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Customer feedback strategies and examples
The success of your business depends on how customers feel about you—yet learning what they think of you is an ongoing challenge. Many of them won’t bother sharing their feelings about your brand, at least not without prompting. To take the pulse of where you stand with customers, you’ll want to develop a customer feedback system.
Why is customer feedback important?
Customer feedback is an invaluable resource for understanding how your business is doing now and for finding ways to improve your overall business success moving forward. In particular, developing an effective customer feedback system offers a few meaningful benefits:
- You gain specific insights into how to improve. Customer feedback is the best evidence-based way to learn what issues or drawbacks your products and brand experience have now, so you can ensure that any changes you make are based on what customers actually want. When your improvements are based on customer input, you can be confident that they’ll pay off.
- You learn what you’re already doing right. You don’t want to make changes that inadvertently make the customer experience worse. When you know what you’re doing well now—the aspects of your business that currently help you achieve customer satisfaction—you can continue investing in what works.
- It’s an important step in improving customer retention. Understanding what your customers like about your brand now is essential for continuing to deliver the kind of experience that keeps them coming back. And retention is a worthy business goal: Qualtrics research found that customers are 2.2 times more likely to buy more from a brand after a satisfying experience.
- It’s crucial to earning customer loyalty. Working to improve your products and services based on customer input is a good way to earn their loyalty. And when customers know that you listen to their opinions, care what they have to say, and act on their feedback, that provides even more fuel for earning customer loyalty.
- It gives you insight into how customers are talking about you to others. Whether or not customers are sharing their feelings about your brand with you, there’s a good chance they’re talking about you to their peers. Qualtrics also found that 86% of consumers will likely recommend a brand to others after a 5-star experience. That kind of positive word-of-mouth is powerful. A good way to know whether customers are talking you up to others or disparaging you is to take steps to find out what they think.
- You can use it to improve your marketing. The best marketing messaging will be based on the features, benefits, and use cases that your customers care about the most. A customer feedback system can help you clarify your target audience, so you gain a better idea of who you should be talking to. And by learning how your customers use your products and what they love about them, you can craft effective marketing campaigns based on the factors that matter most to prospects.
What a customer feedback loop is, and how to close it
When considering how best to develop a customer feedback system, you want to make sure you’re not just thinking about how to collect feedback. The goal should be to set up a customer feedback loop, which involves 3 main steps:
Collect customer feedback
Implement changes based on customer input
Communicate with customers about the changes you made
Learning what customers think is important, but it’s not worth nearly as much if you don’t act on what you learn. Closing the loop by letting customers know about the changes you’ve made ensures that they get the opportunity to discover that you truly value their feedback.
Types of customer feedback
You can collect customer feedback in many ways. Most businesses will want to use a variety to get as full a picture as possible. Some options to consider are:
- Surveys: Customer feedback surveys are a fairly low-lift way to get a snapshot of customer feelings about your brand. Some common customer surveys, like the CSAT (customer satisfaction survey) and NPS (Net Promoter Score), are useful for getting feedback in the form of quantitative data that makes it easy to see if customers are happy or not. It’s a good idea to pair these with survey formats—such as open-ended questions—that give customers the chance to provide more qualitative feedback about why they feel the way they do.
- Reviews: Proactively asking for customers to leave reviews and monitoring all the reviews you receive is a valuable way to gain insights into how customers feel about your business and products. You don’t want to rely on reviews alone, since they’ll often come from customers at the extreme ends of the spectrum: those who love your brand and those who are upset about a bad experience. But as one part of a larger customer feedback strategy, they offer valuable information.
- Focus groups: A focus group involves bringing a group of customers together to get their input on how they feel about your brand. It gives you the chance to hear directly from customers what they care about and ask follow-up questions to get more detail about their feelings and specific changes they’d like.
- Customer interviews: These give you the chance to talk to customers one-on-one to learn what they think. As with focus groups, customer interviews allow follow-up questions, so you can get more insights into customers’ thoughts and feelings about their interactions with your brand.
- Customer support data: Your customer service interactions provide a valuable trove of information about what kind of problems customers deal with and how well your team handles those issues. You can gain good intel on improvements to make to your products and services to reduce future challenges.
Strategies for collecting customer feedback
When and how you ask for customer feedback can make a big difference in how much response you get.
Good ways to ask for feedback
- Emails: Consumers who join your email list are a good potential source for customer feedback in general, since they’ve shown a willingness to engage with your brand. And for customers who place e-commerce orders (and provide their email in the process), you can send feedback requests after they receive an order to try and capture their feelings about the experience when it’s fresh in their memory.
- Texts: For any consumers who opt in to text messaging, you can send a link to surveys or other customer feedback requests. With many customers engaging via mobile, this approach allows you to connect with them on their preferred platform.
- In-app prompts: If you have a branded app or work with third-party mobile apps like Uber Eats, in-app notifications are another good way to ask for feedback. You can set them up to appear after specific interactions, such as when the consumer uses a new feature or completes an order.
Good times to ask for feedback
- After a purchase: If you send customers a feedback request soon after they receive an order, their experience with your product will still be fresh in their mind, which can increase the likelihood that they’ll respond.
- After an event or action: Another good time to consider is whenever there’s a specific event or action you’d appreciate feedback on, like right after a customer service issue is resolved or a customer takes advantage of a promotion. That can help you measure the effectiveness of different aspects of your business, like how well your support team is doing or how successful the promotion was.
- In ongoing surveys: To determine how customers feel about you more generally (not only in response to a specific interaction), consider sending surveys quarterly or biannually to gauge their satisfaction over time.
Encouraging honest and actionable feedback
Getting an answer at all from your feedback requests is meaningful, but you also want to receive responses that are accurate and clear enough to act on. A few good techniques for getting useful, candid feedback include:
- Incentivizing participation: Not only are customers busy, but they also may be getting feedback requests from a handful of brands in a short period. Small incentives—such as a discount on their next order, loyalty points, or the promise of entry into a prize drawing—can encourage customers to take the time to provide detailed feedback.
- Simplifying the process: If you send a 100-question survey that takes an hour to fill out, most customers won’t bother finishing it. Be mindful that the task has to be reasonably easy for people to be willing to complete it. Aim to use simple, user-friendly forms with a mix of rating scales, multiple-choice questions, and open-ended questions.
- Ensuring anonymity: Some customers may feel hesitant to be entirely honest if they know you can connect their criticisms back to them. But negative feedback has at least as much value to your business as positive feedback does—potentially more, since it could help you avoid losing customers. Give customers the option to submit their feedback anonymously. That will likely earn you more candid responses, especially when addressing sensitive issues.
- Personalizing requests: Tailor feedback requests to the individual customer’s experience. When possible, mention the exact products or services you know they’ve purchased. That can help you receive more specific, valuable feedback, while also making the customer more inclined to respond.
- Communicating the impact: If customers know that the time they spend could result in positive changes, that may inspire them to offer more detailed, actionable feedback. Highlight how their input will influence future improvements. This is especially important for any forms of customer feedback that require more of a time investment, like interviews and focus groups.
Examples of effective customer feedback systems
When companies implement successful customer feedback systems, the results show. Some customer feedback system examples worth paying attention to include those below.
Starbucks
Starbucks has a reputation for delivering a solid customer experience that earns loyalty and keeps customers coming back. The company frequently ranks high in the ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) and has over 34 million loyalty program members in the US alone. Part of how it achieves that is by soliciting and acting on customer feedback. In a recent story, the company described the process of launching a new fall flavor. Starbucks brought in customers during the testing phase and took their comments into account—resulting in a shift of the planned launch date from the winter holidays to the fall. By using customer feedback to shape when and how it released the flavor and sharing the story on the company website of how they made the decision, Starbucks completed the feedback loop.
Trader Joe’s
Another brand with a reputation for being a customer darling, Trader Joe’s has topped ACSI’s supermarket ratings multiple times in recent years. The supermarket chain is committed to making it easy for customers to share their feedback. It has feedback forms on its website specific to several categories consumers are likely to have opinions about, including products, discontinued products (so customers can report when they want a product back), and sustainability. Crucially, Trader Joe’s has a history of listening to customer input. In response to customer complaints about how much plastic the company used in its packaging, Trader Joe’s announced in 2021 a commitment to moving toward more sustainable packaging.
Alpaca Chicken
While a smaller brand than our other examples, Alpaca Chicken has still won over the hearts of many loyal customers. The restaurant treats feedback as a top priority, committing to continually monitoring the feedback it receives and responding to reviews within hours. If it gets a review that’s less than 3 stars, the company will personally call the guest to better understand the situation and try to make things right. As a result, Alpaca Chicken’s star rating on Uber Eats is 4.85 out of 5.
Learn from customer feedback with Uber Eats
Not only can Uber Eats help you improve the customer experience by delivering your products to consumers quickly and conveniently, but the app also helps you get customer feedback that informs how to improve your business results and customer relationships.
When customers order through the Uber Eats app, they’re prompted to provide feedback on their experience through an in-app notification soon after their order arrives. That helps you get more of the feedback you need to measure how customers are feeling, implement their suggestions, and create a superior experience that keeps people coming back. If you already use Uber Eats, learn how to monitor and respond to customer feedback on delivery orders. If you haven’t joined the Uber Eats marketplace yet, get started today.
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