Ways to Collect Customer Information

1. Customer feedback surveys

Crafting a useful customer survey is no easy task. There are so many potential questions you could be asking customers, but you have to be careful in your approach.

One way the web has made collecting surveys easier is to let you test a longer, more traditional survey versus a shorter, “slider” survey that appears onscreen as a customer browses your site:

For these short surveys, you can use tools like Qualaroo (featured above) to ask a simple question or conduct a brief poll, with the goal of generating responses from customers who are active on your website.

For longer-form surveys, platforms such as Typeform, Survey Monkey, and GetFeedback can be customized to host any question type.

Remember that if you want to create a customer survey that works — as in, one that customers will actually complete — you need to make sure your survey follows these proven guidelines:

• Ask only questions that fulfill your end goal
• Construct smart, open-ended questions
• Ask one question at a time
• Make rating scales consistent
• Avoid leading and loaded questions

Be sure to check out our full coverage of this topic by reading this post.

2. Email and customer contact forms

Email is one of the most valuable ways to gather candid customer feedback.

However, you can improve the way customers reach out to you via email and maximize this channel’s effectiveness — all of these changes will create a better experience for customers, too.

The three main elements you should focus on for soliciting feedback via email are:

• Assuring customers of a speedy response.
• Creating an organized customer feedback system.
• Sending candid follow-up emails.

A. Setting customer expectations

Customers often don’t complain or leave feedback because they don’t think the business cares. Is it any wonder most companies don’t hear from unhappy customers? But a majority of those same customers would be willing to leave feedback if they knew they’d hear back, and when.

If you want to ensure you’re hearing candid feedback from customers, the simple addition in your email of “We’ll get back to you within X hours/days” will go a long way.

B. Keeping email feedback organized

In an earlier post covering our workflow for managing feedback, I discussed how to use tools like Trello to create “boards” your whole team can access and contribute to, ensuring that no good feedback slips through the cracks.

That post covers our method in detail, but the takeaways are:

• Create boards within Trello titled “Product Ideas” (feature requests), “Up Next” (what’s being worked on) and “Roadmap” (what you plan to work on).
• Create individual cards within each board to categorize requests. For our Product Ideas board, we use sections like “Inbox” (new ideas), “Rejected” (discarded ideas), “Someday/Maybe” (good ideas, but not urgent), and “Apps” (integration requests).
• Add email addresses within cards for the people who requested the idea. For instance, anyone who asked us for Reports upgrades will be added to a list within a card so that they can be notified when the upgrade is complete. Here’s an example card (with emails blocked out for privacy):

This system lets you keep tabs on what’s being requested and by whom, as well as tracking ideas you’ve already passed on. This also gives employees a clear roadmap for future customer interactions.

C. The value of a personal email

Sometimes the best way to get a candid response from a customer is to simply ask for one. Since email isn’t public (like social media) and because the method is personal (unlike a survey), it can allow you to start some pretty interesting conversations with customers.

When customers sign up via email to access information on the site, for example, you have the opportunity to send out an auto-responder email that asks a single question. You can inquire about what customers are struggling with, what feature they’d like to see the most, or simply ask why they signed up. Just make sure you actually reply to these emails, or you’ll be letting people down and they won’t want to email you again.

Another example of using email to collect customer feedback is via your help desk’s happiness Ratings. When your customers rate a reply that came from Help Scout, for instance, they see a screen like this where they can also provide additional comments:

Those ratings and comments can then be easily sorted and filtered in happiness reports that show how teams and individual team members are performing.

3. Usability Tests

Usability testing requires more upfront planning, but delivers more insights than any of the methods listed here. It uncovers things customers sometimes don’t know they’re thinking about or struggling with, and usually provides you with a clear path to make the experience better. Google, a longtime advocate of rapid iteration based on early and frequent user feedback, rewards its user research participants.

At Help Scout, we regularly turn to usability testing to get the design details for a specific process or feature just right. It may be 90% finished, but well-run tests guarantee that we get the final (most important) 10% right. As we prepare to launch major improvements to our Beacon product, such as live chat, for example, we’re opening Beacon 2.0 to a small number of beta participants based on their current implementation of Beacon 1.0 — and we fully expect to make adjustments to the product based on the feedback we receive.

User testing is common for websites and web-based products, but the fundamentals are applicable in any business. Let’s say you run a gym. Give a customer a free month to go to the gym 3-5 days a week and keep a diary about their experience. Seeing the business through a different lens uncovers little things that can make a huge difference.

To get started with usability testing, we highly recommend Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug. For web-based testing with people that are unfamiliar with your business, UserTesting.com does an outstanding job.

4. Exploratory customer interviews

Can direct outreach really be beneficial in getting feedback from customers? Absolutely. Understanding your customers is often as easy as talking to them directly.

This direct outreach can also help fill in the gaps that less personal forms of feedback tend to create. For instance, as Lars Lofgren highlights in The 5 Best Ways to Get Feedback from Your Customers, if you provide an app that creates invoices, and customers have repeatedly told you that they want to customize the design, a few things could be going on here:

• Your customers are mostly designers, and this customization aspect is important for branding.
• Your current design options are lacking.
• They really only need to tweak a few minor sections.

There are a couple important things to note when conducting these sorts of interviews, and the following tips from the Nielsen group can help you get started:

• Focus on user attitudes. Explore how users think about a problem. Asking them what a button color should be will get you nowhere, but understanding their impressions (“This feature is too complicated”) will allow you to alter features to address the problem.
• Use the critical incident method. Ask users to recall specific instances in which they faced a particularly difficult usage case or when something worked particularly well.
• Inquire about habits. Asking users how they normally do a task can reveal problems they didn’t even know were there. If a user is jumping through four menus to do something that they could do with a shortcut, then you now have something to fix.

Since you can get face-to-face and share screens online with programs like Zoomand appear.in, don’t let distance stop you from having one-on-one interviews with customers.

5. Social media

Listening through social media can prove particularly useful for gathering candid feedback from customers. Direct comments or mentions on social networks aren’t the only way for your business to collect customer feedback — many social networks have polling tools built in. Consider this quick poll conducted on Facebook:

In this instance, a short poll on a highly popular social network makes plenty of sense; it’s too short to include as a separate survey, and asking this question on-site would distract from far more important goals.