How to collect customer feedback ?

Published on September 13, 2021  - Updated on December 04, 2023

Analyzing customer reviews is the best way to identify and prioritize irritants.

When you lose a customer without understanding the reasons, it's always annoying. That's why asking customers directly for feedback on a product or service is the key to reducing churn. However, it is not always easy to generate returns, in this article we will detail in our opinion the best ways to collect customer reviews.

Open-ended questions surveys 

When it comes to collecting customer reviews, nothing is more effective than surveys. Once the questions have been defined, it is in fact very easy to distribute them to customers and allows us to obtain very rich feedback in the content. This is the most relevant source to analyze later to get as much insight as possible from your customer reviews.

How to proceed?

First define the questions that will constitute your survey and create it on the tool of your choice (SurveyMonkey, GoogleForm, ZohoForm, etc.). Then you just need to distribute it to your customer base by email, on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and other points of contact with your customers

All you have to do is wait a few days or weeks depending on the number of opinions you want and if all goes well you will have collected a lot of feedback!

If despite everything you receive too few responses, there may be several solutions:

a) The survey must be short. No one wants to spend 1 hour answering a questionnaire, it would be just boring and discouraging for your customers. Keep the questions short and keep your survey between 5 and 10 questions to get the most results.

b) Focus only on questions that are of real interest. This goes along with the previous point but any questions should be used for your future analysis. Do not waste your time or that of your clients with questions of no real interest!

c) Leave your customers free in their responses. Use open-ended questions so as not to steer the answers. In most cases, you will be surprised at the answers you get that reflect what your customers really think.

d) Be transparent. Let your customer know exactly what to expect by clicking on the link in your questionnaire. Explain the purpose of the survey and give the approximate time necessary to answer it. If you don't specify this response time, chances are they won't even click on it, thinking it will take too long.

Short surveys to monitor indicators like the NPS

Another way to do this is to offer surveys with closed questions.

The main advantage is that the customer will spend little time responding to the survey which will allow you to generate more returns.

It also makes it possible to integrate and monitor indicators such as the NPS (Net Promoter Score) in order to have an overall idea of ​​the level of satisfaction of your customers.

On the other hand, the feedback with this type of survey is necessarily less comprehensive and less rich to analyze than with open questions.

This is why we recommend that you prepare a questionnaire condensed into 5 questions as specific as possible. For example, do not ask your customer's opinion on your product as a whole, but rather on one aspect in particular. This is the best way to get relevant feedback that will help you identify precisely the irritants experienced by your customers.

Short surveys with closed questions will therefore provide a less in-depth understanding of what your customers think about your products/services, but it is nevertheless a very good source of feedback.

Make the most of your customers' time

You may have the best questionnaire in the world, but sometimes that is not enough to collect a sufficient number of returns.

Indeed, as mentioned above no one likes to fill out questionnaires, it is all too often tedious and, most of the time, the customer has nothing to gain from it.

However, your customers' time is precious, make your survey interesting so that they want to take the time to answer it.

This is why at Q°emotion we recommend rewarding respondents in order to motivate them.

For example, you can simply offer a voucher on a future order if the person takes the time to fully complete your feedback questionnaire. The customer thus feels considered and will tend to give more complete answers which will bring you more actionable insights

The Google Opinion Rewards app earns Google Play Store credits for completing a survey.

Send a post-purchase follow-up email to request a feedback

If there is one thing that should not be overlooked in order to maximize the number of customer returns, it is timing.

Indeed if you contact a customer 6 months after his purchase, there is a great probability that this one no longer remembers or with less detail of his experience.

On the other hand, if you contact him a few days later, it will still be fresh and the comment is very likely to be more relevant to your business. In addition, as the memory of his experience is very recent, the possibility that he will respond to your survey or leave you an opinion on online review platforms is all the greater.

As far as these platforms are concerned, they are very popular depending on the sector and will have a crucial impact on your business.
For example, a restaurant or a hotel will not be able to miss TripAdvisor while a high-tech product will have to rely on Amazon reviews instead. Today, the vast majority of consumers (88% according to Forbes) consult customer reviews before making a purchase.

It is therefore strongly recommended that you ask your customers to give you a rating on the platform that concerns you.

You can also favor specialized platforms such as Critizr to be sure that the opinions left come from real customers. These opinions are often rich in terms of content and will certainly provide you with actionable insights!

Live chat feedback

Among all the means of communication with your customers that may be relevant to analyze, we can also talk about live chat. If you have one installed on your website, chances are a lot of customers have used it to interact with your customer service.

The main advantage of live chat is the spontaneity of the comments. Indeed, the people who use it will do it on their own without solicitation from you, this will ensure you have feedback or suggestions for improvements directly through your website or application.

This source of advice is generally more oriented towards the pre-purchase experience, whether in terms of your website design or the bugs encountered, so it will give you different insights but just as important to improve your conversion rate.

By analyzing these exchanges with Q°emotion, it will be easy for you to identify the irritants encountered by your customers and to prioritize them in the treatment. Group discussions by topic and define an action plan to act and improve the customer experience

Social networks

The last way to collect feedback that we are going to talk about in this article concerns social networks. Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, your customers are certainly talking about your brand or your products.

By monitoring what is being said about your brand, you will be able to spot a problem very quickly before it emerges.

The most important thing about this source of advice is the speed of action, on social networks everything spreads very quickly, you must immediately respond to dissatisfied customers and correct the irritant before a potential bad buzz.

As mentioned in our article on the 5 best sources of customer reviews, social networks are one of the least relevant sources to analyze. The content of the feedback is generally less comprehensive than for the previous sources. On the other hand, if you're struggling to get customer feedback, social media is still a safe bet and may be worth investigating.

Verbatim analysis

If all goes well, you should quickly be overwhelmed with the reviews. Between questionnaires, emails, live chat, social networks, you will have everything you need to detect and prioritize irritants! But how to do it?

Indeed, it will be impossible for you to process all the verbatims one by one, it is just not feasible.

This is the whole point of a semantic analysis solution like Q ° emotion. Our tool is able to analyze several thousand verbatims in a few moments and classify them emotionally by theme.

Thus, by coupling the volume of comments to the emotional tone, it is easy to prioritize areas for improvement.

In the example above we can see that current operations are the most mentioned topic in the comments as an improvement point. This means that it is undoubtedly a priority irritant to be treated.

By letting the tool analyze the transcripts for you, you will be able to dive more easily into the data and make the best use of your customers' opinions.

To learn more about Q°emotion, you can request your free live demo by clicking here.