Through surveys and social media listening, brands can learn how their customers feel about them. Customer feedback enables brands to improve their offerings and the customer experience.
Gathering feedback can also help your customers feel heard. According to market research company GWI, 42% of consumers want brands to listen to their feedback.
In this article, learn about different feedback collection methods, with tips from businesses to inform your customer feedback strategy.
What is customer feedback?
Customer feedback is any information you receive from consumers on their experience with your brand and products or services. By analyzing customer feedback, you can gauge customer satisfaction, gather ideas on how to improve customer experience, and learn which areas of your business are doing well.
Feedback can come in the form of a rating system (such as a star system or numerical scale), customer surveys, customer interviews, or written reviews.
Ways to gather customer feedback
There are several ways ecommerce businesses can collect customer feedback and learn how customers feel about their products or brand in general. These include:
Social media
Social media provides a direct line of communication between brands and customers, which makes it a good place to gather customer feedback. Here are a few different methods:
Use polls and ask questions
Several social media platforms let you post polls so viewers can weigh in on topics easily. For example, protein snack company Elavi uses Instagram stickers to ask their audience what flavors they’d like to see next.
Read customer messages
Your comment section and DMs can be full of valuable feedback. When YouTuber Amanda Rach Lee launched Shop ARL, she took her followers behind the scenes through the process of building the stationery brand.
“The good thing about doing social media alongside the business, is you pretty much get instant feedback on your products,” she says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.
This direct feedback inspired the colors she used, the layout of planners, and the types of products she sold.
If you want to go beyond your own comment section, use a social listening tool to help you track conversations that pertain to your brand across social media platforms.
Turn to your community groups
A community group can provide an ongoing stream of feedback. Hearth Display, a digital whiteboard brand that helps families get organized, created two private Facebook groups where thousands of families are in constant dialogue with each other and the brand. Cofounder Susie Harrison says this environment results in honest feedback.
“[We learn] about the problems they experience every day, what solutions would serve them best, their feedback on features as we continue to build them, what they’re looking for in terms of a feature set from Hearth to build,” she says on Shopify Masters. “We’re constantly talking to them in real time on a platform that feels native and comfortable to them to get their honest and candid feedback.”
Customer surveys
Customer feedback surveys have many purposes and can include multiple-choice or open-ended questions.
For womenswear brand Modern Citizen, a comprehensive annual survey is a way to ensure they consistently meet customers’ expectations. Every year, the company sends out a 40- to 50-question survey with a mix of multiple choice and free responses.
“That covers everything from broader things like how they’re feeling about the macroeconomic environment, shopping in general, and trying to take a pulse on where the mood of the moment is,” says cofounder Jessica Lee on Shopify Masters. “[We’re] also really getting a sense of [our customer’s] relationship with us. What does she like from us? What is she expecting from us? What would she like to see us do? We also ask questions about the brand, about our creative, about every aspect of what we put out there.”
A few common survey questions include:
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): At the end of an interaction, ask customers how satisfied they are with a product or experience. A customer satisfaction score measures customer satisfaction with a specific product or interaction on a scale from one to 100.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS is a way to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty by asking, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”
- Customer effort score (CES):CES asks customers how easy it is for customers to accomplish a task with your product or business. A high score indicates it’s low-effort for customers.
To create a survey, you can use an app like Shopify Forms, which supports both pop-up and inline forms.
Product reviews
Product reviews provide social proof, a psychological phenomenon that describes how people rely on the opinions of others to influence their own. This makes customer feedback important because it can affect how others perceive your brand.
Luxury footwear brand Scarlett Chase uses product review app Judge.me, which allows store owners to collect, import and syndicate reviews to instill trust in their customers.
Review sites
Customers may use third-party review sites like Google and Trustpilot to share their experiences. Customer review management is the practice of monitoring and influencing this customer feedback. It also gives you another avenue to gather feedback.
To be proactive, you can follow in the footsteps of sustainable toothbrush brand Suri. Anytime a customer leaves a review on Trustpilot, their team gets the information on their Slack channel.
“We read every one,” says Gyve Safavi, cofounder and CEO of Suri, on Shopify Masters. “We get negative ones. We get, ‘Wasn’t for me.’ And we read why and we take [it] into account, and then our innovation team banks that into a sort of model where we start saying, ‘Is that something we can include in a new version?’”
For the team at Suri, innovating is important. As they take on disposable plastic, they continue to look for ways to be more ecoconscious. Being tuned into what customers want via feedback helps them come up with new solutions.
Customer service data
Customer service data can help you identify pain points and improve your products.
Part of accessories brand Ridge’s customer service strategy is to share feedback with the product team. For example, they discovered that their luggage products were getting damaged during fulfillment. In response, the company tweaked its luggage design for smoother shipping.
If you’re a small business with limited customer service resources, you can use an AI-powered messaging system like Shopify Inbox to collect customer service feedback.
3 tips for collecting customer feedback
Here are a few tips you can use to better collect customer feedback and ensure a high-quality customer journey:
Ask the right questions
Your ability to learn useful information from your customers directly relates to the quality and type of questions you ask them. A good place to start is to consider what you want to achieve with your survey.
For example, Copper Cow Coffee surveyed customers to learn how they felt about the products they purchased. The company learned that people loved the coffee, but that didn’t tell them why they didn’t repurchased it, so they got more specific.
“[We asked], ‘Why did you only buy the coffee twice this year if you love it so much, if you say it’s your favorite coffee?’” says Debbie Wei Mullin, founder of Copper Cow Coffee, on Shopify Masters.
This led them to understand that some customers were saving their coffee for special occasions or only purchased it as a gift. In response, Copper Cow launched a lower-cost ground coffee line that customers may be more inclined to use on an everyday basis.
Including both quantitative feedback questions (ratings on a scale) and qualitative feedback questions (asking customers how they feel) allows you to elicit a variety of responses you can use in different ways.
Create a customer feedback loop
A customer feedback loop is the process through which a business receives customer feedback and then responds to that feedback, engaging with consumers and creating a cycle that helps improve the company, the product or service, and the consumer experience.
One model to help kickstart a customer feedback loop is ACAF:
- Ask: The first step is to ask your customers for feedback.
- Categorize: Store and organize information in a way that you can best use it. Some survey apps have built-in analytics to help you make data-driven decisions.
- Act: This step is about implementing customer feedback, which includes informing relevant stakeholders.
- Follow-up: The last stage is to reach out to customers to thank them and ensure they feel appreciated for providing feedback.
Offer incentives
Customers may need a good reason to spend their time and effort filling out feedback forms. Coffee concentrate brand Kloo understands this.
“Putting myself in the consumer’s shoes, if I get an email asking to leave a review or do a survey, I will probably ignore it unless there is something in it for me,” Claudia Snoh, cofounder of Kloo, says on Shopify Masters. “So we offered our customers free products in exchange for their time.”
Customer feedback FAQ
What is an example of good customer feedback?
An example of good customer feedback is Copper Cow Coffee surveying customers to ask why they didn’t purchase more product regularly despite liking it so much. Customers said they were saving the coffee for special occasions or purchasing it as gifts, which inspired the brand to create an everyday product.
Why is it important to get customer feedback?
Leveraging quantitative and qualitative customer feedback can help you to improve different elements of your business, such as your products, customer service, marketing, and branding.
How do you use customer feedback?
Once you collect feedback, use customer feedback analysis tools to create reports. Then analyze these to determine how you can better meet customer needs and grow your business.
