Getting the Most Out of Your Customer Feedback: Thoughts and Questions from 18 Product/CX Leaders

Just because you have the opinion to submit feedback doesn't mean you'll be overflowing with feature requests and feedback. Sometimes, you need to ask for it.

We've written about five high-value points at which to ask for feedback. Today, we wanted to look at this challenge in a more granular fashion – getting down to the specific questions that are asked.

To do this, we talked to 19 PM/CX leaders on their thoughts and questions that they use to collect useful customer feedback.

Note: Savio helps B2B SaaS Customer Success, Product, and Sales teams organize and prioritize product feedback and feature requests. Learn more about Savio here.

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Zainab Afaq, Customer Support Representative @ WPBRigade

The very first basic question is usually about how the product is working for them? And is it working as per the expectations or not.

If yes, then would they like to give a review on our official site so the other users can see the loyalty towards a specific product.

If not, then what are the reasons for not liking it as they might be having different expectations or opinions regarding the product.

Feedback is always important for any type of business, as the customer's appreciation helps in keep working better and the same goes for the negative review from the customers. As the criticism proves to be the greatest part of learning and improvement.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Jack Story, Director @ Assured Marketing

In my experience when asking for customer feedback the most effective way
to ensure a response is by keeping it short and easy.

When requesting a review you are asking a customer to go out of their way to devote their time to your business, the easier and quicker this can be
the better.

As a result the usual questions I ask customers are as follows:

• Please rate our services out of 5 (5 being the highest)
• Do you have any comments?

I find that these type of requests have been the most successful and open the lane of communication between yourself and the customer allowing you to reach back out and request any more information you may desire.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Aastha Shah, Senior Content Writer @ Meetanshi

The most effective way that worked for Meetanshi to ask for customer feedback is politely asking the customers who came for live chat support. We follow a practice where a link to pages where the customer can leave a review is messaged to the customers at the end of free live chat or call. This method is very effective to generate positive reviews because at the end their experience, the customer’s mindset is inclined to be positive for our business. So far, by this method, we’ve collected 190+ 5-star Google reviews, 95+ Facebook reviews, and more.

Follow Aastha Shah: @aastha_7295
Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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William Cannon, CEO @ Signaturely

Use event trigger-based studies to ask questions at the right times
When you’re tracing every single user behavior, it becomes simpler to know when the right opportunities to ask for particular feedback are. For instance, let’s say you’ve recognized a page where you’re noticing a drop in people — a lot of people. You could jump in to create a difference or you could take this chance to ask the customers what’s working wrong and something they’d like to see happen alternately. This is using a failure and transforming it into an opportunity to fix the problem.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Tim Clarke, Director Of Sales @ SEOBlog.com

“What are the three most important features for you and your team—three features that, if removed, will probably make you search for another solution immediately?”

It’s no surprise that you’ll need to stress some of your features sooner or later (Keyword = some ≠ all.)

The problem here is knowing what features to emphasize. Most leads don’t care about the majority of your product’s features. The chances are that there are only two-to-four features that people really care about. I suggest you make this question easier on your customers and yourself by asking a multiple-choice question. For this reason, you’ll need to have an idea of what these features might be.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Sam Shepler, CEO @ TestimonialHero

In SaaS world, you want to hear every nitty-gritty detail of what the customer thinks of your product. From start to finish, every piece of feedback is important in helping you constantly improve the customer's journey. This type of question can help you identify bottlenecks and other issues that can be affecting the performance of your service.

The typical answer to this question would be something like:

I really loved the product, but I found myself waiting more than 2 hours for your CSR to reply to my message on LiveChat. The issue was taken care of by another employee, so all is good, but next time it would be great if you guys could improve CSR's response times on your website!

Follow Sam Shepler: @samshepler
Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Luke Genoyer, Business Development Manager @ Global Call Forwarding

Honestly, there is no one question that gives us the best result consistently. This is because every customer prioritizes different parts of the service. But we've found that the more follow-up questions we ask, the more specific their responses get. In the beginning, customers tend to provide general feedback. But we try to dig deeper, asking about specific account features they are using, measurable benefits they are seeing, and so on. And based on their responses, we ask more questions such as why do you think that worked? how can this process be improved? and so on.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Reuben Yonatan, Founder & CEO @ GetVoIP

When asking for feedback, I focus on personalization and specificity. Regarding personalization, instead of saying, As a valued customer... I will say, As a customer who has been with us for four years... Doing so lets the customer know that I took the time to address them individually. In return, they will be more willing to give their time.

With specificity, I avoid general questions/statements such as kindly feel free to share any helpful feedback. You will get such varied answers, you'll be hard-pressed to extract any useful answers. Based on that, here is an example of a question that elicits good feedback.

As a new user, did you find our Quotematch tool useful? If not, how can we improve it?

We are a cloud communication advisor, and QuoteMatch is the tool we use to filter cloud communication providers for the user based on their requirements.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Sebastian Schaeffer, CTO/Co-Founder @ Dofollow.io

The question that we have asked our future customers is 'what do you hate about this?' and we have told people to be brutal. The feedback we have received so far from those interested in using and finding out more about the software has been eye-opening and has already helped us fix what were glaring UX issue right below our nose.

The reason this question prompts such useful feedback is that, at heart, everyone's a critic. People, and especially other businesses in the industry, love to tell you what they don't like and what you're doing wrong, and they are honest about it. It's cathartic for people and, importantly, it draws your attention to flaws and missing pieces that you might not have seen on your own.

Follow Sebastian Schaeffer: @sebschaeffer
Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Kim Brown, Writer @ Condo Control

We ask our clients how likely they are to recommend our product to a friend or colleague. This works because people aren't going to recommend something they dislike to someone that they do like, and we tend to get constructive and honest responses by asking this question. If clients are very happy with the product and would recommend it, they tell us why. Similarly, if the had a bad experience and would not recommend it, they let us know why. Neutral responses are still a bit challenging to analyze as the client doesn't feel strongly either way.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Aaron Whittaker, Demand Generation Director @ Thrive Agency

“Picture the moment you first signed up. What’s the first action you wanted to do, or outcome you wanted to be achieved?” This lets us know our customers' expectations which I think is the most important thing you should know. Their feedbacks - be it positive or negative lies in their initial expectations. First impressions are everything. They can make or break opportunities in life and in business. Knowing the expectations of your prospects can help you immediately match their reality to that expectation. If you start talking about your entire platform piece by piece, video by video before I do what I need to do, I’m leaving. (Sorry, but that’s how people behave on the internet these days.) So, make sure you know what your customers are expecting from you. And give it to them. ASAP.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Irene Dimakides, Digital Marketer and Content Creator @ Megaventory

Asking for feedback in the form of a public review is great! In a feedback form like this, they are prompted to share both positive and negative points. This builds our social proof as well as shows you what the customers really care about! Any negative points can then be addressed publicly as well - which shows potential buyers you listen to your clients.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Sarah Walters, Marketing Manager @ The Whit Group

"Which features do you love?" gets the best feedback because customers who are happy with your service would want to let you know about the experience and most likely share the experience with their peers. This question is helpful for you to evaluate your killer features and develop a way to provide an even better experience next time. Continue improving your business.

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Kenneth Burke, VP of Marketing @ Text Request

My favorite question we ask is "How much easier does this make your life?"

There are lots of good questions you can ask for feedback, but this typically brings out one of two responses in a conversation. Either a quick "Oh my goodness, I love it" or hesitation. And if the customer hesitates, then I know there's something I can dig into. What's keeping you from having that reflex "I love it" response? What could be more helpful? Where can we improve so that Text Request becomes something you can't live without? It also works well in a survey.

Follow Kenneth Burke: @kennethburke423
Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Cody Miles, Founder and CEO @ Ashore

What we’ve learned from our clients is that questions aren’t necessarily as important as perspective; our company’s proofing software, Ashoreapp.com, doesn't ask questions to reviewers, it puts the reviewer in a situation where they're inherently made to point at something and talk about it. The same goes for us on the business end of things. Most of the time, we don’t need to ask clients for their feedback, they show us what they need. One example that comes to mind is our integration with Zapier. We noticed that the features our clients utilized the most were those that automated boring and repetitive tasks, so we gave them more of what they wanted by integrating our software with a project management tool. Today, this is one of our most popular features - we solved a problem our clients didn’t even know they had.

Ashore brings creatives worldwide actionable, specific feedback on their proofs, cutting the approval time by 50%. Needless to say, we see the value in great feedback; it's the crux of our company, and input from our users is pivotal to our decision-making process.

Follow Cody Miles: @ashoreapp
Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Juan Pablo Sarmiento, Founder @ Artify

As a content creation company that drives its products to the users, the process of obtaining and understanding feedback has been very difficult because most of the time customers would not answer our questions or they would not give the feedback that is important. So, here's how we tore down the process of obtaining the best feedback from customers.

Once the customer has purchased and used our products, they're open to share their experiences. Therefore, we approach them carefully by selecting the best way to communicate with the customer, in all cases by digital means. We communicate with them on Facebook, on Instagram, by e-mail, by text message or over the phone. After the medium of communication is selected, we receive the best feedback from customers when we ask closed and specific questions like Have you had any issues with the software? or Do you like the interface? or even Are you happy with what you bought?

Asking informal and simple questions to the customer has been the best way to obtain a response and establish a conversation where we can deepen the client's feedback because they feel like talking to someone who cares about the user's opinion rather than talking to a survey bot. Think about it, it's better to ask Has the software been useful to you? rather than Do you have 15 minutes to talk about our software? Like, really? Who has 15 minutes to answer a survey?

Follow Juan Pablo Sarmiento: @JuanPabloSarmi
Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Dmitry Azarov, CMO @ Itransition

Customers are usually humble when it comes to positive feedback. There's a simple explanation for this — they take positive experiences for granted unless it's something extraordinary, like fixing things urgently at night or finishing the project early. At the same time, customers tend to remember negative experiences and situations when they felt uncomfortable. For this reason, when you ask them about things they didn't like, you can get an extremely comprehensive answer.

We prioritize feedback that balances between extremes. We inquire what parts in a cooperation flow our customers would like to alter. We don't ask for the overall suggestions but rather specific things, for instance:

• The team lineup and its members, be it developers, DevOps engineers, business analysts, or account managers
• A collaboration scheme and tools
• Deadlines and response time
• The delivered product and its components
• Customer support

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Michelle Diamond, CEO @ Elevate Diamond Strategy

When I ask customers questions that are multiple choice and then leave room for additional feedback, I get the best feedback for myself and my clients. Customers typically don't have a lot of time, so to the extent that you can make it easier for them to respond, the better.

The key is designing the right surveys by asking the right questions or providing the right options when obtaining feedback and then following up (when necessary).

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From our conversations with the above contributors, there is a wide range of questions that are asked, if they are even asked at all. Formal, informal, and open-ended all offer their own benefits and drawbacks for both the customer and company.

Last Updated: 2022-12-15

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