Getting feedback can feel uncomfortable, but it’s essential for growth and performance improvement. Research shows that people who actively seek feedback receive higher performance ratings and build greater trust and credibility. By understanding personal reactions to feedback, separating the message from the messenger, and focusing on coaching-style feedback rather than simple ratings, individuals and organizations can gain deeper insights.
Online surveys make feedback collection easier, more frequent, and more honest through anonymity and real-time responses. When feedback is analyzed thoughtfully, tested through small experiments, and followed by visible action, it becomes a powerful tool for learning, trust-building, and continuous improvement.
As experts mention in “Find the Coaching in Criticism”, published at Harvard Business Review, “Even when you know that [feedback is] essential to your development and you trust that the person delivering it wants you to succeed, it can activate psychological triggers. You might feel misjudged, ill-used, and sometimes threatened to your very core.”
Introduction to Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is the foundation of any thriving business, offering a direct window into the needs, expectations, and experiences of your customers. By actively collecting customer feedback through various methods—such as customer feedback surveys, user interviews, and monitoring social media channels—you gain actionable insights that help you understand what your customers truly value. This feedback not only highlights your company’s strengths but also uncovers areas where improvement is needed. In today’s fast-paced and competitive market, leveraging customer feedback is essential for making strategic decisions that drive customer satisfaction and business growth. Whether you’re gathering feedback from online surveys or engaging with customers on social media, every piece of feedback is an opportunity to learn, adapt, and stay ahead of the competition.
Customer Feedback Strategy
Developing a robust customer feedback strategy is key to turning customer opinions into meaningful business outcomes. A successful strategy starts with choosing the right methods to collect feedback, such as customer feedback surveys, focus groups, and online reviews. It’s important to have a clear plan for analyzing and acting on the feedback you receive, ensuring that every customer voice is heard and valued. By adopting a customer-centric approach, you can improve customer retention, enhance the overall customer experience, and build lasting customer loyalty. A well-defined customer feedback strategy also allows you to prioritize your efforts, focus on high-value customers, and allocate resources where they will have the greatest impact. Ultimately, a thoughtful approach to collecting and using feedback helps your business grow stronger and more responsive to customer needs.
Consider these handy tips when you get feedback
Know your own tendencies
For sure, we have been constantly receiving feedback since we can remember. But we can definitely remember one more thing as well: wo,w do we usually react when we get feedback?
Some might get angry and strike back. Others may go into a defensive mode and try to justify their actions and decisions by all means. And some people may receive the feedback for the moment, and reject it again after a few hours.
We all react in different ways, but by knowing our own common ways of reacting to feedback, we can differentiate between a psychological impulse and a fact more easily. This will help us judge better and evaluate the feedback.
Detach the “what” from the “who”
As a matter of fact, our relationship with the person who is giving the feedback affects how we receive the feedback. How we feel about the messenger often alters how we perceive the meaning of the message.
It’s great to disconnect these two and focus on the feedback itself and the goal that you’re moving towards.
An advantage of using online surveys is that you can get feedback anonymously, and in this way reduce the effect of your personal relationship with the feedback-giver. Additionally, being anonymous will provide the feedback-givers the opportunity to give more honest feedback. Analyzing customer responses can provide deeper insights into their true opinions and help you better understand their needs. Responses to surveys can vary in detail and honesty, so understanding these responses is key to accurately interpreting feedback.
Get more of the “coaching” feedback type
When you ask someone to rate something, for example, when you want to measure your company’s Net Promoter Score, you’ll be getting “evaluative” type of feedback; simply a score. But when you ask them about their reasons for giving you that specific score, you will be receiving “coaching” type of feedback. Qualitative feedback, often gathered through follow-up questions, provides deeper insights into the reasons behind ratings or opinions and helps you understand customer experiences and preferences.
Everyone would need to get both types of feedback, but it is actually the “coaching” type that makes you or the subject that you are evaluating improve and become better.
Analyze the feedback for customer insights
Sometimes, it’s not directly clear if the feedback is valid or useful. Therefore, it’s important to unpack and analyze the feedback to better understand it. Dig deeper into responses to uncover actionable feedback that can lead to meaningful improvements. If a respondent’s answers are very short or not clear enough, encourage them to provide more detail to improve the quality of insights. Try to connect their answers with their previous responses. See if you can make a connection between them. Have they understood your question correctly? Have they simply been too lazy to provide a good response? Are they unconfident and worried about answering honestly? Are there too many questions that have made them tired? Are you asking the right question from the right person?
Analyzing all these may help you figure out the meaning or the message within the feedback. Observe closely where the answers are coming from and where they are heading to.
Get feedback on one subject, every time
Do not make huge surveys or questionnaires that contain questions about a variety of things. For example, if you’re surveying your employees, students, etc, do not wait until you can make an annual performance review survey. It’s not good to ask respondents to give you feedback about different aspects of a huge multi-aspect subject.
Although it is good to include an open-ended question at the end of your survey and let the respondents freely express their opinions about other things that have come to their mind during the survey, try to make the actual process of getting feedback focused on the same subject.
Test your theories with small experiments
After analyzing the feedback, try to design small experiments to test the theories that you have developed from it. If the experiments work, that’s awesome! If not, tweak your approach and test it again. Small experiments do not have a huge risk, and when you study them one by one, it will be easier to follow and track the results.
Conduct customer feedback surveys online
Conducting online surveys, for example, using our free online survey tool, is a perfect way to get feedback. Pop-ups and pop-up surveys are effective ways to collect customer feedback in real time on digital channels, allowing you to engage users at key moments and gather immediate insights. You can share the surveys with your respondents in a variety of ways. For example, share the link to your survey via email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, and so on…, embed it into your site, use pop-ups on websites and other digital channels to engage users and collect user feedback, or even print it in the form of QR codes and ask visitors to your business to answer a few questions. It’s also possible to create a kiosk-mode survey and display it on an iPad or tablet in your shop to get live feedback from your customers.
Using our tool will even help you collect additional data from respondents, for instance, the time of the day they answer your survey, how long it took them to respond, or even from which country or city they are filling in the questionnaire. All these might be meaningful when you analyze the results. The customer data and valuable data gathered through customer feedback tools can inform business decisions, helping you better understand your audience and improve your offerings.
Collect customer feedback in real-time
Don’t wait and waste time; if you want to evaluate your performance in a particular task, or on a specific subject. Just reach out to your audience while the subject is still fresh, and get their feedback right away!
But keep in mind not to bombard them with questions from every angle and in regard to every possible aspect of the subject. Divide the questions into manageable chunks, and if you need to create a few different surveys, ask them to participate in new ones after a reasonable pause.
Ask more frequently
Get feedback regularly. Don’t let the good habit of listening, learning, and changing for the best get old. The more you ask, the easier it becomes to learn and take the feedback.
Give feedback
Yes, you should give feedback too. Let your respondents know about the results of your survey. Share the analytics of your survey with them. Ask for their email addresses, and see if they want to hear more about the results. Write to them after the survey, thank them, and show appreciation. It’s important to follow up with respondents to gather additional insights or clarify their responses, which can be done through follow-up questions that dig deeper into their opinions. After a while, let them know about the results of considering their opinions and applying their valuable feedback.
When you get feedback, give feedback too, and let them know that you, your company, or organization cares about the feedback. Providing feedback to respondents shows that their input is valued and encourages ongoing engagement. Remember, giving feedback is a two-way process that builds trust and motivates participation.
Customer Experience
Customer experience encompasses every interaction a customer has with your company, from browsing your website to reaching out through support channels. Delivering an outstanding customer experience is essential for building trust, loyalty, and positive word-of-mouth. By collecting and acting on customer feedback, you can identify pain points and friction points along the customer journey, allowing you to make targeted improvements that enhance satisfaction.
This might involve streamlining processes, improving communication, or offering more personalized support. Additionally, customer feedback provides valuable guidance for product development, ensuring that new features and services align with evolving customer expectations. When you listen to your customers and act on their feedback, you create a company that truly puts the customer first.
Implementing Feedback
Taking action on customer feedback is where real change happens. Implementing feedback shows your customers that their opinions matter and that your company is committed to continuous improvement. This process involves assigning responsibility for reviewing and acting on feedback, setting clear goals for improvement, and tracking your progress over time.
By addressing negative feedback and responding to customer needs, you can reduce complaints and boost customer satisfaction. Moreover, feedback often reveals opportunities for innovation—whether it’s refining existing products or developing new services that better meet customer needs. When you turn feedback into action, you not only solve problems but also build stronger relationships with your customers.
Measuring Feedback Effectiveness
To ensure your customer feedback efforts are making a meaningful impact, it’s important to measure their effectiveness. Track key metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction, and customer retention to evaluate how well your customer feedback strategy is working.
Analyzing quantitative data helps you identify trends, measure the return on investment of your feedback initiatives, and demonstrate the value of customer feedback to your team and stakeholders. By continuously monitoring these metrics, you can refine your approach, improve the customer experience, and drive long-term business success. Remember, effective measurement is the key to turning feedback into lasting results.
Conclusions
Don’t forget that getting feedback, or actually “taking” the feedback, is not an easy process. However, customer feedback is important for business growth and customer satisfaction, as it enables you to make customer-centric decisions and bridge the experience gap. But no one is perfect. Feedback always helps, and it all depends on your ability to achieve positive results from criticism.
For business owners, understanding customers’ opinions about products and services improves quality while also providing valuable insights into what new offerings customers demand. Customer insights from your customer base can inform improvements to the products customers use and enhance the overall support experience. Engaging customers throughout the customer lifecycle is essential to ensure customer success and create happy customers.
User research, including in-person and unmoderated testing, can provide valuable feedback, though some methods may be time-consuming. It’s important to act in the best interest of both happy and unhappy customers, as collecting feedback from many customers helps identify trends and improve business outcomes.
Some templates which can help you get feedback
Motivation and buying feedback template
Non-Profit Donor feedback template
Student satisfaction feedback template
Product feedback template
User experience feedback template
Post-healthcare-visit feedback template
Frequently Asked Questions
Collecting feedback helps you understand how others perceive your actions, products, or services. In a business context, customer feedback provides valuable insights into customer needs, expectations, and pain points, allowing you to improve performance, strengthen customer relationships, and drive long-term growth.
Feeling stressed or defensive about feedback is natural, but these reactions can be managed. Asking for feedback more frequently, understanding your own emotional tendencies, and focusing on the feedback itself rather than the person delivering it can help you receive feedback more objectively and use it constructively.
Evaluative feedback focuses on ratings or scores, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), while coaching feedback explains the reasons behind those scores. Coaching feedback is more valuable for improvement because it provides deeper, qualitative insights into customer experiences and expectations.
Online customer feedback surveys are one of the most effective methods, especially when anonymity is offered. Sharing surveys via email, social media, pop-ups, QR codes, or kiosk-mode tablets encourages honest responses and allows businesses to collect actionable data in real time.
Customer feedback should be collected regularly, not just once a year. Frequent feedback helps keep insights fresh, allows you to track changes over time, and shows customers that their opinions matter—ultimately improving customer experience, trust, and loyalty.
