Customer feedback is how you create a constructive conversation with your customers. The benefits of user feedback are two-fold. One, you can show customers you care about their opinions and boost engagement and emotional involvement with your brand. Customers love to feel involved in the process and asking for feedback includes them. For example, many fashion brands gather user feedback on how the next items should be designed. Secondly, you can instantly and consistently gather proprietary data on your products or services and how customers are responding to them so you can make better informed decisions and improvements.
Collecting user feedback and data on interactions with your brand and products doesn’t need to be as difficult or expensive as it used to be. You can get very precise information with simple tools you can implement now. (Read our blog “How can PLG Teams Build Better Products from User Feedback” for a deeper dive into best practices.)
Here are the 5 best tools to get better user feedback:
Feedbackify.
It’s all in the name, really. It’s an incredibly simple tool to collect user feedback directly on your website. It takes just five minutes to integrate with your site, no coding experience necessary. It allows visitors to give you feedback on our site without a registration so you can quickly gather their opinion and drop any barriers to engaging them. There’s privacy for both your brand and your customers. You can quickly create popup forms to ask visitors about any problems they encountered on your site, any suggestions they have, and ratings on various categories you want specific feedback on. You can also create a “feedback” tab that floats on your site visitors can access on their own.
SurveyMonkey + Mailchimp.
If you’re already communicating with customers via email, this is a great touchpoint to also collect customer feedback. SurveyMonkey integrated with Mailchimp is a really easy way to set this up. If you have a Mailchimp account up and running, you’re already able to use this. SurveyMonkey helps you create really nice, well integrated surveys and forms into your email campaigns in Mailchimp. It’s perfect for automated post purchase emails to collect feedback on specific products or services. What’s great is also the results of your surveys can be seen with your email engagement data so you have a more concise view of how customers are engaging with your brand. One thing to mention: email may not be the best way to communicate with customers as open rates are not generally high and you can easily get marked as spam. Don’t over do it and adhere to the top five tips for how to avoid the spam folder.
TrustPilot.
Trustpilot is actually a platform of reviews for products and services worldwide. The good thing about getting your customers to write a review for your products or services through TrustPilot is that once they do, they are automatically indexed and syndicated worldwide through the platform, helping get your brand seen through your positive feedback. You can use TrustPilot to create embedded forms and link to send out to customers and display on your site to ask for their feedback. Once you get it, you have access and also your reviews are automatically shared on your social pages and added to your Google results to better engagement and conversions. The downside is pricing jumps for free with very basic features to $299 to $549 a month, which is quite expensive for the only options available.
Hotjar.
This is a bit of an unconventional way to get feedback and it’s not necessarily direct, but it is incredibly valuable. Hotjar is a service and platform that gets you heatmaps, screen recordings, and surveys to get not just direct feedback but all the little detailed data on how customers are interacting with your site and your brand. You can figure out where the points of friction are in your customer’s’ journey throughout your site and get data on how you can improve their experience. It’s incredibly cheap for paid plans and you can free data for under 2,000 pageviews per day. Even taking a look every once in a while can give you some really valuable feedback.
Beamer.
Another unconventional, yet really effective way to gather customer feedback is through an announcement platform integrated on your website like Beamer. Beamer is a newsfeed that sits right within the interface of your website or app. Customer can open up the feed by simply clicking a “What’s New” tab in the navigation or an icon in the interface. When they do, a sidebar appears with a stream of updates. You can create updates for anything: new products, new deals, new features, general news, etc. It makes any page more engaging with more content and actionable CTAs to get traffic moving through your site. You can collect feedback on each announcement you make and gauge reactions. There is a whole Beamer Analytics backend where you can get data on your customers and their reactions in a summarized and simple dashboard. Installing Beamer is super easy and those using it not only get instant feedback but are seeing 10x more engagement!
Customer feedback is becoming more and more important for gaining buyer trust and standing out in the endless sea of options. It’s also vital you make decisions based on as much data and feedback as possible to stay ahead. These tools make it all easier than ever! For a way to both collect feedback, track data on how customers interact with your site, and boost engagement, try Beamer on your website or app today.
