What is Customer Feedback? A guide to collecting and analysing your data
02 May 2022

Are your customers getting value out of the online experience you’re offering? Are they satisfied with your products and services? And just how loyal are they to your brand exactly? These are the questions customer feedback will help you get the answers to. In return, this clarity and better understanding of customers’ needs is what will help us ensure our efforts will bring the desired results. But how do you get started? And what does the process look like from start to finish? Let’s dive in…

In this post, we will define customer feedback and outline the three pillars of the customer feedback management process, including which metrics and digital channels to use and how to bring your feedback program full circle with analytics and closed loop feedback techniques.

What you’ll learn:

• What is customer feedback?
• The customer feedback management process
• Collecting customer feedback (with survey template examples)
• Analysing customer feedback (with chart examples)
• Closing the loop with customer feedback
• Companies that use customer feedback

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is data collected from online visitors – whether that’s via websites, mobile apps or within email campaigns – which expresses the visitor’s reaction to a product, service, or their overall experience on the digital channel. These insights are then used by various digital roles – such as digital marketers, UX designers, web analysts, mobile marketers, and more – to improve the experience.

The customer feedback management process

Customer feedback management (CFM) is the process of collecting, analysing and closing the loop with customer feedback with the goal of optimising the online customer experience. In other words, CFM brings customer feedback full circle.

1. Collecting customer feedback

There are a variety of channels upon which your organisation can collect customer feedback. And depending on your goals, there are also a number of different customer feedback metrics you can measure within your customer feedback surveys that will give you the insights you need to optimise the online experience.

But before we dive into a bunch of examples, let’s look at the two different methods for collecting this feedback: active feedback and passive feedback.

Active customer feedback is essentially customer feedback that is captured ‘in-the-moment’. This type of feedback survey is company-initiated, meaning depending on the rules set in place by the organisation a survey will appear on the page. Potential rules might include: time on page, exit intent, scrolling to the end of a page, etc.

Passive customer feedback – on the other hand – is customer feedback that is captured from a survey that is initiated by the user by clicking on the form, i.e., via a feedback button. This feedback collection method puts the power in the customer’s hands to provide feedback when they wish. Typically that is why many organisations place a feedback button on all of their pages of the website, thus making it possible for the customer to choose when they provide feedback.

Passive feedback typically gathers generic on-page feedback and insights into the general user experience, whereas active feedback often gives insight into a targeted area or funnel.

Our advice? Apply both methods to your digital channels to collect a wide variety of customer feedback.

Then, of course, there are different types of customer feedback surveys you can leverage depending on your goals. Let’s take a look at some customer feedback survey examples below.

Customer feedback survey examples
We’ll start with the most popular digital channel: the website.

Website feedback
Website feedback helps organisations understand which areas of their website are performing well and which areas can be improved upon, i.e., certain pages and funnels that are key to the customer journey, or even online content. As previously mentioned, this type of customer feedback can be collected in a few different ways: via a generic feedback survey which is accessible via some or all pages on the website (a passive feedback survey), at the bottom of a webpage via an embedded survey, or as a pop-up / slide-in survey (an active feedback survey).

Within these surveys you can choose to gather different metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Goal Completion Rate (GCR), Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), or even ratings such as stars, smileys, number scale, etc.

NPS
NPS is one of the most popular loyalty metrics and is a great way of gauging customer loyalty online.



GCR
GCR measures the number of visitors who have completed a specific goal on your website or mobile app.



CES
CES is a metric used to understand how much effort it took your customer to achieve his/her goal.



CSAT
CSAT is essentially a measurement of how well your website meets the expectations of your customer.



Ratings
Ratings can be used to gauge sentiment and general opinions of website visitors. These are typically used in passive feedback surveys.



Email feedback
Email feedback plays an important role in customer-centricity. This type of customer feedback will enable you to provide a platform for two-way communication with your customers, where they can share their thoughts and perceptions of your email(s) and the information you’ve provided. There are various ways your organisation can collect feedback in email campaigns. The most simplistic method is to deploy an embedded survey with thumbs up and thumbs down. We often see this type of feedback used in newsletters and service emails, which are typically content-rich.



Additionally, organisations can gather NPS feedback within their emails. A great example of when to use this is within a post-purchase email, as the recipient has already experienced the customer journey from start to finish.



For a full list of email feedback templates, check out this post.

In-app feedback
As the use of mobile continues to grow, in-app feedback (also referred to as mobile feedback) has become a very powerful and necessary type of feedback. In fact, there’s an entire movement – ‘mobile first’ – which is pushing organisations to put more focus on the performance of their mobile apps. Customers have high expectations when it comes to the performance of these apps, making a good mobile experience a must.

In-app feedback gives organisations the means to gather feedback in a way that suits mobile apps. After all, the screen is different, space is limited and usability is of the utmost importance. Providing customer feedback must therefore be a smooth and effortless process and requires a slightly different approach. In fact, in addition to mobile-specific targeting techniques, some customer feedback tools offer solutions that enable users to gather mobile metadata and capture in-app screenshots to better define mobile issues.

With this type of feedback, many of the same metrics used for websites can be used here as well. For example, CSAT, NPS, and so on.

Here are a few examples of how these customer feedback surveys might look in-app:



Example of a CSAT in-app survey



Example of an NPS in-app survey

2. Analysing customer feedback

The next step in the customer feedback management process is to analyse your customer feedback. Therefore it is important to leverage a feedback tool that offers comprehensive customer feedback analytics. Analysing customer feedback is important for bringing feedback data together and identifying key trends and bottlenecks. Sure, you can export all of your data to another tool and analyse it there, but that is often time-consuming and cannot be done in real-time.

However, getting started with the analysis process can be a bit tricky and somewhat overwhelming for some organisations. Where do you start? How should you set up your dashboard for the best results? Which chart-building techniques will help you derive the most relevant insights from your data?

That is why we’ve written up a full article about customer feedback analytics.

Customer feedback analysis examples
The good news is, there are endless charts you can use to digest all of your feedback data. We’ve listed a few below (which you can find more extensive information on in the article listed above.

Identify trends over time



Cross analyse different channels or even countries

3. Closing the loop with customer feedback

Having gathered and analysed your customer feedback data, the last and final step is to close the loop with the customer and bring all of your efforts to a profitable conclusion. Closed loop feedback is essentially how you can ensure your customers and prospects ultimately buy from you and remain happy, loyal customers.

How to Close the Customer Feedback Loop

Ensure your customers and prospects ultimately remain happy, loyal customers.

Read all about it

First you’ll need to stay on top of your feedback internally. There are several tools within customer feedback software that enable you to do so, including tagging, assigning feedback items to colleagues and even setting up alerts so that feedback is processed quickly. These tools help you distribute and manage feedback across multiple departments.



Then you’ll need to revert back to your customers. Try prioritising feedback by implementing timescales. When it comes to online channels, customers generally want a resolution as quickly as possible, so it is advisable to bear this in mind internally. Track the progress of your actions and revert back to the customer to let them know their feedback is being processed and the team is working on a resolution.

And then, of course, when the issue has been resolved, be sure to notify the customer (or group of customers) depending on how widespread the issue is.

Companies that use customer feedback

Allianz

In this user case we will look at how the organisation Allianz leverages customer feedback.

Note: This is an excerpt from our Customer Stories page. Click the link to read the full Allianz customer story.

Allianz is part of Allianz Group which is one of the largest, multinational financial services companies in the world. At Allianz one of the main principles is that everything must be customer centric. This means that Allianz looks at how its customers experience the website early on in the customer journey. Which areas require extra effort? What can be improved upon in order to optimise the customer journey?

Allianz collects customer feedback primarily to discover obstacles within the customer journey. Stefan (Conversion Specialist at Allianz) talks about a challenge Allianz experience prior to feedback:

There was a tangle of CMS’s, tools and (sub) domains and it was therefore impossible to quickly identify when a website was not functioning optimally. Luckily, customer feedback is able to quickly bring this to your attention. If something does not work, visitors often let us know via the feedback button that is located on every page and a member of the team will receive a notification and start optimising.

Allianz uses both passive and active feedback on the website. Their passive forms enable visitors to let the team at Allianz know what they think of the website.



To prevent drop offs in conversion, Allianz also collects active feedback via an exit survey. An exit survey is a short questionnaire which asks visitors to share why they are leaving the site or page. Often this feedback form appears just before someone ‘threatens’ to leave the page and moves the mouse towards the exit, or if someone is on a page for a certain amount of time.

So what kinds of findings did they make?
With one of the insurance policies, Allianz saw the conversion via mobile was low. Many users clicked on the receipt, but were unable to continue. There was no clickable cross or button, so users got stuck and ended up leaving.

As a result of customer feedback, Allianz was able to resolve this issue and conversions increased from 0.48% to 3.50%; an achievement which translated into more than €900,000 in additional premium turnover.

Calvin Klein

In this user case we will look at how the organisation Calvin Klein leverages customer feedback.

Note: Click the link to read the full Calvin Klein customer story.

Calvin Klein is one of the most recognised fashion houses of today. From a digital perspective, Calvin Klein places a lot of value on data-driven decision making. They do this by not only monitoring quantitative behavioural data, but also by gathering qualitative insights obtained through listening to their customers.

Davy Schuyt, CRO Manager at Calvin Klein:

People move about the website very differently based on their goals and personal backgrounds, making it increasingly more important to be able to ask the right question at the right time. Mopinion allows us to target on a granular level, allowing us to dive deeper into certain topics.

Calvin Klein has multiple surveys running at all times.

“We permanently feature a default feedback button across the website, as well as a permanent survey on the Payment page checking for payment problems (after a set of rules has been met) as well as a survey on the Confirmation page, asking our visitors to recall their shopping experience.”

According to Davy, “the shorter a survey, the more chance someone fills it in. The longer the survey, the more information we get. Generally we keep the questions to a max of 3, but we always include a field for open input. It’s important that we can categorise the answers, but more important that people don’t feel like they have to change their opinion to fit a predetermined answer. As per the activation, we go through our qualitative data sources to ascertain at what point a visitor is most likely to run into an issue that we are trying to solve. That can be on a certain page landing, but also after a certain time, or a certain action taken. That is when we will launch the survey.”



Calvin Klein is very systematic and precise when it comes to analysing their feedback data.

“Every two months we analyse the Confirmation Page, Payment Page and General Feedback surveys. We compare this with previous months to see if persistent errors are diminishing and which new ones are arising. We tend to analyse one-off surveys as soon as possible and use those to fuel our testing roadmap and future campaign implementations.”

All of these are then shared company-wide, since a lot of the learnings are applicable across the board.

Nourish your online experience with customer feedback!

As with many improvement programs, it is critical that you carry out your customer feedback management program from start to finish and do so continuously. This means continuously collecting feedback on all the relevant digital channels, evaluating this feedback in your charts and dashboards and circling back to your customers. Keep in mind, however, that not all customer feedback tools enable you to easily analyse and take action on your feedback within their software. So make sure you have selected a software that brings your feedback full circle, like Mopinion.

Mopinion is an all-in-one customer feedback tool that helps organisations collect and analyse website, mobile, and email campaign customer feedback. It has an easy-to-use interface, with which users can build, design and configure feedback forms however they like. Mopinion users can also target specific groups of visitors with feedback forms and gain insights into why they are struggling to convert. Once collected, feedback items can be visualised in customisable dashboards and charts for advanced analyses. Additionally, digital teams can share and take action on these feedback items in a timely manner with the help of smart alerts.