A new website design rarely gets approved without further tweaks and improvements. As a business owner, it's natural to want...
There are nearly two billion websites nowadays and around five billion active internet users around the globe. If you have an online business, people worldwide visit your website 24/7.
It’s not easy to stand out from the crowd in such a vast ocean of easily accessible information. Having reliable analytics tools is critical because you need actionable insights about your website performance and customer behavior.
Anonymous raw data collection is no longer enough. You need to be aware of potential friction points throughout the customer journey. To make improvements, you need to ask your customers what they struggle with. Combine the feedback with your data on user behavior, and you’ll get an excellent source of information to optimize your product or service.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to use FullSession to combine web analytics and user feedback. FullSession is a web analytics software that helps businesses monitor and measure how their website visitors behave online. With FullSession, you can track engagement data, identify trends and bottlenecks, and spot pages and elements that need improvement. If you want to know more, sign up for FullSession today.
We’ll also show how to present your findings as actionable insights using a customer feedback report. Before we go into more details, let’s explain what the customer feedback report is and how it helps your business.
Get Customer Feedback From Your Users
Measure user sentiment and see why users are unhappy with FullSession’s survey and feedback tools.
A customer feedback report presents the key findings of customer feedback analysis. The report aggregates and summarizes analytics data into actionable insights. Customer feedback reports are useful to all stakeholders. They allow you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your products and help in setting product development priorities.
Here are the stakeholders that can benefit from a customer feedback report:
It’s good to point out that all critical findings in a customer feedback report are derived from numerical data. You should even convert qualitative feedback to numbers. That’s easier said than done, but you will succeed with proper customer feedback tools and a good plan.
In addition, let’s not underestimate a couple of important stages you must complete before you create the customer feedback report. First of all, you must collect customer feedback. Secondly, you must conduct the feedback analysis. It requires combining the feedback with quantitative data on user behavior. Again, you must convert everything to numbers that point to valuable conclusions.
The universal answer sounds simple. Companies need to know what added value their customers get. We are talking about the customer perspective and not what the product managers think. Customer feedback shows how much your product offering matches the clients’ needs and expectations.
If we look more thoroughly into web businesses, we’ll come up with questions only the users can answer. Users access web content remotely and don’t require a shop assistant to guide them to the right areas or take their money at checkout.
This setting eliminates the personal interactions that would happen in a physical store. That’s why you need other data sources about the customer behavior on your website. Also, you need another way of asking if your customers are satisfied with the experience.
Here are the most common sources of customer feedback that digital product owners can use:
Note that all sources provide information that’s gathered in different situations. It’s wise to consider the context to know the importance of the feedback.
Insights from the chat support, for example, show what problems your customers face and how they feel and talk about it at the time of the experience. In contrast, a customer satisfaction survey post-purchase requires the customer to remember an experience.
These nuances may be essential but not as important as collecting feedback in the first place. Getting representative data is the first step. The next is to measure customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction is an excellent indicator of the status of customer experience (CX) you provide. In a survey by Gartner, 81% of respondents said they expected future competition to be based primarily on customer experience.
How many bad experiences are enough to lose a customer? Image source: PWC.
Another survey by PWC indicated that 73% of all people consider customer experience when making purchase decisions. More than half (59%) of US respondents said they would ignore a brand after several bad experiences. One bad experience is enough for 17% of the clients to walk away permanently.
Measuring customer satisfaction will allow you to draw a clear picture and spot areas for improvement that can save you money in the long run. Here’s how improved customer satisfaction helps you stay ahead of the competition:
Each of the points in this list is important enough by itself. That’s why all businesses should collect and analyze customer feedback and use data to measure customer satisfaction. Let’s say a few words about these advantages of high customer satisfaction.
It costs more to get new clients than to keep the current ones. That’s why you should consider all aspects of the customer experience carefully. Don’t stop sending feedback requests after the first customer feedback survey.
For example, you can use confirmation emails to gather feedback after every online purchase. It won’t be too much because every purchase is a different experience, even for loyal customers.
Remember that collecting and analyzing customer feedback are continuous processes. To ensure business growth, you must know what your clients think at all times. You can’t afford the assumption that the experience will stay the same if everything is fine now.
A loyal core customer base is critical for future-proofing your business. Satisfied customers can be significant when a company is going through tough times. They are cheaper to retain, and you can rely on their purchases when you can’t afford aggressive spending on new customer acquisition.
It costs a lot to acquire new customers, especially in industries with fierce competition based on product features and price. It is also valid for mature markets with well-known competing brands, each with a solid customer base. That’s why you should always explore opportunities to improve customer satisfaction.
In addition, other costs would go down when your customers are satisfied. A great example is a cost of providing customer support. More support tickets mean you need more people to handle them.
Also, when the customer contacts the support team, it’s too late, and the experience is already not optimal. Your clients end up dealing with issues instead of enjoying the experience. Why go down this spiral when you can ensure excellent customer satisfaction ahead of time?
Satisfied customers are less likely to venture into the unknown when they can rely on a familiar experience with your product or service. Your happy customers will always prefer to stay in this comfort zone unless something disrupts it.
A slight price difference won’t be a deal-breaker for your loyal customers. It’s not worth going out there and putting effort just for a few cents more.
Keep in mind that this is valid for products and services with similar value. If your competition is constantly innovating and adding more value, they may be able to convert even people with positive customer sentiment about your brand.
Customer satisfaction, or the lack of it, is a primary driver for innovation. When your clients look for specific features, you must consider them, especially when the competition is restless.
Loyalty is good for customer retention, but it can’t compensate for value disparity. If you lag in product improvements for too long, someone will steal your customers. Industries with high innovation rates are a great example of how being first is always better.
Satisfied customers feel good about their purchases. The positive experience makes them eager to promote the products and services they buy. They can explain with enthusiasm what features and qualities they like and why.
Word of mouth is a priceless addition to your marketing effort. People would believe your happy customers because the feedback is genuine. That’s why word of mouth is so influential. It raises the NPS score and turns your clients into a marketing force.
The customer feedback report is an insightful study of customer feedback. The report explains how and why your customers are satisfied or dissatisfied. It helps to understand customer satisfaction in the context of consumer behavior.
The customer feedback report is more than just numbers. You need to analyze the data you gather. It shows which steps and factors in the customer journey affect the experience.
We identified five main benefits of the customer feedback report:
A good customer feedback report is conclusive and shows facts and dependencies that you didn’t know before. It adds more knowledge about your customer behavior and allows a better understanding of your clients’ needs.
Here are some additional comments about each of the listed benefits.
Various teams and individuals in a company can benefit from the customer feedback report. It’s not only for top-level executives but also for other managers and supervisors. The key findings can enable decision-making across all levels of the organization.
Also, the customer feedback report can point to action in any aspect of the customer experience. Depending on the insights, it can aid marketing professionals, product designers, product owners, tech teams, or support teams.
Everyone loves and celebrates positive customer feedback. Businesses don’t collect feedback only to know what they are doing wrong. Your customers can also tell you what you are doing right. You get a chance to learn more about your competitive advantages. This knowledge can guide your marketing, sales, or product development efforts.
The findings in the customer feedback report can show weaknesses that require immediate attention. These could be product or service flaws that directly cause customer dissatisfaction.
Disadvantages can also relate to how you promote and position your product. Setting unrealistic expectations can affect the experience with an otherwise good product of decent value.
If the customer feedback report findings confirm what you already know, then the insights are non-actionable. If you are already doing what’s necessary for improvement, no further action is needed.
An actionable insight points to meaningful positive change that you need to work for. A helpful customer feedback report shows what you don’t know and suggests how to apply this new knowledge.
The key findings in a customer feedback report can motivate managers to rethink their priorities. It depends on how urgent the required action is and the dangers of not taking it. Priorities can often move up or down the list because of new information.
Customers appreciate it when their opinion is valued but wouldn’t invest too much time filling out feedback forms. Businesses are responsible for doing a balanced survey that gathers valuable information without asking for too much customer effort.
You can collect feedback on various topics for various reasons. It all depends on what you need to know right now. For example, you can launch a survey about a new feature of your web app.
The possibilities are endless, but here we listed 14 practical examples of how you can use customer feedback to your advantage.
It should be pretty straightforward. Just ask your customers what they need. It could be a product feature, a website feature, or a preference for the shopping process.
Let’s say, for example, that you sell shoes online and nothing else. You don’t have a massive platform that’s a one-stop shop for everything. End users don’t buy batches of shoes regularly and don’t need to track multiple orders. In this case, you can assume the users might prefer to skip creating an account and just enter their payment information at checkout.
It may sound logical at first, but it’s not necessarily true. It may be accurate, but for only a small number of your customers. There’s one way to find out: just ask. It will allow you to direct your effort more meaningfully and spend your budget on things that matter.
Ask your customers how satisfied they are and what improvements they want to see. Again, don’t change anything that works well. Also, analyze the feedback data carefully. Compare positive to negative responses. Try to figure out if there are groups of customers who want opposite things. Find a balanced solution that improves the overall satisfaction across all customer segments.
Also, be aware of the difference between the product and the overall experience. Let’s go back to the example with the online shoe purchase. A customer could be delighted with his new pair of shoes and still say he wouldn’t shop from your website again. Keep asking until you figure it out. Then you can start planning improvements.
People feel more valued when they know their voice is being heard. The very act of requesting feedback can tip the scales in your favor.
Use customer feedback to power decision-making. Customers will see the results and know they contributed to your improvements. It will make them feel like stakeholders. This kind of involvement will increase loyalty, and loyal customers will be more likely to engage in word-of-mouth promotion.
Most customer satisfaction surveys ask users to evaluate aspects of their experience and put them on a scale. It can limit the feedback to the questions you listed for the survey. Keep in mind that something else may be more critical to the customer.
Use an open-ended customer feedback form to allow users to say the more important things to them. Keep in mind that open-ended questions require more effort to answer. Don’t include too many of them, and keep the survey short and easy to complete.
Last, make sure you go through all answers and label them correctly. It will allow you to turn this qualitative data into numeric data. Then you can quickly summarize the numbers into crucial findings.
Customer feedback can be positive and show what things you excel at. If customers see different aspects of your service as your advantage, you can use that insight to stay ahead of the competition. Also, your respondents can help you arrive at conclusions few others have thought about. If acted upon, it will help you stay on the cutting edge.
The feedback may show surprising new opportunities that you never explored before.
The data from your satisfaction survey will help you find out what is important to your customers. If we retake the retail example, you can use the findings to add new product groups to your online store.
You can also start a premium service with more customer benefits. It would ensure that you cover more market segments and expand your client base.
Product rating is displayed as a rich result on Google. Image source: Google Search Central.
We mentioned product reviews as one of the sources of customer feedback. It’s a special one because reviews are public. They allow future users to research and form opinions about your product or service before buying.
Customer reviews have the power to set expectations. They can also boost your search engine rankings. Positive reviews can qualify you for rich snippets that display your star rating.
If your customer feedback report shows high satisfaction, it’s wise to encourage your users to rate your product or service or leave a review online. It is another form of word-of-mouth promotion. In this case, it’s not just other clients that pick it up. Search engines do this too.
There are two areas to explore here. The first one is how to promote and position your product or brand based on current customer opinions and sentiments. The second is how to utilize word of mouth promotion by satisfied customers.
You need to know who your customers are and what’s important to them in either case. The best way to learn is to gather feedback.
How many times have you seen websites that show reviews or client testimonials? Customers are likely to trust genuine feedback from other people. You can use feedback analysis to make data-driven decisions. You can also publish feedback from current buyers to recruit future clients.
Conversion rate is one of the most used KPIs in e-commerce. It is simple to calculate and very difficult to link to other factors in business. The conversion rate could be low for many reasons. Bad design, poorly selected market segments, and an intimidating checkout process are just a few examples of why your visitors don’t become buyers.
Use feedback surveys to ask customers why they visit your website and their intentions. They could be researching a product online but not sure if they would buy it. It is one of many possibilities. The more users participate in your survey, the greater the significance of the feedback. Gather as many opinions as possible to ensure small data samples do not mislead you.
Insight implies deep understanding, which is essential for making informed decisions. Innovation can be costly, and you must be sure you are going in the right direction. Nowadays, data is the most important factor that motivates strategic decisions.
When your customers tell you what they need and value, match this against what you do in your daily operations. Clients are sensitive to the amount of effort they must put in to get what they need.
Use customer feedback to optimize your service and create a frictionless experience. Ideally, every interaction with your customers should be effortless for them and as easy and cost-effective as possible for you.
Overall traffic and sales in e-commerce are higher on mobile devices. However, you may see a different picture when you break it down by industry. According to the SaleCycle survey on e-commerce in 2020, mobile traffic in retail was 67%, but 53% of the sales were on desktop.
It is just one example of a consumer trend native to a given industry that doesn’t match the global overalls. That’s why it’s important to work with data relevant to your business case.
Use customer feedback together with behavior analytics to define your customer trends. Record user browsing sessions and replay them to see what your customers look at, what they struggle with, or when they abandon the cart. It will enable you to propose changes based on the findings in your unique situation.
Here again, you can complement customer feedback with advanced web analytics. Use tools like FullSession to see which pages your visitors were referred from. Watch the time on site, the bounce rate, and the conversion rate. It will allow you to spot the most efficient lead generation channels.
Feedback also helps you to know your customers better. Thanks to the feedback, you can grow your knowledge of customer segments and their value to the business. It will allow an acquisition effort that targets prospects who behave like your best customers.
Creating a new feedback form with FullSession
FullSession is a web analytics platform that allows advanced tracking of user behavior. Our tracking code is lightweight and won’t slow down your site. It records website visitor sessions and highlights significant events and interactions you can watch during session replays.
FullSession offers two main ways to collect feedback from your website visitors. The first one is the website feedback form. It allows you to ask directly how your customers feel while browsing. It offers real-time feedback collection and is easy to create from your FullSession account.
You can customize the appearance of the form and define questions your users must answer to complete the satisfaction survey. You can set up the form language (English, French, or Arabic), set the form position on the page, and see the desktop or phone preview. You can install the customer feedback form on all website pages or only on selected ones. Targeting by device type is also available.
The second way to collect customer feedback is to track user behavior in real-time. You will learn what your users do and where they struggle with good observation and analysis.
If a negative comment raises a flag, replay the browsing session for this user. See what actually happened and how the visitor interacted with your content. Look for critical events like error clicks and anger clicks. Anything that shows the source of the frustration will help you understand the reasons for the negative feedback.
Also, you can use FullSession heatmaps to learn where on the screen the users are looking at the most. It shows what content or feature grabs more attention and has more interactions. Then you can match this information with the user action events you get from the session replay.
The two methods complement each other and work great when used together. Combine direct customer feedback with behavioral insights to make better conclusions and filter the valuable data from the noise.
Example of a customer feedback report on FullSession
The FullSession customer feedback report has two main sections – the report results and the list of feedback submissions.
Response categories summarize the results, and you can see how many users are happy with the experience, neutral, or unhappy. You can click on any response type to see all submissions.
The list contains all answers and also shows additional user comments. Here you can see the user device type, operating system, browser, and the page where the user submitted the form. Click on any line item to see more details and replay the recorded browsing session. It will help you track the user interactions on the page and learn more about their behavior and experience right before the feedback submission.
A replay of a browsing session with FullSession
To analyze customer feedback, we recommend starting with an overview and then going deeper into the response types you are interested in. It will allow you to get a sense of the overall customer sentiment. Then you can investigate the answers from each response category, e.g., like, dislike, or neutral.
Pay attention to users who took the time to submit additional comments, especially if they are longer than one sentence. Replay the browsing sessions to analyze customer feedback manually. See what happened and spot any friction points or mishaps that affected the experience. Use the event tracker to speed up the replay and focus on the events that matter.
Also, match this knowledge with the info from the FullSession heatmap tool. It will show what content and features grab the users’ attention and what they ignore. Then you can adjust your layout so critical content and elements are within the user’s line of sight. It should eliminate frustration and contribute to a better overall experience.
Customer feedback is a valuable source of information, and that value is likely to increase in the digital future. A good understanding of the client’s needs and struggles help businesses to make the right decisions, keep their customers, and recruit new ones.
A customer feedback report is a practical way to summarize and present key findings from user feedback. However, you need the right tools to collect and analyze feedback data to prepare the report. It is where FullSession helps a lot.
With FullSession, you can run online surveys while getting advanced user behavior analytics. You can record and replay browsing sessions to find out how visitors use your website and outline friction points and areas for improvement. Learn more on FullSession and sign up for a free trial here.
Customer feedback is a broad topic, and there’s a lot to be said. You can get overwhelmed by the amount of information. Here we answered some common questions to help you get quickly to the bits you need.
There are three main steps for preparing a customer feedback report:
Customer feedback can come in various forms. You can get it from online customer surveys, reviews, or direct interaction with your clients. You can also get feedback indirectly when you study customer behaviors to learn what helps or spoils a good customer experience.
Customer feedback analysis is processing data from multiple sources to enable conclusions about your customer experiences. Ultimately it should help you gain knowledge about the needs and frustrations of your customers.
To evaluate customer feedback, you need to separate the responses by categories, e.g., satisfied, neutral, dissatisfied. Then you must summarize how many responses you have by category. Also, don’t forget to check text comments as they contain valuable information and can point you in unexpected directions.