What is user feedback? Where and how to collect it

Tasked with the ultimate challenge of keeping your customers satisfied and engaged with your brand, you might find that things get a little daunting without the right solution in place. Quantitative analytics tools like Google Analytics can tell you a lot about what is happening on your digital channels, but not why. Thankfully, there’s user feedback available to help fill in the gaps.

What is user feedback? And where, and how should you collect it?

What is user feedback?

User feedback is essentially experience data collected from customers on your website(s), mobile app(s) and within email campaigns. This data expresses the user’s reaction to a product, service, or their overall experience on any of these digital channels. The insights obtained from user feedback are then used by various digital roles – such as digital marketers, UX designers, web analysts, mobile marketers, and more – to improve the user experience.

Note: while many companies only collect feedback, there is so much more to the process if you want to really understand your customers and provide real value for them. A well-rounded user feedback programme should include three different stages of feedback: collection, analytics and closing the loop. These last two stages help bring user feedback insights full circle and enable organisations to achieve the goals they set out for.

The importance of user feedback

User feedback is important for a number of reasons. For starters, user feedback points out aspects of your digital experience that need improvement. You can make assumptions all day about what your customers want and how you will give it to them, but in the end their voice is what matters most and they’re the ones who will give you the insights your business needs to make meaningful changes to your product and service offerings. By catering to your customers in this way, they’re also more likely to come back to your brand, as it makes them feel involved and important. After all, listening to your customers helps you build loyalty.

Where to collect user feedback

Over the last few years, user feedback has swept the market, climbing to the top of nearly every digital marketer’s agenda. And not only that, but it has also made its way across more and more digital channels. The reason being is that organisations have finally recognised that customers no longer see digital channels as separate interactions with a brand, but rather as one fluid experience. Therefore, these channels must be fused together and cared for in the exact same way. The glue? User feedback.

There are times when customers switch devices and channels out of convenience. Continuing their customer experience consistently throughout creates a pleasant and unified experience. Without seamless transitions between these devices and channels, marketing messages, accessibility, function customer data, and brand identity gets disjointed. The resulting disorder causes customers confusion, frustration, and trepidation to purchase from those who don’t implement consistency between all touchpoints.

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So which digital channels are most critical for collecting user feedback?

Collecting website feedback
Collecting user feedback from your website is the most common way of gathering feedback. It will help you understand which areas of your website are performing well and which areas could be improved upon, i.e., certain pages and funnels that are key to the customer journey. There are many ways to collect website feedback, including a generic feedback survey which is accessible via some or all pages on the website (aka a passive feedback survey), at the bottom of a webpage via an embedded survey, or as a pop-up / slide-in survey (aka. an active feedback survey).


Website feedback on Calvin Klein

The fact remains however that the strategy behind gathering website feedback varies from industry to industry and organisation to organisation. Where one organisation – like an ecommerce website – might be focused on optimising the purchasing process, another – let’s say a banking institution – might be more focused on providing useful content to help visitors and customers along in the journey. It is all goal-oriented.

Collecting mobile (in-app) feedback
Additionally, you can collect user feedback from your mobile app(s). This is referred to as mobile feedback. This type of user feedback can have a huge impact on the mobile experience, as it helps organisations gather in-the-moment feedback within the mobile app. It’s also important to point out that this type of feedback enables organisations to leverage the same critical features offered with website feedback, such as in-app targeting.

In addition to measuring hard metrics such as Net Promoter Score and CSAT, mobile feedback can also provide your organisation with the sentiment behind mobile user behaviour, through mobile survey elements such as open comments. This qualitative data provides a deeper understanding of your mobile users, thus equipping your organisation with the means to cater more effectively to their needs.

Example of mobile feedback

In a nutshell, collecting user feedback on your mobile app can help you:

• Understand your mobile users. Along with their opinion of your app, mobile feedback also allows you to gather demographic information about your users. Having this information on hand enables your organisation to form personas. If you cross analyse personas with feedback results you’ll be able to create not only a more personalised experience for your users but also develop an app you know they’ll like.
• Track app performance. One of the great things about mobile feedback is that it can give you very specific feedback on, for example, a feature you’ve launched or an update you’ve recently released. You can do this with a number of valuable metrics such as NPS, CSAT, GCR and more.
• Create a unified and consistent experience across all channels. As we stated before, most customers don’t actually make any sort of distinction between the channels they use, whether that’s web or mobile. From their perspective, they see one single brand. Therefore, by prioritising your mobile experience with user feedback, your organisation can provide a seamless experience that blends perfectly with your other channels.

Learn more about mobile feedback here.

Collecting email feedback
Email feedback plays an important role in customer-centricity. By collecting feedback within your email campaigns, you provide a platform for two-way communication with your customers where they can share their thoughts and perceptions of your email(s) and the information you’ve provided. In other words, you as a digital marketer gain insight into what your readers truly value and can boost the entire online customer experience as a whole. Email feedback can be collected in various ways including, email signature feedback, email feedback surveys and email campaign feedback.


Example of an email feedback survey

For example, say you’ve sent out an email with your company’s latest updates, along with several promos. In the (likely) event that your readers say nothing in response to your email (and you do not collect email feedback), you will have no way of knowing how it was received by your readers. Was the content relevant? Was it useful? Was the promo relevant for these readers? Do your readers have suggestions on how you can improve? These are the blanks that email feedback can fill in for you.

How to collect user feedback

Determine your objective(s). Identify what you want to learn from it and why? Do you want to gain insight into customer loyalty? Or should the survey be more geared towards a particular online process (e.g. purchasing)? If you outline your objective(s) properly, it will help you come up with the right (and most relevant) questions to ask later on in the process.

Keep it short. We cannot stress this enough! Gone are the days when companies would send out page long surveys to customers to gauge their satisfaction. The reason being that the majority of your customers simply do not have the time to go through and answer these long and drawn out surveys. It’s a hassle for them and it has a high probability of causing what we call ‘survey fatigue’. So how do you know when your survey is too long?

Interaction is key. Don’t make your questions too intricate – be clear in what you are asking so your customers understand. Always try to incorporate one or two questions that require an open-text answer. These will give you deeper insights into how your customers feel and can even generate ideas you haven’t thought of yourself. Conversational feedback is a good way of achieving this.



Keep it relevant. There are appropriate questions and inappropriate questions to ask depending on your goal(s). For example, you wouldn’t ask someone to provide an Net Promoter Score (NPS) right as they’ve entered your website or before they’ve even become a customer. This goes to show that timing is rather important and surveys should be situational.

This also applies when using survey logic. Survey logic is when you trigger different follow up questions depending on the previous answer given. For example, if you ask for a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) rating and the visitor provides that they are ‘Very Dissatisfied’, then you can ask them ‘why’. Why are they so dissatisfied? These kinds of relevant questions will give you deeper insights into what your customers are thinking.

A solution that caters to your needs

It can be challenging to find the right user feedback solution for your business. There are lots of factors to consider including collection and analysis capabilities (i.e. target options, dashboarding and charts), as well as technical knowledge required, pricing and customer support offered. Not to mention, if you want to measure the customer experience across all of these digital channels, you’ll need a tool that can do it all.

Mopinion is an all-in-one user feedback software that – compared to its competitors – takes feedback one step further and offers in-depth analysis opportunities for its users. With real-time data visualisation in customisable dashboards and charts, users are able to quickly and efficiently digest large sums of feedback data on all their digital channels including (website, mobile apps and email). This ‘one-stop shop’ offers:

• Feedback forms (passive and active) for all your digital channels
• Visual Feedback
• Conversational feedback
• More complex surveys that include question routing
• In-depth analysis, including text analytics, sentiment analysis, smart labeling, etc.
• Advanced data visualisation with in-chart filtering and customisable dashboards
• Seamless data exploration
• Advanced action management