use 5 different methods so that you can collect customer feedback day in and day out. This way, you’ll always know what your customers REALLY want and how their needs are changing.

Here are the 5 best ways to get consistent (and high quality) feedback from your customers:

Surveys
Feedback boxes
Reach out directly
User activity
Usability Tests

Let’s jump in and get to it!

1. Surveys

Surveys are the bread and butter for getting feedback. They’re easy to set up, easy to send out, easy to analyze, and scale very well. What’s not to like?

There are two basic ways to approach surveys.

Long Surveys

This is what we’re most familiar with. After creating some questions with SurveyMonkey, we can send out the link to our customer list, Twitter followers, and anyone else. Then we give it a few days, check back, and have all sorts of feedback (hopefully).

Now, many people get poor results when they send out surveys. Either nobody finishes the survey or the responses aren’t helpful. It doesn’t have to be this way. Use these easy tricks to make sure you get great responses from your surveys.

Keep it short. We’ve all filled out surveys that took over 20 minutes. Was that a fun 20 minutes that you remember fondly? Of course not – it was tedious work. And I bet you started rushing through the answers after the first few questions right? I sure do. So if we want to get quality answers from our customers, it’s critical that we ask only a few key questions. Try to keep your surveys to 5 questions, and definitely don’t go over 10.

Ask only the questions that you’ll use. Every question should serve a purpose. And don’t tell me that one extra question “couldn’t hurt.” It does. If you don’t use the information you’re asking for, you’re wasting your customer’s time. You’re also wasting yours. You’ll have a whole batch of responses to look through and none of them will make a difference. Instead, save time and get better responses, by including only the essential questions.

Start with open-ended questions. When you start asking your customers questions for the first time, their answers are going to completely surprise you. So if you build a survey full of rating scales and multiple choice questions, you’ll restrict answers to your own assumptions. But when you use open-ended questions, you’ll know what your customers are really thinking.

Short Surveys on Your Site

The other option is to offer a survey right on your site.

But I recommend that you avoid throwing a full-blown survey right at your visitors. If you want to feature a survey on your site, keep it to one or two questions that are highly relevant to the page that it’s being displayed on. You’ll get much better feedback this way.

But how do we implement something like this? Well, you should use Qualaroo. You’ll build the question, pick the page you want to display it on, and sort through the responses as you get them. Here’s what a real question looks like:

This is a recent survey that we’ve been running. You see, we’re working on some improvements to our people reports. And before we jump to any conclusions, we want to get as much feedback from our customers as possible. And this Qualaroo survey is one way that we’re doing it.

Let’s break this survey down a little bit so we can see what’s going on. Notice how the survey is asking two very specific questions. This is intentional. If you ask vague questions, you’ll get vague answers. We’re not asking if people like the report as a whole or how they’d like to see it improved. We’re asking for feedback on a single feature within the entire report. This way, we’ll know if that part of the report needs fixing and what direction we should go in to fix it.

We use Qualaroo heavily and it’s a critical part of our process to understand how to improve our product.

But be careful about relying on surveys too much. When you use surveys exclusively, you’ll never get a chance to understand the deeper reasons behind the responses you receive. So use the surveys as a starting point.

2. Feedback Boxes

Do you have a structured process for receiving feedback from your customers? Well, you should.

Your customers are constantly thinking of ways that your business could be better. Maybe parts of your site don’t quite give them what they’re looking for. Or maybe they found something that’s broken.

More often than not, they won’t reach out to your support team. That only happens if the problem is serious. But for the minor annoyances and issues, your customer will just give up and walk away slightly frustrated. Surveys might catch the problem if you ask a related question at the right time. But I wouldn’t count on it.

And when minor issues pop up too frequently, customers will start shopping around for a better solution. Then it’s only a matter of time before they’re gone for good.

So how do we get customers to tell us about the small things? Use a feedback form.

At the bottom of every page in our product, you’ll find this form:

The entire purpose of this form is to make it really easy for our users to tell us when something isn’t working quite right. It’s available as soon as someone needs it, out of the way when they don’t, and sends their message to multiple people here. It even collects information like the account name, the URL, and browser version so we can recreate the problem and determine exactly how to fix it.

I highly recommend you try something similar. Feel free to experiment with different locations to see which one encourages the most feedback from your customers.

But some sites have completely corrupted the feedback form concept.

Let’s take a look at how Verizon does it. On the Verizon Wireless site, there’s a little feedback button on the right side of the page.

So far, so good. It’s unobtrusive and easily available. Let’s go ahead and click on it, and then we get this:

Oh dear.

If I was a real user and had clicked on that feedback button, I probably would have gone from mildly irritated to frustrated. Why? Because this entire form looks like work. I’m being asked questions about issues that aren’t relevant to mine (you want me to rate your layout?). Some of it may be confusing (what’s a cache and how do I clear it?). Instead of being able to alert Verizon about an issue, now I have to jump through a bunch of hoops. After seeing this, I might just bail completely and never send the comment I have.

The whole point of a feedback box is to get feedback from users about small things. That means they have very little motivation to tell us about it in the first place. And you won’t hear about the issue through other channels since it’s only a minor annoyance.

So make that feedback box as simple and easy to use as possible. Or you’ll be missing out on the feedback that it was designed

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