10 Tips for Collecting Meaningful Customer Feedback

When Pranav Goyal, a product manager at Pepper Content, a content marketplace that connects businesses with skilled freelancers, set out to consolidate all their user communication in one place, he had no idea that his journey would lead his company to unlock over $180M in ARR. The team implemented Beamer Feedback to make it easier and more efficient to talk to their customers, but the tool brought in an influx of customer feedback that led the team to new business opportunities and previously un-explored options for their product. This is the impact that collecting customer feedback can have on your business.

For most organizations, collecting meaningful customer feedback can be a difficult and frustrating process. Responses to emailed requests for feedback are lower than ever before. Reaching out once will likely result in only a handful of responses, but reaching out multiple times can have your users feeling like they’re being spammed.

To collect customer feedback successfully in this landscape, software teams need to rely on multiple sources of information and multiple types of data. Read on to learn how you can start collecting valuable feedback from your customers via surveys, social media, customer support calls and conversations, advisory board, and more.

Contents:

1. Ask customers directly with quick surveys.
2. Find out how likely users are to recommend your software.
3. Keep an eye on social media chatter.
4. Ask for feedback during customer support calls or chats.
5. Create a customer advisory board.
6. Make it easy for users to give feedback from within your app.
7. Reward users for sharing feedback.
8. Talk to your customers about their experience in a casual setting.
9. Monitor how customers use your product with tracking tools.
10. Keep customers in the loop with updates.

#1 | Ask customers directly with quick surveys.

Surveys are a commonly used and effective way for companies to gather customer feedback. They can help teams gain essential insights into customer satisfaction, needs, and preferences. A brief survey can help you gather information such as:

• How efficiently and easily your customers can navigate your software
• Which capabilities and workflows offer more to your customers
• What new functionalities would make the product better in the future
• How much your customers like your product

To create a successful survey, use the following best practices.

Identify the key objectives for your survey before designing it. This step will help you prioritize your questions and determine your audience. For example, if a product manager is specifically looking for feedback on a new tool in beta, you’ll want to limit your questions to those that pertain to that tool and send the survey only to those who have used the tool in its beta release.

Keep the survey as short as possible, with a cap of ten questions. Remember that the longer it takes for a person to complete the survey, the less likely they are to submit it — translating to fewer responses and less data for your team.

Ask questions that will collect both quantitative and qualitative data. You can collect quantitative data, for example, by asking a user to rate a certain functionality on a scale of one to ten. To collect qualitative data, ask a more open-ended question and leave them a text box to answer.

Once you’ve gathered survey results, you can analyze the data to identify strengths and weaknesses in your customer experience, find trends and insights to inform your roadmap, and more. The quantitative data you collected will show you how satisfied customers are with factors like product quality, pricing, and customer service, while qualitative data provides more nuanced and subjective feedback that can inform persona research, unique customer requirements, and customer sentiment toward your product.

#2 | Find out how likely users are to recommend your software.

The willingness of customers to recommend your software to their friends and colleagues, usually called Net Promoter Score (NPS), is an important metric to collect and analyze over time to determine the success of your product in the market. It’s typically collected via survey — often, surveys will include the question, “How likely are you to recommend this product to others on a scale of 0 to 10?” The responses to this question are then collected and analyzed as the NPS.

Based on their rating, customers are categorized as promoters (9-10), passives (7-8), or detractors (0-6). Your NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters. A positive score shows that your customers are satisfied and willing to recommend your app. A negative score can indicate problems with your product’s usability, reliability, and efficiency. When your NPS dips into the negative, you’ll want to dig deeper into customer feedback to identify the causes of customer dissatisfaction and take steps to fix any issues.

While teams have previously relied on the traditional survey sent via email to collect this piece of customer feedback, it is far from the only option. Many software developers now ask this question to users within the app itself — a strategy that greatly increases the likelihood of getting a response, as it eliminates the friction of opening and reading an email, clicking on a link to open the survey, and taking the time to answer multiple questions. With an in-app question, a user can give an NPS rating in a single click while they’re actively using the app.

#3 | Keep an eye on social media chatter.

Social media can be a rich source of uncensored, real-time customer feedback on your software if you leverage it effectively. Monitoring popular sites such as TikTok, LinkedIn, X, and Instagram for your brand, the names of your products, keywords and phrases, and your competitors can provide a good foundation for customer and user feedback. Tools such as Brandwatch, Sprout Social, and others can give your team an effective window into what customers are saying about your brand and products.

For product managers and marketers at organizations that make unique or specific tools, a general approach to social media monitoring may not be as effective. For example, a company that builds AI-powered solutions for manufacturers may not get many brand or product mentions on X or TikTok. For this company, finding their user base on social media will require a more focused approach, such as finding manufacturing industry-specific forums on Reddit or Quora, or an industry-specific review site.

When collecting data via social media for customer feedback, look for pain points and complaints that you can address as well as positive feedback to amplify. Your team can also increase the volume of social media feedback by engaging with users on each platform. By engaging as a company with social media chatter about your brand, products, and industry, you can encourage users to leave more valuable feedback.

Responding to positive feedback by commenting and resharing can become a powerful marketing tool in itself, and encourage other users to do the same. You can also respond publicly to customers who raise concerns about your product when appropriate. Commenting on a negative review with a link to your roadmap that includes fixing the issues raised in the review can generate goodwill among users and indicate your dedication to your customers.

Other ways to increase customer feedback via social media include:

• Run targeted ad campaigns that drive your audience toward leaving reviews or take a survey.
• Build a user community via Facebook, Discord, LinkedIn, or other platform where your audience is most active.
• Build a social media presence as a brand or product, share your product roadmap, and ask your followers for feedback — for example, by asking for their “feature wishlist.”

#4 | Ask and collect customer feedback during support calls or chats.

Customer support calls and chats present a prime opportunity to gather feedback to improve your product and service. Make it easy for customers to give feedback during calls by training agents to listen and ask open-ended questions about the issue at hand throughout the call. After resolving the support issue, agents can give an additional opportunity for the customer to give feedback by saying something like, “I’m glad I could help resolve this issue. Do you have any other suggestions on how we can improve our product or customer service?”

Recording and transcribing customer support calls and logging your support chats with tools such as Gong, Otter.ai, or Rev can also be a source of valuable qualitative data about your brand and product. For example, you can flag product-specific keywords from a dataset of support call transcriptions to find which products or features are causing more issues from users. You can also run a sentiment analysis on the same dataset to find out how customers generally feel about your app when it’s giving them trouble. Isolating calls in which a customer feels positively about the product during a support call can indicate a product champion, whom you might be able to leverage for marketing your product and brand.

You can also follow up your customer support calls with a brief survey to measure the customer’s satisfaction with the support they received as well as the product in general. This allows the customer time to calmly reflect on the experience. Include both quantitative ratings on factors like call resolution, agent knowledge, and hold times, along with open-ended fields to highlight positives and areas for improvement.

#5 | Create a customer advisory board.

A customer advisory team provides a proactive way to gather customer perspectives to guide your product decisions. To build your customer advisory team, identify 8-12 of your most engaged customers. Be sure to choose a diverse set of customers or users by including a variety of customer segments.

Choosing customers who have already helped your team via giving positive testimonials and valuable product feedback can help ensure that your board will remain active and help to improve your product. You should also offer incentives for those on the board, such as free access to your product, early access to new products, and the opportunity to beta test new capabilities. representing different customer segments.

To gather feedback from your new customer advisory board, schedule regular meetings and set each agenda well in advance. To direct your discussions and ensure that they’re productive, stick to specific topics for each meeting, such as a certain new product or capability. Show the board relevant product roadmaps, and the research and reasoning behind each product. This will encourage real-time input on your plans, help your team validate and prioritize new additions and rising issues, and highlight trends that may affect your product or company.

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Beyond these regular meetings, give the customers on your advisory board special access to your team for ongoing ideation and feedback, such as a private online forum or Slack channel. As your product grows and changes, ensure that your customer advisory board does too. By proactively engaging a diverse customer panel, you can gain invaluable insights that help you innovate and make strategic decisions grounded in customer needs.

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Beamer tip: Read this article to learn how Signifyd, a commerce protection platform, designed and uses their customer advisory board.

#6 | Make it easy for users to give feedback from within your app.

Collecting customer feedback from emailed surveys, social media, and even support conversations all require meeting the user on a separate medium for communication. The time and effort required on the users’ side for these methods of sharing feedback make it less likely for most of your users to participate. One surefire way to eliminate this friction is to enable users to give feedback from within your app itself. Examples of this include:

• An in-app chat for instant support
• A changelog that highlights new features, updates, and news, which users can comment on
• In-app feedback forms that enable users to submit ideas and feature requests, as well as vote on other others’ requests

Meeting your users in your app can significantly increase the amount of feedback you receive from the people you most want to hear from. Read this blog post for more best practices on communicating effectively with your user base.

#7 | Reward users for sharing feedback.

Rewards can be an effective incentive to encourage users to share feedback. For example, your customers may be more inclined to spend time filling out a survey if you offer a gift card in return.

Other reward systems that can increase feedback and engagement include:

• Virtual badges and points that unlock access to exclusive content. Gamifying feedback taps into users’ desires for status and recognition.
• Reputation incentives like badges on user profiles highlighting them as a “Product Expert” or “Feedback All-Star” for contributing thoughtful suggestions.
• Early access to new features or pre-release beta versions for users who give quality feedback frequently.
• Discounts on their subscription or future purchases from your organization.

When you publicly recognize and thank engaged users who put effort into making the product better for everyone, not only will those users be encouraged to continue that work; others will also be incentivized to leave valuable feedback.

#8 | Talk to your customers about their experience in a casual setting.

Every touchpoint with customers presents an opportunity to gather insights to improve your software, so it’s important to have intentional conversations to collect customer feedback. Your customer service representatives, account executives, and customer success managers can all collect customer feedback as during their interactions with your user base. Their conversations can and should be recorded and transcribed so that your team can fully leverage this qualitative data.

When giving product demos or onboarding, ensure that representatives ask open-ended questions like “What features seem most useful to your work?” and “What other capabilities would allow you to get more value?” Have your team pay special attention to pain points and desired functionality.

Have your account executives and customer success managers schedule brief, informal one-on-one chats with several users each month. A casual environment, such as a meet-up in a cafe, can encourage users to give honest feedback they may not formally submit.

You can also have your team follow up with users after major product releases for conversations specifically about that product. These conversations can be useful in collecting customer feedback on adoption challenges, unique use cases, bugs, and more.

Surveys provide scalable data, but conversational feedback offers qualitative, human insights. When your customer-facing teams are trained and equipped to collect this feedback, you can more easily find information to help guide your product roadmap, positioning, and messaging. Customers want to be heard — so show them you’re listening and close the feedback loop by including their requests on your roadmap and changelogs.

As an example, this article by Peter Kazanjy, cofounder of Potential Energy, runs the customer advisory board for the company. While they have formal meetings to collect feedback, the Potential Energy team also regularly invites the group to happy hours and private dinners to collect feedback in a casual setting while also rewarding the board for their work via networking opportunities and free meals and drinks.

#9 | Monitor how customers use your product with tracking tools.

With the use of modern software, developers often don’t even need to talk to their users to collect certain types of feedback from them. Solutions such as Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Amplitude can help teams gather information about app usage, conversions, user demographics, funnels, product adoption, and more. You can also get even more detailed by leveraging Heap Analytics, Hotjar, or similar tools to view exactly where and what your users tend to view, click, and interact with in your application.

By monitoring usage metrics and analytics, you can track which features are most popular, what workflows help users complete their tasks, and what keeps your users coming back. You can also identify potential issues in your app by:

• Tracking usage metrics to identify gaps where users may struggle to accomplish goals due to missing or ineffective functionality.
• Tracking users’ in-app paths to identify points of friction.
• Looking for drop-off points in key workflows that suggest confusion, annoyance, or distraction.

While relying solely on these solutions to collect customer feedback can be risky and lead to incorrect assumptions, the information you collect via these methods can add valuable context to the data gathered from surveys, social media, and conversations with your users. To learn more about how you can better understand what your customers need, read this blog post.

#10 | Keep customers in the loop with updates.

Collecting feedback from your customers doesn’t end with the survey or meeting. To ensure that your customers feel valued and keep the feedback coming, it’s vital to show that you’re listening to what they say. Here are a few ways that you can close the feedback loop with your customers:

• Publish release notes with every update
• Update your product roadmap on a regular basis
• Call out specific customer feedback in these publications
• Follow up with customers who offered valuable feedback when their suggestions are added to the roadmap and included in product releases

Communicating product updates and releases that cater directly to customer needs and the feedback they offer will foster a continuous conversation with your customers and help grow their loyalty, trust, and usage rates. For example, Pepper Content streamlined their feedback loop with Beamer Feedback, which resulted in hundreds of comments from customers on their changelog posts and 120+ feature requests with over a thousand votes and hundreds of comments.

How can Beamer help you collect customer feedback?

Collecting customer feedback can be challenging when you take all of these channels of communication into consideration. Collecting data from surveys, customer conversations and calls, social media, advisory board meetings, and more can quickly evolve into an onslaught of information — or worse, you may not be able to collect enough data to inform your roadmap even if you engage in all of these feedback collection methods.

With Beamer, you can easily collect customer feedback, enable users to discuss and vote on feature requests, and close your feedback loop with changelogs and roadmaps — all without having your users leave your app. Drawing inspiration from the best changelog examples, you can create your own method to inform your customers and gather data. By housing customer feedback collection within your app, you can:

• Keep all your feature requests in one place
• Validate feature ideas early
• Close the feedback loop easily
• Share customer feedback across your team and directly to those who need to act on it
• Respond to requests and questions quickly and build trust

To learn more, check out Beamer Feedback.

Read this case study to learn how Pepper Content, a PLG company, unlocked over $180K in MRR with Beamer Feedback.