How to get customer feedback

Asking users for direct feedback is a great way to gain actionable insight you can use to improve your conversion rate. When used alongside other research methods, user feedback can be a valuable part of your optimisation plan.

Why we need customer feeback

Before we get into the best ways of gathering customer feedback, let’s start by talking about why it’s important to the success of online businesses. Getting answers straight from your customers in their own words helps you understand what they really want and their ever-changing needs, expectations and motivations. If you ask the right questions, you can really tap into the mindset of your potential buyers. The better you know your customers, the more you’ll be able to align your service to their needs.

As well as building a picture of your audience and highlighting their preferences, customer feedback can expose any issues or friction encountered when browsing, allowing you to identify and eradicate problems to improve user experience.

Last but not least, by requesting feedback you’re giving your users an opportunity to talk about their experience. People are generally happy to share their opinions and will appreciate seeing that you value their thoughts. This method of communication can strengthen your relationship with your visitors and allows you to interact directly with the people who are using your service.

There are lots of avenues you can take to gather your feedback, so now we’ll go through a few of the most popular methods.

How to get feedback

1. Survey your users

Surveys are one of the most common methods of user research. You can set up a survey on your website using tools such as Hotjar or Typeform. These platforms are pretty flexible and enable you to customise question types, invitation and targeting.

If you’re aiming to target visitors having a problem on the page or wavering in their buying decision, you can set up your feedback to show after a delay of a minute or two. On-exit surveys for those about to abandon the site are also useful for understanding why users are leaving rather than converting.

Alternatively, you can send surveys via email with platforms such as MailChimp. You could survey existing customers and email subscribers to gather feedback from people who have already converted or shown interest in your offering. Sending a survey when visitors abandon their cart can shed light on their reasons.

Before you do this, you need to plan what to ask your customers. Decide what you want to find out and devise questions that will get meaningful answers you can use to improve people’s experience on your website.

Some example questions:

• What is the main reason for your visit to the site today?
• Have you experienced any troubles or frustrations on our site today?
• Are there any questions you haven’t been able to find the answer to?

The questions you ask should be tailored to your specific objectives and will depend on what you want to find out and the issues you intend to resolve.

Things to consider

Qualitative or quantitative?
Open questions may be more work for your users to complete, but can provide much better detail. You’ll find that you can learn a lot from just a small number of responses.

Targeting
If you set up surveys on your site, carefully consider the placement and timing – you don’t want to distract visitors from the desired goal.

Sample size
Ensure you have a big enough sample size to gain actionable insights. To increase your response rate, consider an incentive such as a free guide or voucher.

2. Usability tests

You can run a 5-second test using tools like Usability Hub. These allow you to upload specific pages or designs and user testers are asked about what they remember in order to measure their first impressions.

You may also want to run usability tests containing tasks and questions where you can directly observe users interacting with your site, which can be set up through sites like WhatUsersDo.com. Recruit a sample of users who match your demographic and set up a series of tasks to carry out on your website, asking them to comment on what they’re doing whilst completing these. This way you can see which aspects they notice first, where they go to access information, how they navigate and uncover usability issues.

These kinds of tests are invaluable, as directly observing behaviour on your site can provide a huge amount of insight into your biggest problems.

3. Live chat

As well as providing a convenient and quick way for your customers to get answers or assistance, live chat is a great way to learn where visitors have questions and help to address these. Through live chat transcripts, you can get immediate access to honest feedback, learn about users’ true pain points and turn them into opportunities.

On-site live chat helps you get an idea of what people are looking at and where they’re struggling so you can plan how to resolve issues, improve your service and meet customer needs.

You can also observe people’s phrasing, giving you an insight into the voice of the customer which you can then utilise in your website content.

Adding a pop-up inviting users to talk about or rate their experience is another method of gathering valuable feedback about your website, products or services.

How to use responses

Don’t forget to monitor your feedback as you collect it to ensure you’re gathering some useful responses – you shouldn’t be surprised by the insights when you come to analyse the data.

Use these methods and you’ll have a whole host of data from various forms of customer feedback, which will fuel your optimisation strategy. Once you’ve identified trends and recurring points in the feedback, you can turn these into actions to improve your service or start A/B testing before making changes to the site.

If you’d like advice on how to gather customer feedback and use it in your CRO strategy, please get in touch. Call 0161 236 1188 or email [email protected].