Customer feedback form: How to create an effective form

A customer feedback form helps you understand what customers think about your products, services and digital experiences. But creating an effective form requires more than simply adding a few questions.

To collect meaningful feedback, you need to consider what you want to learn, which questions will support that goal, where and when the form should appear and how the responses will be analysed and acted on. The form should also be short, easy to complete and aligned with your brand.

In this guide, we break down the anatomy of a customer feedback form and explain how to create one that generates useful, actionable insights.

TLDR; – Article Summary

• A customer feedback form is a questionnaire used to collect information about customer experiences, satisfaction, loyalty and usability.
• Start by defining a clear goal before choosing your questions or feedback metrics.
• Combine quantitative questions, such as ratings, with open-ended questions that explain why customers selected a particular score.
• Customer feedback forms can be distributed through websites, mobile apps and email.
• Forms can be actively triggered by user behaviour or passively accessed through a feedback button.
• Keep most digital feedback forms short, relevant and easy to complete.
• Match the form’s tone, visual design and placement to your brand and the customer journey.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What is a customer feedback form?
• The anatomy of a customer feedback form
• How to create a customer feedback form
• Customer feedback form questions
• Customer feedback form placement
• Customer feedback form triggering
• Customer feedback form display and positioning
• Customer feedback form design and branding
• Start building your customer feedback forms
• Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Customer Feedback Form?

A customer feedback form is a questionnaire or survey designed to collect feedback about a customer’s experience with a product, service or business interaction.

These forms can measure areas such as:

• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty
• Customer effort
• Website usability
• Mobile app experiences
• Product satisfaction
• Goal completion
• Customer service interactions

Customer feedback forms can be distributed across digital channels, including websites, mobile apps and email campaigns.

The information collected helps organisations make more informed decisions, identify friction in customer journeys and improve the overall customer experience.

The Anatomy of a Customer Feedback Form

The structure of a customer feedback form depends on what the organisation wants to learn.

For example, a detailed market research survey may contain multiple sections and demographic questions. A website microsurvey, on the other hand, may contain only two or three questions.

Most effective customer feedback forms include a combination of:

• A score or rating question
• One or more follow-up questions
• An optional open-comment field
• Relevant categories or answer options
• Contact details when a response is required
• Contextual information about the customer’s experience

Combining quantitative scores with qualitative feedback gives you both measurable results and an explanation of why customers responded in a particular way.

How to create a customer feedback form

As previously mentioned, there are a number of factors to consider when creating your feedback form. To illustrate, we’ve broken these down into three categories:

• Customer Feedback Form Questions
• Customer Feedback Form Placement
• Marketing and Branding Considerations

Customer Feedback Form Questions

A customer feedback form is composed of various questions ranging from scores and follow-up questions to open-answer sections.

Let’s take a look at the options a well-rounded customer feedback software might provide when creating your customer feedback forms.

Scores / Ratings

Scores and ratings are typically the first feedback questions to appear in a customer feedback form. These come in all shapes and sizes, but typically all work with a scale of some sort that makes analysing this data quick and easy.

Here are the most notable scores and ratings:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score, or NPS, measures customer loyalty by asking how likely a customer is to recommend your organisation, product or service.



Learn more about NPS surveys here.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction Score, or CSAT, measures how satisfied a customer is with a particular product, service or interaction.



Learn more about CSAT surveys here.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score, or CES, measures how much effort a customer needed to complete a task.

Goal Completion Rate (GCR)

Goal Completion Rate, or GCR, measures whether customers were able to achieve what they intended to do.

It is particularly useful across website and app journeys because it can reveal where users successfully complete their goals and where they encounter friction.

Stars/Smileys

Thumbs

Follow-up question (types)

A score tells you what the customer experienced. A follow-up question helps explain why.

For example, a low satisfaction score alone does not tell you whether the problem involved pricing, delivery, website usability or customer service.

Here are some of the follow-up question types you can apply to your customer feedback forms:

Multiple-Choice / Check all that apply

These kinds of questions are beneficial for categorisation. Are you trying to find out how many of your visitors have been able to reach a certain goal, what job title they have or learn where they live? Then these are the question types that will easily help you collect and analyse that data.

Below you’ll find some examples of common multiple-choice/check all that apply question types.

• Radio button




• Checkbox




• Dropdown

Categories

This question type is often used for general feedback. As these forms are commonly placed on all pages of a webiste, they usually collect a substantial amount of broad feedback. Categorising it like this makes analysing the data and assigning a follow-uptask to the right team much easier.

Text area / Open Comment Section

Adding an open comment section at the bottom of your customer feedback forms helps give your forms context. For example, imagine publishing a Goal Completion Rate form on your website that triggers on exit-intent. The form asks whether your visitors managed to achieve what they wanted to during their session and includes radio buttons with the options ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

This allows you to understand if your website is working according to your visitors’ needs. However, without asking a follow-up question, like ‘We’re sorry to hear that. Could you elaborate on what you were looking to achieve?‘, you won’t be able to identify which actions to take to create a better user experience.

Contact details

Adding a contact details section to your feedback forms enables organisations to follow up on feedback if needed.

Screenshot

Visual feedback helps organisations quickly identify bugs and design issues occurring on the website or in-app.

Need inspiration for your follow-up questions?
Check out our extensive list of survey question examples! Alternatively you can check our library of website feedback form templates here.

Customer Feedback Form Placement

The placement (or deployment) method used for your customer feedback forms is also important. Are you going to gather feedback on your mobile app rather than your website? Then you’ll need to use a mobile-optimised form (and maybe even an SDK). Are you going to make use of feedback buttons on the page, or do you want to trigger customer feedback forms based on certain behaviours (e.g. leaving the page)? As you can hear, there are multiple important factors to consider.

Channels

There are three key channels through which you can collect customer feedback: websites, mobile apps and emails. Let’s take a look at each of these individually below.

Website

As you might’ve guessed, website feedback is feedback collected from your website. This is the most common channel for gathering feedback, especially for industries such as e-commerce and retail, as it is essentially the ‘face of the business’. Customer feedback forms on this channel enable your organisation to discover bugs and usability issues, but also measure important metrics like customer satisfaction. As a result, you will have the insights needed to boost conversions and reduce drop-off rates across your website.



Calvin Klein website feedback form

Mobile App

Mobile feedback enables your organisation to gather feedback from its mobile app(s). This type of feedback provides insight into things like the effectiveness of onboarding processes, the success of feature launches and of course, helps track bug issues. For this channel, you must leverage customer feedback technology made specially for mobile, whether that’s via webview, API or SDK.


DHL mobile feedback form

Email

And lastly, organisations can also collect email feedback through email campaigns. Gathering feedback on this channel enables organisations to better understand their email audience and gauge if the content they’re sending is useful and/or informative. It is ideal for email campaigns such as promo campaigns, confirmation emails, newsletters, re-engagement campaigns and more. It is also a channel used to measure sentiment following an interaction with the customer (e.g. post-purchase drip campaigns). Email feedback can be collected via an embedded survey or by way of an email survey invite (with a click-through landing page).



Albert Heijn email feedback

Triggering

There are two methods to trigger (or initiate) a feedback form: actively or passively.

Active

Active feedback forms are company-initiated. In other words, the feedback form is triggered based on rules or ‘events’ that the company defines such as behaviour. For example, some events might include click path, exit intent, mouse movement, etc. This method is very effective for gathering more targeted data and capturing feedback in the moment.



Feu Vert exit feedback form

Check here for examples of event-driven feedback.

Passive

Passive feedback forms are user-initiated. These usually come in the form of a feedback button (or icon) visible on the side or corner of a webpage or mobile app. They are also sometimes built into the menu of an application. This type of feedback is great for visitors who want to provide feedback on topics like usability and overall satisfaction. These forms are ideal (for gathering general feedback) in that they are always live on one or many pages of the website, enabling visitors to provide feedback when and where they want to.

Display / Positioning

There are also a number of ways to display your feedback form on the page, including: modal, slide-in and embedded customer feedback forms. Which one to choose is purely based on user experience and design in most cases.

Modal

Slide-in

Embedded

Embedded is frequently used for detailed content pages (e.g. FAQs) as well as email campaigns.

Marketing and Branding Considerations

In addition to the questions themselves and the deployment methods applied, it’s also important to make sure a few marketing concerns are addressed. The most important being the tone of voice, branding and user friendliness.

Tone of voice

In marketing communications, tone of voice is a small but critical factor as it is a direct reflection of your brand’s personality. When it comes to customer feedback forms, your tone of voice may vary depending on the industry, context or even the channel on which the feedback is being collected.

Many technology companies, for example, use a very informal tone of voice as this speaks well to their audience. Whereas perhaps a financial institution may use a more formal tone.

In terms of context, you might also see that many feedback forms aimed at conducting market research tend to be more formal, whereas a short user experience survey may use informal language.

Branding

Branding is also an important consideration when creating customer feedback forms. The look and feel of your feedback form should be aligned with your brand’s style. Therefore, it’s important to select a feedback solution that caters to these customisation needs.

For example, using the right colour codes, font, shapes, logo and even a feedback button that blends in with your existing branding will go a long way.



Take this feedback form from TOGGO. It fits perfectly into the page and the feedback button blends in nicely. Nothing about this feedback form tells you that it’s been created using a different software.

User friendliness

Lastly, your organisation should consider the user friendliness of its customer feedback forms. Are they easy to find? Are they available on the right pages across your website or within your mobile app? How long are your surveys? Let’s take a look at the best practices.

• Make your feedback forms accessible. Ensure your customer feedback forms are easy to find across your digital channels. Use always-on forms for general feedback and targeted forms that appear based on user behaviour.
• Relevant pages create relevant insights. Place each form where customers have enough context to respond accurately. For example, an NPS survey should not appear on the homepage before visitors have interacted with your brand.
• Prevent feedback fatigue with short surveys. Keep customer feedback forms focused and easy to complete. For most digital use cases, two to three questions are enough.

Looking for more user feedback best practices? Check out this post.

Start building your customer feedback forms today!

A well-designed customer feedback form gives you more than a collection of scores. It helps you understand customer needs, identify friction and prioritise improvements across your website, mobile app, products and services.

With Mopinion (part of Netigate), you can create fully customisable customer feedback forms and collect targeted feedback across websites, mobile apps and email. Advanced targeting, flexible question types and actionable reporting help your teams capture feedback at relevant moments and turn customer insights into meaningful improvements.

Start with a clear objective, keep your questions focused and collect feedback as close as possible to the experience you want to evaluate. By combining the right metrics with contextual follow-up questions and a user-friendly design, you can turn customer responses into actions that improve the customer experience.