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Let’s get down to business. In today’s market, where customers are king, customer feedback is essential for any business. But how do you get better user feedback?
It’s is not just collection of opinions anymore.
Gone are the days when you could get away with a simple email asking, “On a scale from one to ten, how would you rate your experience?”
We studied different strategies, so let’s explore the best ways to get better user feedback.
Social listening, in-app surveys, emails, feature requests… we’ll share different approaches to show you how to get more customer feedback and build a strong feedback loop.

Leverage Social Listening to get more feedback

Social listening is a critical, yet often underutilized, element to gather user feedback.

By tracking social media for brand mentions and relevant conversations, you gain access to candid customer sentiments. You can identify friction points, uncover blind spots in your product, track recurring complaints…and get insights – both positive and negative – that users would not share directly with you. You can also go beyond and monitor your competition, trending topics, industry niches, and get even more comprehensive feedback.

Use tools like Buska.io to gather more efficiently user feedback :
Automate Monitoring: Track consumer talks of brand mentions across all the social platforms and blogs. This ensures no valuable feedback goes unnoticed.

Analyse Sentiments: The emotions beyond the words are crucial. buska’s sentiment analysis detects the nuances of social conversations and gives you better insights into customer feelings.

Know in Real-Time: Nowadays, timing is everything. Get instant alerts about critical user feedback or complaints, to take effective and quick action.

It will give you relevant information from your customers and prospects about the way your product is perceived.

Ask for customer feedback in your app

Another way to get direct feedback from your customers is to ask them.
But how do you get their attention ? and get them to spend time sharing feedback? Use in-app surveys.
Ask your customers about their experience while they are connected to your tool :

  • They are already actively engaging with your product
  • It is not intrusive like emails
  • You get real time and in-context responses right when customers are using the product.

Tools like Qualli allow you to build easily in app surveys for all sorts of feedback needs:
micro-surveys, multi-steps surveys, customized forms, mobile surveys…
With it, you can setup an automated feedback loops to gather feedback in minutes.

Integrate in-app surveys in your toolkit to get direct feedback with high response rates. Make the surveys very specific and short. If you create a long form survey, you can create friction in the product flow, which will impact the user experience.

The user feedback classic : the Email marketing campaign

Email marketing remains a basic indispensable tool to gather customer feedback.
Sending out customized surveys through emails allows you to reach beyond your immediate user base. Be careful and avoid spray and pray, because you won’t get good results, and will attract mostly extremes : angry customers will complain but won’t give useful insights and ambassadors will not be objective either.
Create a feedback marketing campaign like you would craft a personalized outbound campaign :

  • segment your emails to cater to different customer groups.
  • keep the email short and clear.
  • focus on the value the user gets from giving you their feedback.
  • write clear, specific questions to limit biased or approximate responses.
how to get better user feedback using social listening and other techniques

Feedback button on your site

Having a feedback button or feature request box is an excellent tool for continuous, spontaneous customer input. Get better user feedback from your customers, as they proactively reach out to you to share their thoughts.

Place widgets on your website to allow your users to share immediate feedback. That way you can get instant feedback on bugs or malfunctions.
They are also a good way to get feature requests from your customers. This method ensures that you have a constant pulse on customer perceptions and can make agile improvements.
To start, you can even implement a simple CTA with a form for people to share their feedback or requests.

Do user interviews.

One last strategy we want to share with you is to do user interviews. It might sound trivial, but it’s a very qualitative tool that is underutilized nowadays.

Getting on a call with a user is a perfect way to gauge their emotion, to showcase how they use the product and get more detailed information. Obviously, it is more difficult and time consuming. But it’s worth trying.
In your marketing emails, include a “Feedback Call” CTA with a link to your calendar (you can use free tools like lemcal).
In your feedback button, add the option to schedule a call linking to your calendar.

Build a strong feedback loop

Leverage these different approaches, from traditional emails to social listening, this will help you get better user feedback. These techniques are complementary and interconnected.
To maximize your results, use them in a feedback loop, for instance :

  • use your social listening tool to get real time notifications
  • show the widget feedback button when people sign-up
  • in your onboarding email sequence, include a feedback step
  • schedule a micro survey X days after sign up
  • send an email feedback campaign 30 days after sign up … …

Centralize all the user feedback and responses you get in your communication tool.
For example, send notifications from buska to a slack channel, receive Qualli notifications of the in app surveys, automate email forms responses to the slack channel, link your feedback button to send notifications…

The ultimate goal is to get more and better feedback and turn it into a dynamic dialogue with your customers. Therefore, you will keep innovating and building better products.


If you enjoyed this article, make sure to check out our Blog for more insights on Social Listening