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10 Ways to Boost Customer Satisfaction

• G. Tomas M. Hult
• Forrest V. Morgeson

Takeaways from an analysis of millions of consumer data points.

Customer satisfaction is at its lowest point in the past two decades. Companies must focus on 10 areas of the customer experience to improve satisfaction without sacrificing revenue. The authors base their findings on research at the ACSI — analyzing millions of customer data points — and research that we conducted for The Reign of the Customer : Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Customer Satisfaction. For three decades, the ACSI has been a leading satisfaction index (cause-and-effect metric) connected to the quality of brands sold by companies with significant market share in the United States.

Despite all the effort and money poured into CX tools by companies, customer satisfaction continues to decline . In the United States, it is now at its lowest level in nearly two decades, per data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Consumer sentiment is also at its lowest in more than two decades. This negative dynamic in the customer-centric ecosystem in which we now live creates the challenge of figuring out what is going wrong and what companies can do to fix it.

• GH G. Tomas M. Hult is part of the leadership team at the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI); coauthor of The Reign of the Customer: Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Customer Satisfaction ; and professor in the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. He is also a member of the Expert Networks of the World Economic Forum and the United Nations’ World Investment Forum.
• FM Forrest V. Morgeson is an assistant professor in the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University; (Former) Director of Research at the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI); and coauthor of The Reign of the Customer: Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Customer Satisfaction .

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The Benefits of Customer Feedback, According to Experts

Published: August 24, 2023

Customers are, more often than not , willing to talk about your business. When they do talk, the information they share is called customer feedback, and it can help you improve all aspects of your business.

In this post, learn exactly what customer feedback is, why it’s important, and discover insight from HubSpot experts about the specific benefits it brings.

Table of Contents

What is customer feedback?

Why is customer feedback important, benefits of customer feedback, how to get feedback from customers.

Customer feedback is information customers share with you about their experience with your products or services and any interaction they’ve had with your company.

This feedback can be indirect or direct. For example, customers can openly discuss your brand on social media without tagging you (indirect) or leave product reviews and comments on your business’ website (direct).

Customer feedback is important because it tells you how they feel about your business. You’ll learn what they like about your offer and areas where you can improve.

Without this feedback, you won’t know if you satisfy the people you exist for — your customers. You won’t know if they use your product as intended and even if they want to continue doing business with you.

HubSpot Service Hub includes Service Analytics , which helps you uncover key insights into your service teams. You can easily view customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) to learn exactly how your customers feel so you can continue offering the support they want.

Get Started with Service Analytics

Let’s go over some specific ways that customer feedback is beneficial.

1. Customer feedback helps you learn about your audience on a deeper level.

Your business likely conducted extensive market research and buyer persona research to understand your target audience and how they relate to your business. While you probably gathered valuable insight, nothing is more valuable than the insight that comes directly from your customers, which is what customer feedback is.

They’ll let you know more about themselves, how they use your products and services, and what they expect from you. When you understand more about them and who they are, you can create experiences that speak directly to their needs.

Customers also already expect that the brands they do business with understand their needs and champion them in their processes. Case in point:

• 73% of consumers worldwide expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
• Over half of consumers say they’ll become repeat buyers after a personalized experience.
• 80% of business leaders say consumers spend an average of 38% more when their experience is personalized.

2. Customer feedback gives you insight into customer satisfaction levels.

Customer satisfaction is how happy customers are with your products, services, and any interaction with your business. It’s an important metric as it helps you address customer issues, prevent churn, and build a base of loyal customers.

Specific ways of collecting customer feedback, namely customer satisfaction surveys , tell you exactly how your customers feel and how satisfied they are.Katie Cort, a Senior Customer Onboarding Specialist, says, “If the company does not have a way of knowing whether or not their customers are happy — things like retention will not improve!”

3. Customer feedback helps support teams develop their skills.

The support you offer customers directly impacts their success with your products or services. Customer feedback helps you ensure that your support teams can help customers succeed as it can provide specific insight into rep performance.

Caleb King , an Inbound Consultant, says, “Customer feedback is a very important tool for managers to get anecdotal feedback directly from the customer as one of the many pieces for measuring team members’ performance.”

To get this feedback, you can send follow-up surveys after support calls to ask customers how satisfied they are with the help they received. Rachel Ang , a Senior Customer Support Specialist, notes this benefit as well: “Reps get to see the feedback, and that’s really helpful for training and learning what could be improved and what we can continue doing.”

Teams that use customer feedback to build and improve their skills are better suited to meet customer needs and create delightful experiences.

4. Customer feedback helps you improve your products and services.

Customers sometimes give feedback that mentions a negative experience they’ve had. While it may seem disheartening, this feedback actually helps you improve your products and business operations, especially if you use it to make changes.

For example, customers who consistently mention a pain point in your onboarding process telling you that you might need to give additional clarification and update your process to ensure it runs smoothly.

Using this type of customer feedback also ensures you’re not making changes on an assumption but rather on the actual thoughts and feelings that come from those who matter most.

5. Customer feedback helps you attract new customers.

Customer reviews are a form of feedback, and consumers often rely on it when it comes to making purchasing decisions:

• 98% of customers read online reviews for local businesses.
• User-generated content, which reviews are, is 8.7x more impactful than influencer content and 6.6x more impactful than branded content.
• 69% of consumers would feel positive about using a business with reviews describing a positive experience.

The stats above simply show that customers want to hear from your existing customers and their experiences with you. When you collect and ask for reviews, you’re giving potential customers the information they look for when deciding whether to purchase, helping you with customer acquisition.

6. Customer feedback helps you initiate conversations with dissatisfied customers.

Customer feedback can help you identify dissatisfied customers to begin a dialogue with and open the opportunity to make it right and change the course of your relationship. Their feedback about their situation also helps you learn their pain points and identify possible areas for improvement in your operations.

Opening a dialogue with these customers and using their feedback to make changes helps you increase customer loyalty, as 83% of customers agree that they feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints.

Cort says, “Customers are already giving feedback — to friends and family, competitors, social media, etc. So the question becomes, are you going to start listening to feedback and implement change because of it?”

Here are some ways to get feedback from customers :

• Send follow-up emails after you have provided a service to a customer and ask for their feedback.
• Use social listening to see how customers are talking about you online.
• Monitor heatmaps on your website to see where customers spend the most time.
• Conduct customer interviews.
• Offer incentives for providing feedback.

Overall, hearing what customers say about you helps you make changes to your business processes and offers, inspire loyalty, and better serve your audiences. So, when you want to hear from them, just ask — they’re likely to share.

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Customer Satisfaction Research: What it is + How to do it?

Customer satisfaction research is essential for businesses looking to build long-term customer relationships. It provides organizations with essential insights into their customers’ thinking and tastes.

Customers who are satisfied with the quality of service are more likely to become loyal customers. In this blog, we will explore customer satisfaction research and how to do it for customer-centric success.

What is customer satisfaction research?

Customer satisfaction research is a systematic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data that allows companies to measure the satisfaction level of customers when purchasing a product or service from their brand.

This research is useful to identify satisfied customers who are loyal defenders of your brand and who are dissatisfied to follow up on their demands.

There are many reasons to measure customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction research offers great insights, so your team can focus on meeting customer expectations or flagging potential issues that may affect your business growth.

Importance of conducting a satisfaction study

Customer satisfaction research allows business managers and owners to discover that keeping current customers costs less than getting new ones.

One way to collect information about customer satisfaction is by conducting online surveys, which will help you make the necessary changes to improve your business and maintain customer loyalty.

Responding to customer complaints and concerns don’t always mean knowing their needs. Satisfaction surveys allow companies to understand what is working, what needs to be improved, and why.

To provide better customer service, it’s important to understand how they feel and allow them to explain why they feel that way. Only then can you adapt your services and offer an experience that makes you stand out from the competition.

Companies carry out satisfaction studies for different objectives. Among the most important uses of this mechanism are:

• Know what are the areas that need to be improved in the business.
• Know the opinion of customers about your brand. 
• Find out what the true needs of customers are.
• Create better customer retention strategies.
• Know if the market strategies that are carried out are working. 
• Meet customer expectations.

How to carry out customer satisfaction research?

Customer satisfaction research takes several steps to get a thorough and accurate insight into your customer experiences and perspectives. Here’s a step-by-step method you can follow for carrying out customer satisfaction research:

Step 1: Define Research Objectives

Defining precise and well-structured research objectives is an essential first step in every customer satisfaction research project. These objectives will guide you through the whole research process and ensure that the research remains focused, relevant, and connected with your business goals.

To define research objectives, follow the steps outlined below:

• Identify the Objectives: Start by identifying the overall objectives of your customer satisfaction research.
• Break Down Objectives: Divide the purpose into specific objectives. Each objective should be specific and address a different component of customer satisfaction.
• SMART Criteria: Make sure your objectives are SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
• Prioritize: If you have several objectives, prioritize them according to relevance and potential impact.

Step 2: Select Research Methodology

Selecting an appropriate research technique is a vital decision that will define your overall research process. Your approach will influence the type of data you gather, the level of insights you get, and the general validity of your findings. Here are some examples of research methodology.

• Surveys: Surveys are a popular and versatile method for collecting data on customer satisfaction. You can gather qualitative and quantitative data through structured questions.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is the most straightforward of the customer satisfaction survey methodologies. Surveys are well-suited for measuring customer satisfaction scores, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and other quantitative metrics.

• Interviews: Interviews will enable you to have in-depth interactions with customers. You can get valuable qualitative insights into customer experiences through phone interviews or in-person chats.
• Focus Groups: In a focus group, a small group of customers shares their experiences, ideas, and impressions in a guided session. This strategy encourages group interactions by allowing participants to respond to each other’s comments.
• Observations: Observational research refers to directly monitoring customers as they interact with your products or services. This strategy will provide you insights into user behavior and reactions in real time.

Step 3: Develop Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Developing well-crafted customer satisfaction surveys is an important stage in customer satisfaction research. It serves as the primary tool for gathering customer data and insights.

A well-crafted customer satisfaction survey will ensure that you get relevant and meaningful data. It will also motivate you to make improvements and increase customer satisfaction. You can develop a robust customer satisfaction survey by following the steps below:

• Define Research Objectives: Before developing survey questions, ensure you understand the research objectives. Determine which aspects of customer satisfaction you want to measure and what insights you want to get.
• Choose Question Types: Remember the research objectives when creating customer satisfaction survey questions. Select appropriate question types that align with your research objectives. It will help you to capture different dimensions of customer satisfaction. To quantify responses, include closed-ended questions with Likert scales, multiple-choice options, and ranking scales. Include open-ended questions. It will encourage your customers to provide thorough comments and insights.
• Order and Flow: Organize the survey questions logically, begin with general questions, and then proceed to more specialized and complicated topics. Keep a balance between qualitative and quantitative questions.
• Avoid Leading Questions: Leading questions will unintentionally influence your respondents and compromise the accuracy of their responses. So, avoid including leading questions and design questions that are neutral and unbiased.
• Incorporate Demographic Questions: Demographic questions (e.g., age, gender, location) will help you to segment responses and analyze satisfaction across different customer segments. So include it.
• Mobile-Friendly Design: Make sure your survey is mobile-friendly and displays properly on different screen sizes.

Step 4: Sampling Strategy

Sampling ensures that the findings are representative of your whole customer base. It will enable you to make correct decisions and judgments. A well-planned sampling method will help you reduce biases and increase your findings’ generalization.

Depending on your research objectives and available resources, you can use a variety of sampling methods . Here are a few common approaches:

• Simple Random Sampling : It ensures that every person in the population has an equal chance of being chosen.
• Stratified Random Sampling : This sampling method divides your population into subgroups based on specified criteria.
• Convenience Sampling : This method selects participants who are easily accessible, such as customers who frequently visit your physical store or online store.

Step 5: Data Collection and Analysis

In this step, you will collect data from your target audience, arrange and evaluate the data systematically, and generate useful insights to make informed decisions.

Use statistical tools to analyze trends, correlations, and distributions for quantitative data. Calculate measures such as averages, percentages, and standard deviations. You can visually represent the findings using graphs, charts, and tables.

Use qualitative analysis tools for qualitative data. Content analysis, thematic analysis, and sentiment analysis are all common methodologies you can use. These strategies will help you identify repeating themes, attitudes, and patterns in open-ended responses.

Step 6: Implement Changes

The implementation phase of customer satisfaction research is where insights and recommendations are implemented. Here, you will turn data-driven findings into real improvements that directly influence the customer experience.

Create a detailed implementation plan for each identified improvement. Implementing changes based on research findings involves careful planning, cooperation, and a dedication to providing greater customer value.

Define specific tasks, time frames, responsible parties, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of each effort. Prioritize the actionable recommendations that are most likely to improve customer satisfaction and retention significantly.

Step 7: Communication and Regular Feedback Loop

Transparency is essential for maintaining trust and credibility with your customers. Share the research’s findings and the responses that were made. Let your customers know that their opinions are taken seriously and have resulted in concrete improvements.

Customer satisfaction will remain a dynamic and changing emphasis of your business strategy if you establish a continual feedback loop. Here are some tips for creating and keeping a consistent feedback loop:

• Scheduled Surveys: Conduct customer satisfaction surveys quarterly, semi-annually, or yearly. 
• Incorporate Feedback Mechanisms: Integrate feedback mechanisms into various touchpoints, such as post-purchase follow-up emails, customer service interactions, or feedback forms on your website.
• Feedback Analysis: Analyze the customer feedback you received from each cycle in detail. Identify recurring themes, popular trends, and problem areas.
• Action Planning: Create action plans for additional improvements based on the newly acquired insight.
• Implementation: Implement the suggested modification and changes in every relevant part of your business.

Advantages of carrying out a satisfaction study

Carrying out a satisfaction study has great benefits for your organization:

• Obtain valuable information from customers

Doing customer satisfaction research allows you to obtain information about your customers, determine how happy they are with your company, and correct what is wrong.

• Establish priorities

The satisfaction study results allow you to discover which areas of your business need more attention, such as customer service, the sales closing process, etc.

• Customer retention

If your customers are satisfied with your products, it is possible that they will stay in your business. Maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction is extremely important to the overall success of your organization. 

• Maintain your reputation

A satisfaction study allows you to interact with consumers and show them that you care about their needs and opinions. In particular, they offer to improve the customer experience if you make the changes.

• Maintain customer loyalty

If you want to maintain customer loyalty, a satisfaction survey will give you the opportunity to listen to their feedback and improve your brand.

• Get new customers

People feel more confident buying from transparent companies, so post the feedback you get from current customers to show that you allow any kind of feedback and value it. 

• An advantage over the competition

There is a lot of competition in the market today, so any advantage you may have needs to be made known. Show current and potential customers the areas in which you excel.

Conducting customer satisfaction research with QuestionPro

One of the best ways to find out the opinion of customers and their needs is through online surveys, which allow you to collect information and perform data analysis to make better business decisions.

With QuestionPro, you can find out how satisfied your customers are by asking a Net Promoter Score question, which will let you know if consumers are promoters or detractors of your brand. 

Other types of questions that will help you gather information for your study are: 

• Multiple Choice Questions
• Closed questions
• Open text questions
• Order and Ranking Questions

You can track customer satisfaction and measure how happy your existing customers are with your business, brand, and customer initiatives by using QuestionPro’s customer satisfaction survey templates and survey questions. These customer satisfaction survey examples help ensure a higher survey completion and response rate for your market research.

Find out what customers think! Carry out customer satisfaction research and collect the necessary information to improve the consumer experience. Contact us and learn how to measure customer satisfaction using QuestionPro.

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The customer feedback guide: analyzing and collecting customer feedback (and using it to grow)

At Hotjar, customer feedback is at the core of what we do. We want all of our team members to obsess over the wants, needs, and opinions of our users and customers, and in turn, we encourage our users and customers to obsess over their users and customers. It’s a virtuous cycle where everybody can have the best experience possible.

There are no quick hacks or fancy solutions here: the most direct way to find out what’s working (or not) for customers is by simply asking them. In this article, we show you why you should collect feedback from customers, how to do it, and how to use that information to make positive changes.

Last updated

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Table of contents

What is customer feedback, 11 reasons why collecting customer feedback is important, which customers should you collect feedback from.

13 ways to collect customer feedback

6 follow-up actions for customer feedback

How to start collecting customer feedback with hotjar.

Customer feedback is the information a business collects directly from its customers about their preferences and experiences with a product or service. Customers can share their opinions through surveys, interviews, and other channels to tell a company whether they’re satisfied or dissatisfied. Customer feedback allows any business to learn directly from its customers; the information can then be used to enhance products, optimize  sales funnels , and  improve the customer experience .

Nobody has better firsthand knowledge of your business than your customers. Collecting customer feedback gives you the opportunity to leverage that expert knowledge into better service, better sales, and a better product in at least 11 different ways:

Understand what drives customers to your website

Understand what stops your customers from converting

Understand what persuades your customers to convert

Improve your product

Improve your website

Improve your sales and customer service

Measure customer satisfaction through customer feedback surveys

Build customer relationships and show you care

Improve customer retention

Fine-tune your pricing strategy

Understand your competition

1. Understand what drives customers to your website​

Instead of guessing or assuming why your visitors have reached your site, learn about what drove them there.Collecting feedback in the form of  psychographic data  on your customers’ goals, desires, and interests gives you a better understanding of why they need your services. By looking beyond your metrics and asking respondents to describe what they are looking for, and why they want it, in their own words, you can find out what problems your visitors are trying to solve—and how you can help.  

2. Understand what stops your customers from converting

Barriers are the obstacles that prevent your customers from engaging with your product as planned. They could be physical (website errors), practical (a lack of information), or even psychological (shame or fear).

Collecting feedback in the form of  open-ended questions  (“What is stopping you from buying today?”, “How easy did we make it for you to do what you wanted to do?”) helps you determine how much effort a customer has to exert to use a product or service, find the information they need, or get an issue resolved—so you can focus on removing these barriers.

3. Understand what persuades your customers to convert

In contrast to barriers, hooks are the aspect of your website that persuade potential customers to take action. When you get feedback from your customers about what convinced them, you can discover the most effective hooks and emphasize them on your website to increase  conversion rates .

4. Improve your product

If you don’t know how to improve your product, let your visitors tell you! With feedback, you’ll hear directly from your users and customers where your biggest room for growth is. 

Ultimately, the most useful and intuitive products are created through a customer-centric design process (here is  an example of the process we use to build and improve Hotjar ) that uses customer feedback to align products perfectly to the customer’s needs.

5. Improve your website

The easier it is to use your website, the more likely visitors are to convert or recommend you to others. You can collect customer feedback about your website in a variety of ways and use it as a roadmap for how to optimize your website—from placing a small feedback widget on each page of your site to running full-scale  usability testing .

6. Improve your sales and customer service

Polling customers helps you evaluate the effectiveness and helpfulness of your sales and/or customer service representatives. In this context, a  Customer Effort Score calculation  helps you determine how easy, or difficult it is for customers to resolve any issues they encounter when doing business with you—studies show that  low effort is the strongest driver of customer loyalty , so this is something you definitely need to be on top of.

7. Measure customer satisfaction

You can use customer satisfaction outside of customer support! By running  customer satisfaction surveys  across your site or via email, you can find out how happy your customers are with individual pages or functions. With this information, you’ll constantly make improvements to their experience.

8. Build customer relationships and show you care

As humans, we love it when we know we are being heard. Responding to the concerns that your customers share with you in a proactive manner allows you to close the feedback loop and make sure they know you take their issues seriously. On the other hand, companies that don’t go the extra mile to understand and address customer concerns are left with higher churn rates and unhappy customers.

9. Improve customer retention

On-page or exit-intent surveys can help you understand why customers leave, downgrade, or cancel. This information is crucial when you need to address specific customer concerns and boost your future retention rates.

10. Fine-tune your pricing strategy

If your pricing plans are confusing, or if your prices are simply too high, that will negatively impact sales. Asking for customer feedback on your pricing pages or surveying customers  after  they’ve converted helps you determine if customers think your pricing is clear and reasonable, or there is room for improvement.

11. Understand your competition

In order to compete in your industry, you need to know how your services measure up in terms of pricing, quality, and service. Surveying your customer base on their past experiences might give you a clear indication of who your major competitors are and how you stack up against them.

📚 Read more : want to get a better sense of the questions you can ask? Get started from this handy list of  28 customer feedback questions .

Ask for feedback on your website today 🔥

Sign up for Hotjar to start collecting feedback on your website, and answer burning questions like: why is my website not converting? Why are visitors leaving without buying? How can I improve?

People in different parts of the   customer lifecycle  will have different perspectives and information to share with you. Some customers have long histories with your product, while others may be trying it out for the first time. Whom you survey and when depends on the type of information you want to collect.

New customers

New customers can offer a fresh perspective on your product that’s different from more seasoned users. They’ve also just gone through the decision-making and purchasing process, so they are the perfect people to poll for information on customer drivers, barriers, and hooks—which in turn can help you improve both the  customer experience  and your  conversion rates ,  optimizing buying experiences and overall customer success.

Survey new customers after they complete their initial transaction and again during onboarding to make sure they are able to understand and implement your services.

Pro tip : while their information is very valuable, you don’t want to ask too much of new customers right off the bat. Use quick pop-up polls and brief surveys to gather information.

Active customers

Consistent or regular customers will be more knowledgeable about the ins and outs of your product or services and can give you informed feedback on specific features and processes. Routinely ask regular users to rate their satisfaction using  Net Promoter Score (NPS) or  Customer Effort Score  (CES) polls, and send them email surveys or onsite surveys asking their opinions on specific aspects of your product or service.

Long-term customers

Your most loyal long-term customers are a great source for collecting more nuanced feedback. They know your product extremely well, which makes them best equipped to explain in-depth what they like or would improve. They can also speak to bigger picture issues, such as changes in service or quality over time.

In addition to routine surveys or pop-up questions, identify your most dedicated users and personally reach out and ask them for feedback via a longer survey or phone interview.

13 methods of collecting customer feedback

There are many different methods for collecting feedback, from pop-up polls to chat logs. You may want to employ a variety of customer feedback methods to increase the likelihood of getting a response and to evaluate different aspects of the customer experience. Here, we're going to cover 13 different systems:

On-page feedback widgets

On-page surveys

On-page pop-ups

Email surveys

Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys

Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys

Customer contact/service

Usability testing

Social channels

Unscripted interviews

1. On-page feedback widgets

On-page feedback widgets like  Incoming Feedback  help you collect in-the-moment feedback from your visitors and customers about what they love or hate about a page or any of its elements. The results give you a useful mix of qualitative and quantitative data, as the comments can be read individually to keep track of specific issues, and the overall love-to-hate scores are aggregated and can be visualized as trends over time.

2. On-page surveys

Unobtrusive  on-page surveys  invite customers to share feedback about a particular page or feature. You can ask open-ended questions or scaled questions like NPS or CSAT (see below).

3. On-page pop-ups

Pop-up surveys appear in the middle of the screen, forcing users to either respond or close the box before moving on. They should be used sparingly to minimize the chance of annoying people, but they can be useful for getting answers to quick-and-specific questions such as “Not making a purchase today? Why?”

Pro tip : you can have the same result with on-page surveys (see #2 again), and cause a far less disruptive experience for your visitors. 

4. Email surveys

Send email  surveys  to your customers when you want to ask several questions at once. Ask almost any kind of question here, like: open-ended, multiple-choice, or rating scale questions are all fair game. The return rate is usually low for email surveys, but it’s possible to boost participation by promising a reward (like a discount) or prize (a chance to win a gift card) to participants.

5. Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of customer loyalty and satisfaction, where customers are asked how likely they are to recommend your brand to others on a scale of 0-10. This is a terrific indicator of general satisfaction and  customer engagement ; bonus points for pairing the score question with a few follow-up questions that investigate the context behind your customers’ score.

Read more  → our  complete guide to Net Promoter Score

6. Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a measurement of how much effort a customer felt they had to put into an action or interaction with your business. Customers who find your product easy to use are more likely to continue using it and report overall satisfaction.

Read more  → here is our complete overview of  Customer Effort Score

7. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys are brief polls designed to measure customer satisfaction with a product or service in a single specific moment, usually by ranking their satisfaction or through a binary choice (happy face/sad face). CSAT scores are usually high, so a sudden negative dip is an indicator that something has gone wrong; they’re useful for pinpointing specific problem areas or issues within your website.

Read more  → here is our complete overview of  Customer satisfaction surveys

8. Customer contact/service

Reading through old customer support tickets or service emails can help you see what time-sensitive problems or complaints your customers have dealt with recently. This is great feedback for pinpointing pressing issues or recurring problems that can affect customer happiness.

Practical example from my experience at Hotjar: when users reached out to your support team looking for a feature/functionality we didn’t have, we sent them to our feature request tool where they would submit the request themselves. After reviewing several negative CSAT ratings, we learned that this process was incredibly frustrating for our users. Solution: instead of sending them to another tool, we now submit the request on their behalf.

9. Usability testing

Usability testing is a method of  testing a website’s functionality  and ease of use by observing users as they attempt to navigate it. There are many different methods of testing you can employ and many  user testing tools , but the end goal is gathering user and customer feedback that helps you build a functional and efficient user experience. Read more → our starter’s guide to  Usability testing

10. Social channels

Many customers consider your social media channels a direct line of communication to your brand. Monitor Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other social media platforms for complaints, issues, and compliments.

11. Live chat

A live chat function on your website can help you close sales, assist with troubleshooting, and act as a forum for user feedback. Review live chat transcripts to collect data about customers’ experiences and issues.

Read more  → here is a practical example of how reviewing live chat transcripts can  help optimize a landing page . 

12. Reviews

Reviews left by customers , either on your own site or on third-party sites, are another place to look for constructive feedback. Customers are likely to be very honest when writing for other potential customers, and you may learn something new that didn’t surface when you were collecting internal feedback.

13. Unscripted interviews

Interviews are more labor-intensive than an on-site survey, but they also provide an opportunity to dig deeply into a customer’s beliefs and ideas. Sit down with some of your ideal potential customers (or invite them for a virtual cup of coffee) to learn more about their motivations, or spend time talking to long-term customers to learn about their experiences and views on your brand.

You'll be able to uncover pain points and customer insight into new ideas and maybe even get their take on new features for your product. Although these kinds of customer interactions are time-consuming, you'll be gathering feedback that can help you close the loop on any problems customers have been having.

You can collect mountains of feedback, but it’s all useless unless you find a way to categorize and understand it, respond, or use that feedback to  improve your customers’ experience .

1. Identify areas that need to be fixed or improved

Gather customer feedback to highlight areas of your site, services, or products that need improvement. Make a list of issues and prioritize them in order of urgency. Tackle the ones that will have a large impact on customer experience first, then work on smaller micro- and macro-level issues .

2. Listen to customers’ suggestions

Instead of just using feedback to create a laundry list of issues, listen to your customers’ suggestions on how to fix or improve things. You don’t need to execute on all of their advice, but hearing their suggestions could lead to better features or outside-the-box solutions.

3. Share the good and bad feedback with internal teams

The more people who are involved in reading and addressing customer feedback, the better. Make sure that the appropriate teams have a chance to review both positive feedback and detractors.

4. Follow up with your customers

Many customers don’t bother to leave feedback because they think that companies either don’t care or won’t address their concerns. If you find a piece of customer feedback particularly helpful, follow up and thank them for their advice. Or respond to a customer who presents a serious concern with assurances that you’re working to fix their issue. This increases your credibility and strengthens the relationship.

5. Share with the community

Another way to bolster your reputation and create loyal customers is to publicly respond to concerns either in release notes or on social media. Let the community around your product know what you are doing, how you’re improving, and why you appreciate their feedback.

6. Track feedback trends over time

Keep track of the trajectory of your customer feedback over time. Ideally, you want to see an increase in satisfaction over time as issues are identified and addressed. Take note of negative spikes and drill down to find out the underlying causes.

If you’re ready to get started, Hotjar has the tools to help you plan, implement, and analyze customer feedback.

Incoming Feedback

Hotjar’s  Incoming Feedback  feature helps you get instant visual feedback on any page of your website. Your customers can rate their satisfaction using visual icons, then provide follow-up comments or suggestions.

These micro-polls can give you an insight into what people love, or hate, about your site, and measure changes in performance over time.

Feedback polls/on-page surveys

Customizable  feedback surveys  can be used on any page you choose to gather information from customers about their experiences with your website, products, or services. Use online surveys to ask open-ended questions or scaled questions, like an NPS poll, with follow-up paths based on the user’s answers. You can also hyper-target questions to users based on their demographic information or how long they’ve spent on your page.

Our  survey  editor tool makes it simple to build your own user/customer surveys using open-ended, multiple-choice, or scaled questions; you can then distribute your surveys via email, web links, or through a pop-up on the site, and read the answers directly inside the Hotjar dashboard.

Use feedback to maintain, and improve, your relationship with customers

Collecting customer feedback should be a part of every business’s operations. Building a customer-centric business, one that truly strives to support and help customers means routinely asking for and evaluating feedback from your customers.

Help them help  you  to be the best.

FAQs about customer feedback

Why is customer feedback important.

Getting direct customer feedback is important because it gives you a first-hand view of the customer journey and how the customer perceives your website, product, or service. Oftentimes, companies speculate about the customer experience from quantitative data, but direct customer feedback provides unique insight on what makes customers convert (or not convert) and ultimately shows you how to optimize your product/service and boost growth.

How do you collect customer feedback?

There are various different ways to collect customer feedback: on-page feedback widgets and surveys, email surveys, NPS surveys, CSAT surveys, and usability testing are all ways to elicit different kinds of feedback from customers.

How do you use customer feedback?

It’s important to understand how you want to use customer feedback before you create and disseminate your surveys or tests. Have clearly specified goals for what you want to know and make sure the questions are tailored towards that goal. Then, you collate the data you’ve collected and organized it to get a broader-picture of how users use and perceive their experience with your product or service.

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Measuring Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty

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Measuring customer satisfaction and customer loyalty represents a key challenge for firms. In response, researchers and practitioners have developed a plethora of options on how to assess these phenomena. However, existing measurement approaches differ substantially with regard to their complexity, sophistication, and information quality. Furthermore, guidance is scarce on how firms can leverage and combine these approaches to implement a state-of-the-art satisfaction and loyalty measurement system. This chapter attempts to address this vacancy. The authors first define and conceptualize customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Next, the authors provide an overview of the different operationalization and measurement approaches that companies face when designing a customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement system. The authors also discuss some of the common modeling challenges associated with measuring loyalty, namely, dealing with self-selection bias. Finally, the authors project what the future holds in this area.

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Hohenberg, S., Taylor, W. (2020). Measuring Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty. In: Homburg, C., Klarmann, M., Vomberg, A. (eds) Handbook of Market Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05542-8_30-1

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Customer Feedback: Why It’s Important + 7 Ways to Collect It

When you think about collecting customer feedback, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of possibilities. With so many customers — and so many ways to connect with their feedback — it’s hard to know where to start.

One thing is clear though: taking a proactive approach to collecting customer feedback ensures you never stray too far from the needs of your community, even as those needs evolve.

Feedback is a powerful guide that can give your leadership team insights that chart a path forward for every part of a company — from product through UX and customer support . That’s especially important when it comes to customer satisfaction .

In this blog post, we break down 7 ways to collect customer feedback. Here’s everything you need to know about the different methods at your fingertips.

Prefer to watch a video instead? Check out this webinar on turning customer conversations into actionable product insights, featuring Mathew Patterson of Help Scout, Jake Bartlett of Atlassian, and Mary Jantsch of Tuff.

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is the information, insights, issues, and input shared by your community about their experiences with your company, product, or services. This feedback guides improvements of the customer experience and can empower positive change in any business — even (and especially) when it’s negative.

Why is customer feedback important?

Customer feedback is important because it serves as a guiding resource for the growth of your company. Don’t you want to know what you’re getting right — and wrong — as a business in the eyes of your customers?

Within the good and the bad, you can find gems that make it easier to adjust and adapt the customer experience over time. In short, feedback is the way to keep your community at the heart of everything you do.

The 7 most effective customer feedback methods

Before you begin collecting feedback from customers, you need to pinpoint why you’re seeking their input. Identifying your desired outcomes and outlining the process for getting there sets the groundwork for a worthwhile investment of your time — and your customers’ time.

Without a clear intention, your feedback may not serve anyone.

Jot down the answers to these questions and talk about them with your team before getting started:

What part of the customer experience would you like to improve (onboarding, content marketing)? Target the aspect of the customer journey that would most benefit from customer insights.

What’s your plan for the data you collect? There’s no reason to gather customer feedback unless it leads to actionable change. Let’s say your customer survey reveals that your product’s UI is confusing. Ensure that you’re willing to invest in fixing it before collecting feedback.

Which customer feedback channel works best for your goals?

Don’t worry about that last question. By the end of this post, you’ll have all the information you need to answer it.

Choosing the right customer support tool for you

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1. Customer feedback surveys

Developing a useful customer survey may be more challenging than you think. There are a ton of questions you could ask customers. The good news: you can choose between short slider surveys (which help you target specific issues) that pop up on your site or longer, traditional surveys.

For one-question surveys, you can use a tool like Qualaroo to gauge the response of customers who are already active on your website.

For longer-form surveys, there are a ton of options. SurveyKing offers a free platform for small businesses that’s just starting to explore the power of feedback. Alchemer adapts to everyone from solopreneurs up to larger organizations, and at the enterprise level, Qualtrics yields dynamic, sophisticated insights.

If you want customers to follow through on completing a survey, make sure you follow some simple best practices.

Only ask questions that help you meet your goals.

Write thoughtful open-ended questions.

Create consistent rating scales.

Avoid leading or loaded questions.

2. Email and customer contact forms

Email is one of the easiest ways to gather candid customer feedback. Because it’s a support channel for most companies, you can use each interaction as an opportunity to gather feedback. To maximize the likelihood of hearing back from a customer, do these three things:

Set clear expectations

Sometimes, customers don’t offer important feedback because they don’t think anyone cares. Is it any wonder most companies don’t hear from unhappy customers? Many of those same customers may be willing to leave feedback if they knew they’d hear back — and exactly when to expect a response.

Consider adding a short sentence to your emails that tells people how soon they can anticipate hearing back from you. “We’ll get back to within X hours/days” will go a long way to set expectations and build trust with your community.

Organize email feedback

At Help Scout, we use Trello to create “boards” your whole team can access and contribute to with great customer feedback. It’s a clear process ensuring that no helpful insights slip through the cracks. Here's the system:

Create boards within Trello titled “Product Ideas” (feature requests), “Up Next” (what’s being worked on) and “Roadmap” (what you plan to work on).

Build individual cards within each board to categorize requests. For our Product Ideas board, we use sections like “Inbox” (new ideas), “Rejected” (discarded ideas), “Someday/Maybe” (good ideas, but not urgent), and “Apps” (integration requests).

Add email addresses within cards for the people who requested the idea. For instance, anyone who asked us for Reports upgrades will be added to a list within a card so that they can be notified when the upgrade is complete. Here’s an example card (with emails blocked out for privacy):

This system enables you to keep tabs on requests and their requestors, as well as ideas you’ve already passed on. The process also gives employees a clear roadmap to guide future customer interactions.

Send personalized responses

The best way to get a candid response from a customer is to simply ask for one. Since email enables you to send a one-to-one request, you can ask for more personal feedback than in a survey.

When customers sign up for more information about your services, for example, you can send out an auto-responder email asking a single question. Inquire into the issues that customers are struggling with most, what features they would love to see, or just ask why they signed up!

The trick is to make sure you team has a set process for replying to these emails; otherwise, your customers will feel let down.

You can also use a help desk to transform every email into an opportunity to tune into customer feedback with happiness ratings . When your customers rate a reply from Help Scout, they can also add extra comments:

You can sort the rating and comments into happiness reports that capture the performance of individuals and teams.

Try the customer support platform your team and customers will love

Teams using Help Scout are set up in minutes, twice as productive, and save up to 80% in annual support costs. Start a free trial to see what it can do for you.

3. Usability tests

For usability testing to bring deep insights to your company, it requires more upfront planning. With a clear strategy, though, you can uncover challenges that customers don’t know they’re facing and actionable insights that make their experiences better.

You may even want to consider rewarding your user research participants the way Google does .

At Help Scout, we leverage usability testing to refine design details or new features. When we’re 90% finished with the updates, these tests guarantee we get that last 10% right.

When our team prepared to launch major improvements to our Beacon product , they opened Beacon 2.0 to a small number of beta participants based on their current implementation of Beacon 1.0. We transformed their feedback into product adjustments that improved the product before we rolled it out to everyone.

Even though most of us associate user testing with web-based products, the fundamentals apply to any business.

Let’s say you run a gym. Offer a customer a free month to visit your gym three to five days a week and keep a diary about their experiences. Learning about the business from their perspective uncovers small tweaks that make a huge difference to the customer experience.

The book Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug can help you start to understand the power of usability testing. For web-based testing with people who don’t know your business, check out UserTesting — they do an outstanding job, too.

4. Exploratory customer interviews

Does direct outreach translate to beneficial feedback from customers? Absolutely! Reaching out to customers directly opens up conversations that otherwise wouldn’t happen.

Qualitative stories from customers bring color and nuance to quantitative feedback (data). These personal experiences help a team understand the feelings behind customer decisions and the community response to a company’s brand or decisions.

When you conduct customer interviews , you create the opportunity to challenge false assumptions that developed over time.

Keep the following tips in mind when you sit down to talk to customers:

Start an open-ended dialogue. When you’re talking to customers, open-ended questions are your best friend. These queries give your customers the flexibility to dig into their experiences with more detail. Plus, they’re less likely to be biased or leading questions.

Get more specific as you go. Begin the conversation with wider impressions and get more detailed in your questions as the dialogue evolves. Every piece of feedback they give you is an opportunity for another more specific follow-up.

Practice active listening. To receive insights that can help your team, you need to be open and receptive. Maintain eye contact and mirror back the key takeaways you’re hearing from clients, always keeping the spotlight on them.

Don’t let distance stop you either. Help Scout uses Zoom to speak to a diverse group of customers no matter where they are.

5. Social media

Social listening can give you access to an otherwise untapped reservoir of candid feedback from customers. Direct comments or mentions on social networks aren’t the only way for your business to collect customer feedback either — many networks include built-in polling tools. Look at this quick poll on Instagram:

The Dogist Shop created an “Ask us any questions about our holiday lines” survey on Instagram stories. A customer asked The Dogist Shop on Instagram if they planned on making ornaments of the team’s dogs this year.

Not only could the team clarify the answer to the entire community, but Dogist also asked the community if they wanted ornaments next year in a one-question Instagram poll. This kind of natural engagement ensures that their team’s product decisions align with the purchasing behaviors of their community.

6. On-site activity (via analytics)

Analytics reveal what customers don’t know about how they use your product. Especially if you sell a digital product or service, you benefit from leveraging analytics to understand how users interact with your company.

For example, if you offer self-service content as a form of customer service , you could see the number of people visiting each article.

If one article has an 0:09 average time on page and an awful bounce rate, you know something isn’t sticking about your messaging. Reporting tools like like Help Scout’s Docs Report give you insights about failed searches, most frequently visited pages, and so on so you can improve your customer’s self-service experience.

7. Instant feedback from your website

With an embeddable on-site widget like Beacon , you can collect instant customer feedback without asking the customer any questions.

At Help Scout, for example, we pulled nine articles into a webpage that could be valuable to potential customers on the page. Instead of asking customers which articles they preferred, Beacon collected the data on the most popular articles. If none of the articles helped, the customer could email the team — and that’s valuable information, too.

Collecting customer feedback is crucial

Customers can transform every aspect of your company for the better if you listen to their feedback. Think about your most pressing goals and start with one clear, simple method for collecting customer feedback before expanding out to more complex tactics like usability testing and analytics.

Customer support channels are the ideal place to begin — your support team brings more value when they approach every interaction as an opportunity to collect quantitative and qualitative feedback on real experiences with your company.

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Elizabeth wellington.

Liz writes about business, creativity and making meaningful work. Say hello on Twitter or through her website.

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What are the benefits of customer feedback?

Last updated

2 March 2024

Reviewed by

Whether streamlining manufacturing processes, enhancing supply chain logistics, or fine-tuning service delivery, these companies attribute their achievements to strategically integrating customer insights, ensuring continual refinement and excellence across various facets of their operations.

Still, many companies have yet to fully leverage the feedback they collect or employ a customer feedback strategy.

Moreover, some companies aren’t tapping into the power of collecting feedback—a huge missed opportunity.

Collecting and using customer feedback offers many concrete benefits and helps prevent various business risks. Let’s further investigate.

• What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is any information customers provide about their experience with any aspect of your business, from its products and services to its staff and facilities to its online presence—this feedback groups into two broad categories: indirect and direct feedback.

Indirect customer feedback:

This type of feedback comes directly from the customer but is unsolicited by the business. Indirect feedback can take many forms, including, but not limited to:

Social media comments

Online reviews

Inbound calls to customer service

Customer-initiated emails or chats

In-person comments to employees

Indirect feedback may also include customer data captured by point of sale (POS) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and web analytics. For example, repeated purchases at a given retail location indicate a customer's preference. These actions are a form of feedback.

Direct customer feedback:

Standard mechanisms for gathering direct feedback include

Digital or physical feedback surveys (reward-based or not)

Subscription cancellation surveys

Interview panels

Focus groups

In-app ratings

Online forums created by the business

Loyalty programs

• Structured or unstructured feedback

Feedback can be structured or unstructured. Structured feedback is quantitative , like ratings, while unstructured feedback is qualitative , like comments.

It’s crucial to validate insights from unstructured data before taking action. Consider a business with ten customers who have commented online about their trouble using a product. That business must review structured, quantitative data about the product's usability to ensure that many, not just a few, customers share this sentiment. 

If no quantitative research is available, you may need to solicit direct, structured feedback from customers about usability to validate these types of comments. Otherwise, there would be a risk of making product changes that only a handful of users value, thereby increasing costs that revenue won’t offset.

• Why is customer feedback important?

Customer feedback is paramount for businesses as it is an invaluable guide for strategic decisions. Actively monitoring, collecting, and meticulously evaluating customer feedback enables companies to gain granular insights into the intricacies of preferences, pain points, and expectations.

This nuanced understanding allows you to fine-tune their products, services, and overall brand experience, ensuring a custom approach that resonates with their target audience. For instance, if customers consistently desire enhanced features in a particular product, you can allocate resources to meet those specific demands, thereby staying ahead of the competition.

Moreover, customer feedback serves as a real-time barometer of customer satisfaction, helping companies identify and rectify issues promptly. Quickly addressing concerns fosters customer loyalty and enhances the overall brand reputation.

Customer feedback isn’t just a measure of past performance but a strategic tool for future success. It empowers businesses to meet and exceed customer expectations, solidifying their position in the market and driving sustained growth.

• The benefits of customer feedback

Customer feedback helps align your operational goals with customer needs in numerous beneficial ways, including

Improving products and services

When collecting customer feedback for product development, insights can uncover existing issues and inspire new ideas. Successful new product development relies on understanding consumer needs and emphasizing the importance of integrating various feedback forms. Products addressing real-world problems are more likely to be valued by customers and, therefore, succeed in the market.

In a global survey by 280 Group, nearly 900 product managers reported that, on average, 20.9% of their products failed to meet customer needs . Incorporating customer feedback into the development process reduces the risk of product misalignment with consumer preferences.

Continuous discovery, involving ongoing solicitation and analysis of customer feedback, is crucial for creating products that align with consumer desires and streamlining the development process. 

For example, in the smartphone industry, brands leverage user communities and surveys to gather feedback on current devices and ideas for new features. This iterative process enables companies to avoid wasting resources on unwanted features and continually deliver value to consumers.

Enhancing satisfaction levels and creating value 

Monitoring customer feedback helps you understand how well you are (or aren't) serving customers. Companies can use customer feedback to learn what customers like the most about their products. 

Depending on the data, you may learn that by leaning into your strengths, you can increase customer satisfaction and create additional value, for which some customers may even be willing to pay more.

How much more, exactly? 

Depending on your industry and clientele, perhaps as much as 10–30% more , going by Forbes contributor and CX expert Shep Hyken's willingness to pay findings.

Conversely, when customer satisfaction levels begin to lag, feedback will grow negative, customers may buy less or jump ship to competitors, and profits will decline. 

Moreover, when customers are dissatisfied, they don't keep it to themselves. A bad viral product review can result in skyrocketing customer acquisition costs—GM of Service Hub at HubSpot describes the state of customer acquisition in unequivocal terms like “ appalling .” According to research by SimplicityDX, the increase in e-commerce acquisition cost is 222% more than in 2013 .

However, when you recognize early dissatisfaction signals, you can modify the product, service, and customer experience (or all three). 

Engaging and increasing customer loyalty 

People appreciate having their voices heard. Direct engagement with customers online can deepen a customer's connection with and respect for a company, strengthening their loyalty. 

When you directly respond to a customer's feedback, they may reward you with greater loyalty, increased purchases, and positive word of mouth. 

Moreover, having high numbers of loyal customers can improve the efficiency of marketing efforts. 

Additionally, engaged, happy customers respond favorably to direct feedback solicitations, particularly if you ask them immediately after a purchase. 

According to a BrightLocal survey conducted in 2023, 34% of consumers said they would likely leave a review if asked to do so via email .

Meanwhile, 33% said they would provide a review in person during their experience or transaction.

A further 32% reported that a receipt or invoice would be an effective way to request a review. (Social media reviews weren’t far behind, ranking a close 4th).

(Remember that you’ll be competing with loads of other inbox messages, so a hybrid approach may maximize the volume of customer feedback you can capture).

Improving customer acquisition and retention

Listening to existing customers can also yield insights about marketing and sales strategies that make it easier to acquire customers. For example, a business may learn that its pricing is too high or that its marketing is turning off a segment of consumers . 

Customer feedback can help your business make the adjustments necessary to attract more customers and, in some cases, do so while reducing customer acquisition costs.

Moreover, businesses aren’t the only ones who pay attention to customer feedback. Other customers do as well. Many customers, especially those seeking a product or service for the first time, will skim customer reviews for potential red flags. 

TrustPulse says 60% of consumers believe the number of reviews is crucial when considering whether to use a business. Also, more reviews testify to a business's credibility and popularity, so quantity matters.

Conversely, businesses whose customers speak negatively will find it more challenging to attract new customers and face growing customer acquisition costs and customer churn.

Optimizing resource and training allocation

Customer feedback also helps optimize training and performance. Imagine your business is introducing a complex new product.

Suppose you receive customer feedback suggesting that your sales team struggles to explain aspects of the product's functionality or installation.

Your business could respond accordingly by investing more time in training.

Additionally, by reviewing touchpoints like call center feedback, chat logs, or other employee-consumer interactions, you can pinpoint errors stemming from inexperience and ensure that departments have a balance of senior and junior staff.

Enhancing decision-making ability

It may be tempting to react immediately to customer criticism. A negative review or comment can send PR teams into overdrive . It might also be tempting to spur designers, engineers, and product teams into action.

Still, reacting without adequate data might lead to spending considerable time and money making product modifications or operational adjustments, only to discover that the feedback was misleading—it may be that the feedback reflects the sentiments of the few and not the majority of customers.

Or perhaps customers don’t value a feature request enough to pay for it. When insights or sentiments are batches of unstructured data, they must be tested and validated before taking action to avoid these unnecessary risks.

Reducing costs

There are nearly unlimited ways your business might lower costs using feedback data, potentially impacting everything from acquisition costs to churn rates.

You might identify potential design flaws through prototype testing and feedback before production starts, avoiding production errors and shortening the NPD process , saving time and money. 

In some cases, feedback can help identify bottlenecks in the customer journey and pinpoint where to streamline. For instance, one energy company found that setting up a new utility account for customers moving to a new home required 18 steps (!) That company used survey data to streamline its process and reduce new account opening steps to five, resulting in a 40-50% cost reduction . The number of complaints also decreased, as did the number of people handling them (from 109 to 20).

Product reviews, sales data, and other indirect customer feedback may also help divest a product or brand before it becomes a liability.

De-escalating and continuing conversations offline

Acknowledging customer feedback is crucial, especially when monitoring reviews or engaging in social listening . A key aspect of this practice involves taking the conversation offline by inviting the customer to follow up directly via email or another direct route, away from the public view.

By doing so, you can address concerns or feedback with a personalized and focused approach, demonstrating a commitment to customer satisfaction. This private interaction respects the customer's privacy and encourages a more open and detailed discussion.

Handling matters privately can also prevent escalation and negative public perception while striving for long-lasting customer relationships through direct and meaningful communication.

Better customer experience

In today's competitive landscape—once in which 73% of consumers told PwC that customer experience is their top decision-making factor driving purchasing decisions—prioritizing exceptional service must be a paramount focus.

Many businesses even have a team devoted entirely to ensuring service excellence, from when customers visit their website (or enter a retail location's doors) to when they unbox the product.

Positive customer experiences help strengthen brand loyalty and customer lifetime value. But it's nearly impossible to build a consistent high-quality customer experience  without being in tune with precise data describing what customers need, want, and value .

In his book Business @ the Speed of Thought, Bill Gates emphasizes that customer feedback, even if negative, helps a business learn and improve, stating, " Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. "

• The complexity of interpreting customer feedback

Unpacking customer feedback isn’t always straightforward or even factually correct.

For instance, a customer might unknowingly state that a product feature “doesn’t work” when it simply lacks that feature. Or a comment might be so vague that it has insufficient detail to identify the problem.

Customer feedback can also be rooted in a customer's own biases. In the worst case, negative feedback may result from coordinated efforts, such as in the case of “ review-bombing ,” a form of trolling that could stem from boredom or even disgruntled employees. 

Consequently, it is becoming increasingly essential to have a combination of know-how and tools to help determine which insights are genuine and valuable and which are not.

• Challenges in customer feedback management:

Disjointed understanding: Teams often have a disjointed sense of customer feedback due to a lack of easily shareable findings.

Feedback difficulties: Providing feedback becomes challenging when surveys have vague questions or do not allow open-ended responses.

Training gaps: Call center representatives or employees may lack training to address specific customer concerns.

Missed opportunities: Companies commonly miss the benefits of real-time communication through live chat and social media platforms.

Delayed action: Delayed action on customer feedback can lead to a loss of interest and reduced feedback participation.

Quality of feedback: Consequently, received feedback may be inaccurate, unclear, or fail to reflect overall customer sentiment.

• Complexities in analyzing customer feedback:

Data prioritization: Determining the most important datasets and the best analysis methods can be complex.

Time-consuming analysis: Manual customer feedback analysis is often time-consuming.

Resource constraints: Many businesses, particularly smaller ones, lack the time or personnel for comprehensive customer feedback evaluation.

Skill challenges: While market research evaluation is a specialized skill, companies with a single marketing generalist may find customer feedback analysis challenging.

• How to get actionable customer feedback

Despite these challenges, even the smallest businesses can obtain actionable customer insights. Customer feedback hubs—online platforms that leverage technologies and tools, including AI, machine learning, and data visualization—are available to forward-thinking companies looking for easy ways to transform customer data into product, design, service, and experience insights data they can use.  

How to build a customer feedback hub

Businesses don't need to build a customer feedback hub in-house when they can take advantage of Dovetail's all-in-one platform . Dovetail's hub automatically secures customer data from CRMs, enterprise apps, and other sources. 

Businesses can quickly bulk upload data, as well as automatically integrate data from

Google Drive

Many others via Zapier

Using AI and machine learning, the platform can rapidly identify patterns and trends businesses can use and share internally securely. You can get the insights you need to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and sales while reducing costs.

Should you be using a customer insights hub?

Do you want to discover previous customer research faster?

Do you share your customer research findings with others?

Do you analyze customer research data?

Start for free today, add your research, and get to key insights faster

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Customer Satisfaction: The Ultimate Guide

How to Measure, Improve, and Manage Customer Satisfaction to Grow Your Business

If you don’t satisfy your customers, your business will fail.

The data backs this up.

Growing businesses are more likely to prioritize customer success than those with stagnant or decreasing revenue. Successful customers can become your best salespeople, as well; our research shows that 77% of people have shared positive experiences with companies in the past year.

Furthermore, keeping your current customers happy is good business in the long term. Common business wisdom tells you that acquiring customers is 5 to 25 times more expensive than keeping current customers.

A bad customer experience or bad customer service is also a leading indicator of customer churn (which is massively detrimental to growth ).

In our 2018 State of Inbound report , 61% of respondents noted "generating traffic and leads" as their number one marketing challenge, which can probably be tied back to another problem: They’re also struggling to keep their existing customers .

A business simply can’t grow sustainably if it has a churn problem, and we can find early red flags of churn by gauging customer satisfaction (and working to improve it over time).

of growing businesses rate customer success as "very important"

Acquiring customers is

more expensive than keeping current customers.

of companies believe retention is cheaper than acquisition

In an attempt to demystify customer satisfaction and make the measurement actionable for businesses of any size and type, we wrote a comprehensive guide that ranges from customer satisfaction definitions all the way to tools and tricks to make sure you’re gathering data correctly and actually using it to grow your business.

Without further ado, let’s dive in. Feel free to read it from start to finish, or skip around to sections that are most applicable to you.

What is customer satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction a measurement we use to quantify the degree to which a customer is satisfied with a product, service, or experience. It measures how a customer feels about a brand interaction.

Many terms in business are nebulous and vague. Customer satisfaction is one of those terms.

In practice, this could be executed using many different survey design tactics, such as differing questions, survey response scales, and collection methods. Sometimes, we collect these measures right after a transaction or other times at a fixed date in the customer relationship. Sometimes we use a five-point Likert scale, and sometimes we use a Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) survey. In fact, there’s some ruckus around the term “customer satisfaction.” After all, as the argument goes , customer satisfaction is simply the absence of customer frustration. If you have a great meal at a restaurant, you don’t sit back, smile, and say, “that meal was ... satisfactory.” The argument is that we should aim for delight. We’ll ignore arguments of semantics in this guide, but it’s important to note that the focus generally shouldn’t be on providing an average experience, but rather, on creating raving promoters for your business. Still, measuring customer satisfaction can help us do this (no matter what we call the metric).

Why measure customer satisfaction?

If you don’t measure customer satisfaction, you can’t identify unhappy customers. If you don’t know who is unhappy, you don’t know who will churn, and you can't figure out why they're unhappy. If people churn faster than you can acquire new customers, your business will fail.

“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and, eventually, to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”  ― H. James Harrington

Without contact or feedback from the customer, we isolate ourselves in a sort of bubble.

The truth is, however, that even the best, most innovative, top-performing businesses all have faults and opportunity areas. These companies are elite because they measure things like customer satisfaction and act upon the data.

If you’re open to the idea that you could improve, it’s worth spending the little bit of time it takes to set up measurement solutions and to collect the data. What’s the harm? You might find problem areas that are worth massive amounts in terms of ROI.

That’s the general truth about measuring and data. Specifically, though, what’s the importance of customer satisfaction to business health?

Customer retention is arguably the most important factor in long-term business growth. You can acquire customers as rapidly as you’d like, but if they aren’t sticking around, you don’t have a sustainable business.

Retention affects every part of a business, from the customer acquisition cost to the customer lifetime value to word of mouth and customer loyalty. In fact, the ratio of these metrics (CAC/LTV) is important, too: You can spend more money to acquire customers if they retain for longer and are worth more. It’s one business lever that truly impacts every other.

If you’re still not convinced, check out these two data points:

• 82% of companies agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition.
• A repeat customer spends 67% more than a new customer.

Retention is good for business. Here’s how Brian Balfour , former VP Growth at HubSpot, puts it :

“The point is, every improvement that you make to retention also improves all of these other things — virality, LTV, payback period. It is literally the foundation of all of growth, and that’s really why retention is the king.”

Okay, we’ve established that customer satisfaction matters and that you should measure it. Now the question is: How?

How to Measure Customer Satisfaction

Every method of collecting data on customer satisfaction comes down to a customer survey .

With digital analytics, we can determine if users are researching a goal, how they are interacting with a feature, or even their relative struggle completing a given task. But we can’t gauge their emotional response to any of that.

That’s the secret. Measuring customer satisfaction gives you a peek at your customers’ emotional responses.

If we simply judge customer experience on conversion rates and goals completed, the DMV would score very high — much higher than something with higher funnel drop-off, like, say, buying a Tesla.

Luckily, most businesses know not to measure things so myopically. We look at data in the right context and with a blend of attitudinal and behavioral data. When it comes to optimizing for customer experience and improving customer satisfaction, that’s the way to go.

Surveys: When do you send them? To whom do you send them?

These are great questions — and it depends on what you want to answer.

Most often, with a customer satisfaction survey, you’re looking to answer a very specific question such as, “How did the customer feel about this specific situation?” This situation is usually transactional, such as buying a pair of socks or getting an oil change.

In this case, you’re best off sending the survey as soon as you can. The longer the delay, the more likely it is that your data will be skewed. The memory does strange things, especially when it comes to emotions and experiences. If you want a true reflection of the customer’s experience, send the survey ASAP.

Sometimes, however, we want to learn if there has been a longitudinal change in customer satisfaction, either on an individual or aggregate level ... basically, have we improved or not over time? In this case, you just need to control for time and make sure that all surveys are being sent to users in a similar time interval (immediately, six months after purchase, two years after purchase, etc.). This allows you to analyze users in cohorts to determine differences in customer satisfaction scores over time. 

Who should fill out customer satisfaction surveys? Ideally, every customer that has an experience with your business. Wherever you can bake in an effortless customer satisfaction survey, I would do so (barring an annoying user experience, of course).

In some cases, you’ll want to isolate certain groups of customers to do more in-depth surveys. In this case, again, it depends on the answers you’re looking for. If, for instance, you want to find out what it is your best customers love about your business, you would isolate customers with that cluster of characteristics and survey them. Same goes for any group of customers from which you’d like to get insights.

What does a customer satisfaction survey look like? What kind of questions do you ask? How do you determine a customer satisfaction score?

These questions are tough to answer in a broad sense because there are many different schools of thought and they are constantly evolving. 

To a certain extent, you also need to customize the survey itself to your business goals. What do you want to know? Which questions (and their scores) can be used as leading indicators of growth or churn? 

Just look at the difference between a customer satisfaction survey like this  ... 

... a great example of an NPS survey using a tool like Nicereply  ...

... and a nice looking and simple NPS survey using a tool like Typeform .

I’m personally a fan of simpler solutions, as they tend to be more understandable and actionable for the business, so NPS wins for me. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect for your situation.

You can customize things to your own use case. Here's a nice simple customer satisfaction survey example using Google Forms .

About general experience ... 

• Overall, I am very satisfied with my experience with [Company].
• How would you rate [Company] overall?
• How well do our products meet your needs?
• How responsive have we been to your questions about our products?
• How likely are you to purchase our products again?
• How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague? (NPS)

About the product itself ...

• How would you rate the quality of the product?
• How would you rate the value for money of the product?

You can also ask more open-ended questions (and with the right software or data science, you can even run a sentiment analysis to quantify the responses in a way) ... 

• How would you describe your experience/our company in three words?
• Why did you purchase from us today?
• Was there anything you would improve about your experience?

I briefly mentioned that these are usually measured using “ordinal scales.” Without getting too into the weeds, this essentially means you’re measuring your customers’ responses on a scale , usually on a scale of 1 to 5 (such as the commonly used Likert Scale ) or 1 to 7.

I’m going to save you the trouble here (because there is a lot of boring academic debate over which method is best) and say that it’s more important that you simply choose a method and stick with it. Change over time is more important than what the number is. I’ll finish this section off by mentioning a very popular type of customer satisfaction (and loyalty) survey called Net Promoter Score ®, or NPS®. Calculate your Net Promoter Score by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

NPS is quite popular right now, especially in quickly growing companies. We use it regularly at HubSpot to track our customers'  and  employees' happiness. It’s a simple metric that you can use to rally your team around to improve customer satisfaction and retention. But there are critics. Mainly, the argument is that the metric is too simplified and not quite predictive of retention or loyalty. However, no customer satisfaction metric is perfect, so it’s all about how you’re able to use the data. Here’s how Craig Morrison at Usability Hour addresses that:

“When talking about the Net Promoter Score, you’ll often hear people say it isn’t accurate, or it doesn’t work, or that it depends on how you phrase the question, etc. But the thing is, what are you actually doing right now to keep track of how your users experience with your product? Anything? Surveys? Interviews? Many startups I work with are doing absolutely nothing. So while this system might have its flaws, it’s way better than doing nothing at all. It’s the best way to keep track of how the changes you’re making to your product are effective your user experience.”

In truth, I like the simplicity and actionability of the NPS. I also like that you usually add a follow up open-ended question, such as “What’s the reason for your rating?” to couple your quantitative measurement with some qualitative insight. Another benefit of NPS is that it can be benchmarked against others in your industry to truly understand where you stand with regards to customer satisfaction. Rallying your company to focus on NPS, a customer satisfaction metric, will help you create a culture of customer-centricity and improve this score with time. In summary, there are many different ways of measuring customer satisfaction, but what’s important is that you can measure changes over time and that you can actually use the data to improve the customer experience. If your method is too complicated for your organization to rally behind, it won’t be useful. That’s the power of a single question like NPS.

How to Improve Customer Satisfaction

• Ask for customer feedback.
• Educate customers and provide answers.
• Leverage social media.
• Make things easy to accomplish.
• Wow your customers.
• Use focus groups.
• Check out your competitors.

Now that we’ve discussed the importance of customer satisfaction, as well as some methods for measuring satisfaction, the obvious question is, “How do we improve customer satisfaction?”

The obvious answer is that there is no tried-and-true silver bullet strategy here. (Sorry.)

However, there are some guiding principles and evidence-based tactics that can get you some quick wins. Hopefully, they’ll get you started on the path to an improved customer experience.

1. Ask for customer feedback.

This one is table stakes: Make it easier for your customers to complain.

If your customers can’t give you feedback or complain to you directly, they’ll do so on social media or to their friends. They’ll be doubly frustrated — first with their poor experience, and second with their lack of an outlet to fix their poor experience.

This means investing in customer feedback tools and customer support.

Often, if you have a well-placed mechanism to catch customer feedback and respond in real time, you can prevent a user from becoming a detractor in the first place. If you can react quickly, you can turn the situation into a positive one.

Customer success expert Lincoln Murphy put it well :

“Don’t let customers get to the point where they’ll be a detractor in the first place; you do this by understanding their Desired Outcome and operationalizing around ensuring they achieve that — also known as Customer Success. Make sure you give the customer other places to provide feedback ad hoc: feature requests, bug reports, open support tickets, chat with your team, etc. Don’t let the NPS survey be the only way — or the only time — they can give feedback to you. Continually remind them that those other feedback modalities are there for them to use. This way, when you do get a detractor you know it’s probably legit and not venting all of the pent up — and not even entirely negative, but it becomes so with no outlet — sentiment.”

There are many ways you can do this. One way is with live chat . This technology is rapidly improving in its scalability and targeting capability, as well as reporting. Another way is with feedback forms, such as those that companies like Usabilla offer.

The vast majority of dissatisfied customers will simply walk away unhappy, and you’ll never know. They’ll then tell their friends and your reputation will worsen. Negative word-of-mouth is no treat for a company. According to AllBusiness.com :

“Most unhappy customers don’t take the time to complain, they just quit doing business with you. But guess what: They didn’t say anything to do, but they definitely tell all their friends. The experts say, the average upset customer tells nine people. So what can you do? To avoid losing customers because of a bad experience, you need to make it easy for them to complain. That’s right. Let them know their complaints are welcome. Keep in mind, a complaining customer cares enough about the relationship with your business to at least bring the issue to your attention.”

Collecting customer feedback is important in itself, and not enough businesses do it. But it can be complicated, and companies tend to make common mistakes. I reached out to survey design and customer feedback expert, Dr. Matthew Champagne , and he gave a super comprehensive summary of mistakes to avoid:

"So many customers WANT to help their favorite businesses improve, but they are obstructed at every turn by companies who give them transparently bad survey questions, insulting incentives, ask the wrong questions, ask when it’s too late or when memories have faded or make it a painful process to answer. Companies always use the 'autopsy approach' to customer satisfaction: wait until the event is over to figure out what went wrong. Customers should be asked questions while it still matters to them and while their feedback could still make a difference. The only incentives that matter to customers are answering their questions: (1) was my voice heard? (2) did what I say make a difference? and (3) how do I compare to others? Instead, companies annoy and insult customers by offering them some unknown (but probably minuscule) chance of winning some generic gift. Companies still think it’s 1999. Telling customers to 'please take your time to help us improve our products and services' didn’t work 20 years ago and certainly doesn’t work today with savvy customers. With attention at a premium, companies have to stop focusing on self-centered rationales to fill out surveys and instead give customers internal incentives. 'Representativeness' is critical and few companies consider this. Getting responses from 3% or even 10% of customers is meaningless if you don’t know what the “silent middle” is saying. Companies take action on the misleading results from a non-representative portion of their audience because it’s all the data they have. That’s one reason there are so many mediocre companies."

2. Educate customers and provide answers.

All customer questions should be readily answerable, either manually, within your interface, or with documentation.

It’s incredibly frustrating when you can’t find an answer to a question or concern while using a product or browsing a website. How many times have you experienced that and tried, to no avail, to find a live chat or some way to get an answer? It’s far too common.

You have a few options here.

First, and no matter what, conduct user experience (UX) research. If you simply run a few user tests and watch some session replays (using a tool like HotJar), you’ll find tons of UX problems that you never would have noticed otherwise. It’s both alarming and insightful, but it’s inarguably useful.

From there, you should have a solid list of low-hanging fruit that you can prioritize and fix.

Second, look into smarter content and documentation. When you’re fielding support inquiries — or really, any customer touchpoint — make sure you’re writing down, categorizing, and quantifying common questions and complaints (and where they occur). This data will be your building ground for a solid help documentation plan.

Where are users struggling and with what? How can you answer that with content in real time so users don’t even need to reach out to you? We do this here at HubSpot with user guides in our HubSpot Academy knowledge base.

Finally, look into smarter customer support options. In addition to displaying your contact information prominently, live chat is increasingly a necessary site element to have.

It’s expected of most businesses nowadays to have live chat software . The stats are undeniable.

• 63% of customers said they were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat as opposed to one that doesn’t.
• 44% of people said that having live chat available while shopping online was one of the most important features a company can offer.
• 79% of customers say that they prefer live chat because of the immediacy it provides.

The research pretty much all confirms that live chat is the most preferred form of customer service , and that expectation is only growing.

Then there’s a whole new emerging field of chatbots and artificial intelligence solutions. Read about what we’re doing with chatbots at HubSpot here .

3. Leverage social media.

Customer satisfaction isn't always expressly, well, expressed. Customers will often take to third-party avenues like review sites and social media to share their experiences.

When you track and monitor your customers' activities on social media, you can better understand any positive and negative feedback about your brand. You can also feel better equipped to address this feedback and improve your overall customer satisfaction.

Whether or not you use social media as an active customer service tool, your business should be poised and ready to respond to feedback within 24 hours. This could be on Facebook Messenger, Twitter, or in Instagram or LinkedIn comments. A social media listening tool (like HubSpot ) can help with this.

You can also use social media to proactively collect customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction. Consider offering live chats or Q&A sessions where customers can ask pressing questions, express concerns, or merely connect with your service or sales team.

The great thing about social media is it meets your customers wherever they are, allowing you to improve their satisfaction in the process.

4. Make things easy to accomplish.

Usability is important to the customer experience. Despite this, it’s not often thought about in terms of customer satisfaction.

We think about the power of our features and what you can accomplish with the product, but we forget that users have to learn how to use the platform — that it’s often not an intuitive experience.

The easiest-to-use products are the most addicting.

Facebook knows this, and so does every other app on which you spend too much time. They make things so frictionless that, when you receive a trigger (either internal or external) to use the app, there’s no difficulty in doing so.

Companies with positive, healthy missions think a lot about this as well, because their whole goal is to create habits. Think about products like HeadSpace and Duolingo: It’s not easy to meditate or to learn a foreign language, but the ease of the app makes it easy to do so.

One reason I love Amazon so much (but my wallet doesn’t) is how easy they make it to purchase. One-click purchase? I’m all in.

5. "Wow" your customers.

Satisfy your customers? That’s a good start, but you should really be aiming to delight your customers . To wow  your customers.

At least that’s the advice that Warren Buffett gives ... so it’s probably pertinent wisdom.

According to Buffett ,

“Any business with delighted customers has a sales force they won’t have to pay; You don’t see them, but they are talking to people all the time.”

Here’s where things get tricky when it comes to tactical advice, though; there’s no silver bullet strategy to delighting your customers. To be remarkable, you have to, by definition, do something a little outside of the ordinary (and not simply avoiding annoying your customers ). 

Some companies, like Zappos or Amazon, make that a core part of their operating ethos. When you truly rally your company around customer delight, you don’t need to worry about the individual tactics; those ideas will come. 

Whether it’s something quirky like sending hoverboards to your best customers, something remarkable like staying on a call for a Guinness Record amount of time (like Zappos ), or something thoughtful like writing handwritten thank-you notes to your marketing partners, delighting your customers can bring about amazing business results.

6. Use focus groups.

It's one thing to offer customers various channels for sharing feedback; it's quite another to proactively seek (and pay for) feedback. Focus groups gather a number of your target audience members or active customers with the intention of collecting constructive criticism. 

Focus groups allow for honest responses. Not only does it create a space for you to ask a variety of pointed questions without the risk of losing interest, but it encourages your audience to answer candidly. When writing reviews or feedback, people often edit or "clean up" their answers. Focus groups happen in person, allowing you to gather unfiltered feedback and criticism — including from body language and nonverbal responses.

These responses can be some of your best tools when understanding how to improve your customer satisfaction. 

7. Check out your competitors.

When customers are unhappy, they take their business elsewhere. So, where would your unsatisfied customers go? Take a look at your competition to understand how they may be making their (and your) customers happier.

What your competitors are doing right and wrong can teach you a lot about your customers, industry, and products. Go to their website to understand their online customer journey. If they have physical store locations, visit those to understand how they engage customers in person. Contact their sales and service teams to see how they interact with potential and current customers.

Find yourself delighted? Odds are, your customers are, too. Incorporate some new ways to boost your own customer satisfaction.

Customer Satisfaction Tools & Software

Now that we’ve covered why you should care about customer satisfaction and how to measure it (and some ways to improve it), let’s cover some actual tools and software you can use to measure and improve customer satisfaction.

Tools for Measuring Customer Satisfaction

The first thing you need to figure out is how you’ll collect customer satisfaction data. Depending on your goals, you could collect it via customer surveys (and you could send your customer surveys multiple different ways), in-app surveys, post-service surveys, or even with customer interviews or longer form surveys.

My favorite way? Right in your app or website, and right after a critical moment in the user experience. For instance, if you have a photo-sharing app, triggering a feedback survey after a user uploads their first photo could be a great inflection point. Similarly, after a user makes a purchase on an e-commerce site, you’d ideally be able to trigger a survey to get their immediate thoughts.

There are many tools to do this, and more joining the market every day. A few popular options today include:

If you’re trying to target a specific class of users or at a specific time interval, sending out email surveys might be a good option. You can also usually collect more data from your customers this way. (Be careful not to get greedy . Even if you give a reward for completion, long surveys are a pain to fill out , which can trigger the central tendency bias ). My favorite tools for this are:

• SurveyMonkey
• Google Forms  (and G Suite )

There’s no shortage of customer survey software out there, though. Just do a quick Google search and see what I mean. It’s hard to compare all the options, which is why I recommend using something simple like Google Forms or Survey Monkey, but if you want to do some more research, here’s a good resource to learn more about customer survey software .

Customer Satisfaction Measurements and Methods

Outside of the specific tool you use and the time you trigger the survey, you also need to consider which customer satisfaction methodology you use. There’s no shortage here, either.

First, as we mentioned previously in this guide, NPS is a popular method because of its simplicity and actionability. Data is useless if you can’t use it to make better decisions, and NPS seems to have both high predictive validity and actionability. People understand what it means, so it can be put to use in an organization quite easily.

Then there are other “one question” satisfaction methodologies like SUS and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score). CSAT is the most commonly used satisfaction method, and it’s likely the most straightforward as well.

You simply ask your customer to rate their satisfaction with your business, product, or service. Your survey scale can be 1 – 3, 1 – 5, or 1 – 10. Most academics disagree on which scale is the best to use.

It’s not as important to spend too long weighing which scale to use, but rather to implement something your team can agree on and sticking with it. It’s more about establishing a baseline and improving than it is to be perfectly accurate in measurement.

Customer Effort Score is another popular “single question survey.” Instead of simply asking your customers how satisfied they were, you ask how easy it was to purchase or to complete an action in your product.

Apparently, this score is more predictive of consumer behavior than CSAT or NPS, but again, there’s a lot of disagreement among academics on the specifics, and it’s mostly important that you choose one you can take action upon.

Eventually, things get more complex and you can add on more questions  ...

It's usually best to keep things simple, though. People don't want to fill out long surveys, and you want to make sure you get accurate data. When you add enough complexity, you may have to consider hiring a survey design specialist.

Boost Your Customer Satisfaction Today

Customer satisfaction (or delight or loyalty or whatever word you use) is incredibly important to the health of your business. If your customers are unhappy, they’ll leave, and no business can survive and compete long term with a serious churn problem. This guide has defined customer satisfaction as well as given you ways to measure it. It has also given you ideas to increase customer satisfaction. But that's just a start. Now it’s on you to implement these measurement strategies and customer satisfaction programs. It’s up to you to iterate and even innovate in the area of customer satisfaction. Your business growth depends on it .

Alex Birkett

Growth Marketing Manager @ HubSpot

To read this content please select one of the options below:

Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, artificial intelligence applications to customer feedback research: a review.

Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

ISBN : 978-1-80262-876-0 , eISBN : 978-1-80262-875-3

Publication date: 13 March 2023

In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of customer feedback literature, highlighting the burgeoning role of artificial intelligence (AI). Customer feedback has long been a valuable source of customer insights for businesses and market researchers. While previously survey focused, customer feedback in the digital age has evolved to be rich, interactive, multimodal, and virtually real time. Such explosion in feedback content has also been accompanied by a rapid development of AI and machine learning technologies that enable firms to understand and take advantage of these high-velocity data sources. Yet, some of the challenges with traditional surveys remain, such as self-selection concerns of who chooses to participate and what attributes they give feedback on. In addition, these new feedback channels face other unique challenges like review manipulation and herding effects due to their public and democratic nature. Thus, while the AI toolkit has revolutionized the area of customer feedback, extracting meaningful insights requires complementing it with the appropriate social science toolkit. We begin by touching upon conventional customer feedback research and chart its evolution through the years as the nature of available data and analysis tools develop. We conclude by providing recommendations for future questions that remain to be explored in this field.

• Customer feedback
• Artificial intelligence
• Reputation systems
• Unstructured data
• Machine learning
• Natural language processing
• Causal inference

Lee, P.S. , Chakraborty, I. and Banerjee, S. (2023), "Artificial Intelligence Applications to Customer Feedback Research: A Review", Sudhir, K. and Toubia, O. (Ed.) Artificial Intelligence in Marketing ( Review of Marketing Research, Vol. 20 ), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 169-190. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1548-643520230000020010

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2023 Peter S. Lee, Ishita Chakraborty and Shrabastee Banerjee. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited

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Product development: Leveraging qualitative research to meet customer expectations

Explore four stages in product development where implementing qualitative research can provide deep insights, guiding companies to better meet consumer needs and stay ahead of the competition.

Tips for collecting customer feedback  

Editor’s note: Kimberly Pate is managing director, corporate research, at Arlington, Va.-based market research firm Hanover Research. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here . 

Customer expectations for their products are higher than ever, and companies are struggling to keep up.

A recent survey found that one in three consumers is struggling to find products that meet their needs. Companies that do not gather customer insights and incorporate them into product development will lose customers to their competitors. In fact, that same survey showed that 72% of customers are willing to try new products to find one that meets their needs.

Companies have several options for collecting customer feedback on products, the most common of which are customer surveys. However, there are a few stages of the product development process where companies can benefit from going beyond a survey by gathering qualitative data. This data allows companies to discover rich and valuable insights that can direct areas for future research or development.

What is qualitative product feedback?

Qualitative product feedback involves asking customers questions directly. The two most common formats are customer interviews and focus groups. This approach allows companies to gather in-depth feedback and ask follow-up questions to delve deeper into the reasoning behind responses. The open-ended questions center on a product’s value, features and product experience allowing companies to build products and features customers want.

Though asking interview questions may seem straightforward and relatively easy, it is critical to enlist an experienced facilitator. A skilled moderator ensures that questions are asked in a way that gets the desired insights without influencing customers’ responses. They also need to correctly code and accurately interpret the responses without bias or assumptions.

By gathering and incorporating qualitative product feedback companies can:

• Understand customer perceptions and preferences on various aspects of the company and its products.
• Gather unanticipated feedback that would not be collected from a formatted survey.
• Clarify customers’ opinions by asking for follow-up questions that provide more context.

Understanding when to collect product feedback

There are four key stages of product development where qualitative feedback is critical: initial product development, product refinement, pre-launch and post-launch. 

1. Initial product development.  Qualitative research can help narrow and refine potential product concepts during the initial idea-generation phase of product development. Its approaches can produce a detailed picture of customers’ experiences with a product and reveal unmet needs and untapped opportunities.

For example, a company looking to update a product can interview current customers about the existing product and gather opinions on potential features. Gathering direct feedback at this stage allows companies to identify the products and features customers are most interested in and why.

2. Product refinement.   Customer feedback is also critical in the product refinement stage. Even if you confirmed a product is in demand in earlier development stages, your produced product may not align with what customers are willing to buy.

Gathering feedback on proposed elements (features, pricing, etc.,) and allowing customers to beta test and evaluate products helps companies determine if the proposed product is viable and identify what additional refinement is necessary.

In this phase, engaging an audience that spans different age groups, ethnicities, income levels and genders is critical to take cultural differences and considerations into account that may not be top of mind for design or marketing teams.

3. Pre-launch.   Companies need to fine-tune how they will market the new product before releasing it. Qualitative feedback at this stage can help companies identify what themes and elements of the product resonate most with customers.

A common example is focus groups that are shown new messaging or ads before launch. This allows researchers to collect a group’s reaction to new concepts and spark conversation on what resonates and what’s falling off the mark. Not only does collecting direct customer feedback help companies optimize their messaging, but it can also produce customer quotes that can showcase the product’s value, enhancing marketing and sales strategies.

4. Post-launch.   Most rigorous post-launch reviews include some type of customer experience survey to evaluate the product’s performance. By conducting follow-up qualitative research, companies can collect additional data and context to clarify the results of the post-launch surveys.

For example, if a typically loyal and engaged customer segment expresses dissatisfaction with functionality or a lack of desire to buy a new product, qualitative research can uncover the reasons why and allow a company to direct future product improvements.

Qualitative feedback can uncover potential product pitfalls

While it is hard to foresee every potential product pitfall, a well-designed research plan that includes qualitative feedback can identify potential concerns with product features at different stages in product development and bring to light new perceptions and interpretations that companies can leverage to further enhance their products.

The challenges and benefits of AI-powered customer service Related Categories: Consumers, Consumer Research, CX/UX-Customer/User Experience Consumers, Consumer Research, CX/UX-Customer/User Experience, Artificial Intelligence / AI, Research Industry, Customer Satisfaction Studies, Retailing

How hype analysis lets companies find value in customer excitement Related Categories: Consumers, Consumer Research, Qualitative Research Consumers, Consumer Research, Qualitative Research, Research Industry, Artificial Intelligence / AI, Marketing Research-General, Psychological/Emotion Research, Quantitative Research, Social Media Research

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Samsung Scores #1 in Customer Satisfaction and Overall Service Quality for 5G Mobile

When it comes to mobile devices , consumers put a lot of consideration into their purchase, often driven by price, product quality and a good reputation for customer care. In fact, 9 out of 10 smartphone customers are more likely to buy from a brand that offers good customer service. 1

Underscoring the company’s efforts in product quality and service, Samsung Electronics America achieved #1 customer satisfaction and #1 overall service quality among 5G mobile devices in the 2024 American Customer Satisfaction Index Survey. The Index is based on customer ratings of their own mobile devices and identifies the industry leaders they recognize for excellence in product and service quality. Among 5G phones , Samsung also achieved top scores for overall quality, product quality, and screen performance .

“People remember when you take care of them. That’s why we’re investing so deeply in our customer care experience to help them get back up and running faster when the unexpected happens,” said Mark Williams, Vice President of Customer Care at Samsung Electronics America . “We’re proud that the ACSI results show how our customers recognize not only Samsung’s commitment to going above and beyond for them, but also the high quality of our mobile devices.”

Convenient Care in More Locations & Languages

According to Samsung research, 76% of people say easy access to customer service and speedy solutions are the top factors that impact their decision to buy a new product. 2 Over the past several years, Samsung has grown its service network, achieving #1 Quality and Service Coverage in the U.S. for mobile devices . 3 Today, more than 9,000 Samsung Mobile-certified technicians in the U.S. offer convenient walk-in, mail-in and We Come to You repair options.

In 2024, we’ll build upon our Batteries Plus partnership to offer even more convenient in-warranty walk-in service for Galaxy smartphone repairs , often completed on the same day. We will work with our partners to scale the number of Samsung Authorized Care locations even more to cover 84% of the U.S. population with same-day in-warranty mobile repair , prioritizing places that do not have existing Samsung Care options and enabling more people to conveniently access quality care in the towns where they live and work.

“It is an honor to celebrate alongside Samsung as these results are not just an acknowledgment of their commitment to excellence, but a testament to the collaborative efforts shared among partners like Batteries Plus,” said Derek Detenber, Chief Marketing and Merchandising Officer of Batteries Plus . “At Batteries Plus, our goal is to continually foster strong relationships between partners and consumers alike, ensuring that every interaction in our stores reflects our commitment to service and satisfaction.”

In addition to convenience and speed, 73% of people say that, when it comes to customer satisfaction, having easily accessible live support with representatives. 4 To provide faster access on-the-go, Samsung customers can access Samsung Care via SMS text messaging to 1 800 SAMSUNG . Since 2023, we’ve engaged in over 3.5 million conversations via text message, assisting more than 530,000 customers with their product care needs. With just a simple text, customers can reach a live representative 24/7 from wherever they are, reducing long wait times or multiple calls. The conversation can be paused and restarted at the customer’s convenience, and the information is saved in the chat so it doesn’t need to be repeated each time.

Additionally, Samsung is enhancing the care experience even more by extending SMS text messaging capabilities to include Spanish language support through AI translation services. Now, Samsung Care is able to quickly recognize and translate conversations between Spanish-speaking customers and English-speaking representatives to offer better support to more people. The offering received a 2024 Excellence in Customer Service Award from Business Intelligence Group and a Gold Award for Innovation in Customer Service from the 2024 Stevie Awards .

For more on Samsung Care, visit Samsung.com .

Need support from the Samsung Care Team? Visit the Samsung Care YouTube Channel , check out the Samsung Members App and Samsung Communities or call or text 1-800-SAMSUNG to start a conversation with a Samsung Care representative.

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About 2024 american customer satisfaction index (acsi®) survey, the acsi survey is the nation’s only cross-industry measure of customer satisfaction. since 1994, the survey has been recognized as a leader in analyzing consumer sentiment about the products and services used most often. between april 2023 and march 2024, the acsi cell phone manufacturer study surveyed over 4,000 u.s. consumers who recently purchased mobile phones to evaluate the quality of their experiences., 1 based on internal samsung research, march 2024, 2 based on internal samsung research, march 2024, 3 among leading smart phone manufacturers (in-warranty authorized locations only); based on population within 30 min. drive of walk-in service center or home van service center ($30 home van service fee)., 4 based on internal samsung research, march 2024, media contact.

Corporate Communications (US) [email protected]

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2024 saas industry research by churnzero and successcoaching reveals high job satisfaction, challenging workloads for customer success managers.

CSMs are more likely than average to be happy in their roles, although just 40% say their schedules and workloads are realistic, according to the 2024 CSM Confidential Report.

WASHINGTON , May 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- ChurnZero , the platform and partner for customer success, has released the 2024 CSM Confidential Report , a new industry study of customer success managers (CSMs) and their perspectives on their roles, goals, skills, teams, and managerial support. Created in partnership with SuccessCOACHING , the report reveals that CSMs have an above-average rate of job satisfaction and a deep appreciation for their teams and managers, despite often struggling with heavy workloads and gaps in their skills and team processes. The report also identifies several opportunities for customer success leaders to help their teams hit their goals with greater efficiency and less stress.

"The takeaway for SaaS leaders from the data is clear," says You Mon Tsang, CEO and co-founder, ChurnZero. "Your CSMs are your company's champions—now give them the resources, processes, and training they need to deliver the revenue you depend on. If your CSMs are struggling, take the opportunities outlined in the report to help them become better managers of their own success, and engines of sustained growth for your organization."

The 2024 CSM Confidential Report's key findings include:

High job satisfaction for CSMs: 68% of CSMs say they're happy in their current role, making CSMs a happier group on average than the U.S. workforce as a whole.* 91% enjoy consulting with customers to solve their challenges, 81% say they enjoy thinking strategically to solve difficult problems, and 84% say they like and appreciate their team.

Struggles with goals and workload: Just 40% of CSMs say their workload and schedule is realistic, and only 41% say they can complete their work without working evenings or weekends. Only 45% say their manager is good at helping them prioritize their work.

Potential gaps in critical skills: Asked to pick an area in which extra training would make them more effective, CSMs tended to pick business skills including analytics, forecasting, metrics, strategy, and negotiation—indicating a shortfall in these areas as customer success becomes a revenue-owning team.

Gaps in manager skillsets: While most CSMs say their managers perform well in the interpersonal aspects of leadership, less than half say their managers are good at keeping people accountable (47%), setting clear goals (47%), coaching and mentoring their team (43%), and supporting their team's professional development (42%).

Download the 2024 CSM Confidential Report in full at ChurnZero.

About ChurnZero

ChurnZero  is the platform and partner for customer success, dedicated to helping subscription businesses grow and succeed at scale.

ChurnZero's customer success software provides automation, in-app communication, health scoring, actionable reporting, revenue forecasting, and Customer Success AI™ to help Customer Success teams work efficiently, deliver greater customer value, and drive more revenue.

The ChurnZero team prides itself on being a top-rated partner, consultant, and coach to customer success teams worldwide who use ChurnZero to increase and scale their impact. Founded in 2015, ChurnZero is headquartered in Washington, D.C. , and has an office in Amsterdam .

Chris Pilbeam

[email protected]

*62% of U.S. workers are satisfied in their jobs. Source: The Conference Board, Job Satisfaction Survey 2023.

View original content to download multimedia: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/2024-saas-industry-research-by-churnzero-and-successcoaching-reveals-high-job-satisfaction-challenging-workloads-for-customer-success-managers-302144201.html

SOURCE ChurnZero