As a founder, marketer or product manager, you spend a lot of time looking at your analytics and heatmaps, but that never tells the whole story. Analytics and data can only tell you what the user is doing, but never why the user is doing it. You can see through data where your users are falling off in the funnel and you can see through data how the user is engaging with your product/service, but talking to your customers will help you understand why they are doing it or what they love about it.

Chapter 1: Introduction To User Feedback Surveys

For this specific guide, we’ll be focusing on using user feedback surveys in order to obtain actionable customer feedback that will help you improve the growth of your business.

We all came across some form of survey online before. Usually surveys receive a bad rep due to long form surveys that take a long time to complete. Most feedback surveys that we see nowadays are surveys that you receive after you’ve used a service or purchase a product. It’s usually through an email that leads to some sort of long form survey that takes a lot of time to complete at some external link. These surveys usually feel annoying and most people aren’t willing to fill them out. User feedback surveys on the other hand are short form surveys that ask simple questions which leads to a much higher response rate.

Collecting data for data’s sake is not the end goal of user surveys. Rather, it’s the ability to analyze the responses and find new areas of opportunity to improve the performance of your business that counts.

We’ll be covering a lot in this detailed guide ranging from the importance of user feedback, different types of surveys, finding that AHA! Moment, analyzing survey data, getting your team involved and most importantly the type of tools that you can use to get those data.

Let’s start by talking about the importance of user/customer feedback and why it is important to your business.

Figure out what to build next (product roadmap)

One of the hardest things about building a software company is knowing what product features to build next. If you’re constantly asking your customers for feedback, you will notice that every customer expects something different. Some want “Feature X” and some want “Feature Y”. As an entrepreneur, product manager, or marketer, it’s extremely hard to please every single customer.

So, how can we decide on which product features to build next? With user feedback surveys, you can slowly narrow down the focus and take away the guesswork of developing a good product roadmap. Product teams often make a simple mistake – make decisions based on a few answers and not take into account all answers they don’t receive reasons. Lack of a different feature can cause people not to become your customers but they won’t contact support to talk about it – they will simply leave your website and look for a more suitable alternative. We don’t want that. We want to create WOW experience for the customers.

In order to do that, we must know their thoughts and feature expectations for your product. User feedback surveys can help with this. There’s a lot of ways you can collect valuable feedback from your customers, but we will go into those details in the future chapters. If you’re looking for an in depth article on prioritizing product features, check out our guide here.

Increase User Retention

Too many founders and marketers focus on user acquisition, but they forgot the importance of user retention. User retention is the best way to ensure that you have a sustainable growth. A good Product Hunt launch can land you a lot of sign ups, but that does not ensure that it will last forever and it does not ensure that you will have paid advocates.

With user feedback surveys, you can slowly narrow down your customer’s true needs. With this in mind, you’re able to structure a sustainable growth strategy for the long term that will help you with user retention.

Increasing user retention starts with an awesome product as well as an awesome customer experience. In order to achieve both, you need to gain feedback and know how to improve your product. The most scalable way to do this is through user feedback surveys.

Know what content to create next

A good content strategy is a great way to boost your company’s brand exposure as well as bring back customers that haven’t converted yet. The pain is that it’s not easy and it’s a super competitive space. Your content manager might be stuck with knowing what to write next or what type of content to create next (ebooks, white paper, infographics etc.) Instead of guessing, you can use user feedback surveys to dig your audience’s brain and only write articles that your users would want to read. This will result in a much higher engagement rate, lower bounce rate, as well as make a bigger impact on influencer marketing.

“It’s critical to get as much knowledge about your customers as you can in order for you to understand who these people are and what they loved, liked and disliked about your content. The only way to do that is to go right to the source. You need to talk directly to your customers to learn what quality content means to them. Not just at the outset of your content strategy, but on an ongoing basis.” – Hiten Shah

Improve conversion rate

Converting trial users to paid users isn’t an easy task. It requires a lot of nurturing. Conversion rate optimization is a constant process of optimizing your website to increase the number of conversions (signups, completed orders, collected leads etc.) from any given amount of traffic.

Let’s imagine a simple example: you sell a digital course for $100. If your conversion rate is 2%, you need to attract 50 users to your website to sell a unit. Now let’s increase the conversion rate from 2 to 3%. You need just 34 visitors to sell a unit or you will sell 50% more products with the same amount of traffic. With this in mind, now you can spend more money on other aspects of the business such as hiring better talents to help you grow and scale your business.

The powerful thing about user feedback surveys is that you can use a website widget or post email one-click surveys to figure out what the user thinks about your check out page or app. Now you can narrow down the correct changes to make in order to improve your conversions.

Discover new marketing channels

One of the biggest struggles with marketers is coming up with new growth hacks that work. Marketers and entrepreneurs spend their entire workday coming up with new ideas to test. Unfortunately, most of these tests just don’t provide the results that the companies want to see. You read about a growth hack that works for another company, but the truth is that the same growth hack might not work for your business.

So instead of wasting time and resources coming up with new growth hacks and testing them, why not talk to your customers to figure out the next marketing strategy that you can try? The truth is that too many entrepreneurs and marketers are stuck in their own world and spend too much time analyzing data. Data is awesome and it can give you powerful insights on what your customers are doing, but data…well..it’s data. It’s almost like we’ve focused so much on being data-driven that we’ve forgotten about being customer-driven and the importance of actually talking to our customers.

In order to really understand what your customers want, you need to actually hear their pain, see their frustrations, their challenges, and use their voice/feedback as a data to come up with your next growth hacks.

Improving customer development

Customer development is a term popularized by Steve Blank. It refers to a constant process of getting to know your customers better and validating your assumptions about them, their needs, and your product. It has been used mostly by startups, but bigger companies are starting adapting it as well to decrease costs and risk associated with new product launches.

A problem we ran into at YesInsights was that every user that signed up for our product had a different use case. Some of them didn’t know what the use cases were supposed to be or how they can use our product but wanted to try us out.

In order for us to help them, we had to narrow down their pain points and find out exactly what they are looking for. Using one-click surveys allowed us to understand their roles and responsibilities.

Customer development process is not complete without collecting and analyzing feedback from your potential and actual customers.

Improving your user onboarding process

One of the most discussed topics in product development these days is onboarding, otherwise known as the very first encounter a user has with your product. If you nail your onboarding experience, you’ll be well on your way to positive engagement and retention. If your onboarding sucks, you’ll quickly leave your users feeling cold, helpless, confused and eventually churning.

Using user feedback surveys along with a tool like Intercom will allow you to end out triggered emails and engage with your new user sign ups which will help you improve your onboarding process.

Lenny, one of our co-founders, put together a detailed webinar on “How you can improve your user onboarding with surveys”

Figuring out whether or not your product has hit product/market fit

You can use user feedback surveys to determine what your customers are thinking about your product to see if your product is getting towards the product/market fit. One of the best ways to do this would be through Net Promoter Score surveys or asking a simple question such as, “How disappointed will you be if we no longer have “feature XYZ”

I will go more in detail about this in the later chapters.

There’s a lot more tricks and things that you can do such as generate more customer referrals through user feedback surveys, but this introduction lesson should cover up most of the main points and purposes of a user feedback survey.

It’s also important to keep in mind that while a user survey plan provides almost immediate feedback, it’s most definitely not a quick fix. After you feel you’ve thoroughly addressed one concern, it’s smart to survey users again to determine if you’ve really solved the problem. Once you’re sure you have, you can safely move on to the next problematic or lackluster aspect of your user experience.

See you in Chapter 2! 

Chapter 2: The Different Types of User Feedback Surveys

We sure covered a lot about the importance of user/customer feedback in chapter 1. In this chapter, I will be briefly covering the different types of user feedback surveys that you can start using today. It’s always a good practice to start implementing surveys within your marketing funnel as early as possible to lay out the initial foundation. It shouldn’t end there. Running user feedback surveys is like optimizing your website. You have to tweak and test constantly, so that you can get the most out of every single survey you send.

With that said, let’s cover the different type of user feedback surveys that you can start setting up today.

Long Form Surveys

Long form surveys are the type of surveys that you receive in your email from companies that require you to go to an external link to answer a series of long questions. We see these in our inboxes every single day. Companies of all size use them to conduct user research. These type of surveys tend to work best when there is some sort of incentive involved. For example, a lot of companies like WeWork will ask you to complete a long survey in exchange for a free $100 Amazon gift card.

Neil Patel does the same with his HelloBar. When you log into HelloBar’s dashboard, you will see a modal pop up that ask you to go through a 60 minute survey interview in exchange for an Amazon gift card.

The good thing about traditional long form surveys is that you can get a lot of valuable information out of one individual. Instead of just asking a few questions, you can go in depth and the user will most likely answer all the questions because there is a reward involved. It’s a great way of conducting a long form of research for you to gain the most insights for solving the problem. Another advantage of long form surveys is that you can obtain a broad range of data (e.g., attitudes, opinions, beliefs, values, behavior, factual). With long form surveys, you can drill down the main piece of puzzle you are trying to solve.

Now, there’s also a lot of downside of long traditional surveys. Most of these surveys receive a very low response rate. When Kapost sent a survey to 23,310 marketers, only 1.1% of people completed it. That’s a horribly low response rate, but it’s actually very common. Most surveys are blasted to everyone on a huge list with little context. Customers don’t care enough to respond.

Short Form Surveys (One-Click)

The alternative to long traditional surveys are short one-click surveys. One-click surveys also known as in-line surveys receives a 4-6x higher response rate compared to traditional surveys.

At YesInsights, we send a one-click survey to everyone that signs up for our free trial in the initial onboarding email. Out of everyone that opens the email, 50% of them will click on a response.

There are 5 big advantages of using inline email surveys:

– It feels like a natural part of your email content

– Customers can respond painlessly with one click

– You don’t have to send extra emails asking leads to take a survey

– It’s straightforward and gets to the point.

– It’s literally the most scalable, yet non-intrusive way to get customer intel.

And if you ask the right questions, you can actually get people to recommend your product even if they never convert to a paid customer. It’s very powerful. Another trick that you can use that is also used by a lot of our customers is by embedding this survey within your drip email or onboarding email campaigns to nurture the customer throughout their lifetime.

Another strong use case for one-click surveys is using it in your post transaction emails. You can use this to figure out what other products that your customers might want to purchase next. A good question would be, “Which of the following products might you be interested in purchasing next?” Once the customer selects a product, you can trigger an email with a discount code for those specific type of products. This will help you increase sales and revenue.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys

Net Promoter Score surveys are considered to be a short form survey because it is still based on the one-click survey theory. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) was established by Bain & Company in 2003 to help companies measure and evaluate customer loyalty. Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, created a new way of measuring how well an organization treated the people whose lives it affected.

The NPS works by sending a quick, one question survey to your customers that asks them:

“How likely is it that you would recommend *Company name* to a friend or colleague?”

The question has a 1-10 rating scale for respondents to answer. With 10 being extremely likely to recommend and 1 being not at all likely. See the picture below to see a sample of a NPS survey looks like. Here are a few advantages to using a NPS survey:

Easy to use – A NPS survey is easy to send and easy to receive quick feedback. It’s similar to our one-click survey where your customers can easily select a response and it will be logged. This results in a much higher survey completion rate because it reduces the barrier to completing a survey. A traditional survey requires people to click on a link, then go to another site, and complete a long survey. With one-click surveys and NPS survey, the customer can just select an option and not have to worry about hitting reply and typing up an email to give customer feedback.

Easy to follow up and plan ahead – NPS practitioners typically share customer feedback very quickly after it is received. They quickly ask managers or frontline employees to contact every customer who gives an unfavorable score (a detractor), to identify the customer’s concerns, and to fix the problem whenever possible. Frontline managers and senior leaders use NPS data and customer comments to inform decisions about process changes, new products and other innovations.

Simple and Straightforward – The Net Promoter Score is a single number that can be tracked from week to week and month to month, just like net profit. As with net profit, of course, a company’s Net Promoter Scores can be broken down however you wish—by business line, by store, by product, even by individual customer-service rep. Customers usually don’t have to think too much. It’s soooo easy that even a 10 year old can understand it ?

Website Widget Feedback Surveys

Website widget feedback surveys are the little sliders that slide in with a simple survey when you visit a website or an app. This is one of the most powerful survey tools out there. It appears in the form of a one-click survey where only one question is displayed.

Usually with a good website feedback widget tool, you’re able to only have the survey appear on certain pages of your website. This is important because it will help you gain actionable feedback for those specific page.

Another thing to look for is a website widget feedback tool is the ability to segment and perform certain actions based on the response of the survey. For example, you might have a website feedback widget appear on a specific blog post. The question might ask, “Did you find this content helpful?” If the user selects “YES”, you should be able to prompt them to entering their email. That way you can collect emails as well as gain actionable feedback.

Another great place to use website widget feedback surveys would be in your e-commerce post check out pages or certain PPC advertising landing page that your potential customers might be landing on. If used correctly, website widget feedback surveys is one of the most powerful ways to run A/B testing and getting the most out of your user feedback results.

SMS Surveys

I’m pretty sure most of us have their phones with us everywhere we go (even in the shower). Text message is something that people check regularly. There aren’t too many companies out there that are offering or applying SMS surveys, but it can be another way for you to gain actionable user feedback.

I’ve seen enterprise companies like AT&T send out regular Net Promoter Score SMS surveys, and I did reply to it. It can be a powerful tool for the near future.

Which survey type you decide to implement depends on several factors, including what you’re trying to learn and who you’re hoping to learn from. We’ll cover this more thoroughly in the later chapters. While each type has its strengths and weaknesses, context is really the key here. You want to ensure that you’re asking the right questions and planning ahead of time before sending out your first survey. There isn’t a right or wrong survey, but there’s most definitely a right or wrong survey for a specific data point that you are trying to gather.

See you in Chapter 3!

Chapter 3: Planning Out Your Very First Survey

In the previous chapters you learned why user/customer feedback is important and the different types of surveys that you can send out. In this chapter, I will cover exactly how you can plan out your very first user feedback survey. While it might be tempting to go out and blast a few surveys to your list right now, it is important to brainstorm with your team to come up with the best questions to ask in order to achieve the maximum results and get the actual data that your team is seeking.

Have a strong hypothesis

Here’s Hiten Shah’s advice on building a hypothesis for customer feedback questions,

When creating a problem hypothesis start by describing the group of people you are targeting and what problem you think they have. It’s a simple format:

“[Group of people] have a problem [their problem]”

“At KISSmetrics, we built a mobile app for people that use Google Analytics. Here’s our hypothesis:”

Google Analytics users have a problem monitoring key business metrics on their mobile phone. You can take the idea for a new feature or a product iteration and create a hypothesis out of it. When we wanted to improve our real-time view in the KISSmetrics product, we started with a hypothesis: New and existing KISSmetrics customers have a problem debuging their implementation and viewing their users in real-time.

From that, we can learn that it is extremely vital to have a hypothesis in place before sending out any customer feedback survey.

Have a strong goal/end result

The point of a user feedback survey is for you to gain actionable feedback and to gain insights on data that you cannot get from just using analytical tools. Before coming up with a question, you need to know the end goal of the question.

For example, if you are sending out a survey question regarding the best product feature for your company to build next, you should know that your goal is to narrow down a list most requested feature and only work on the features that the majority of your users want. The best approach for this would be to brainstorm the survey questions ahead of time with your team.

Ideally, your survey should be built around accomplishing a single goal. What’s the main thing that your company is trying to figure out now? A laser-focused set of questions will produce higher quality results that are easier to analyze and put into action. Think of the survey questions as an unsolved puzzle set. You want to be able to fill in and complete the puzzle by asking customers the correct questions that will help you plug in the holes.

Do we need to segment our list to survey?

You might have a large customer database or a large email list. It is vital at this point that you and your team figure out whether or not you need to narrow down the list by segmenting them. For example, if you are sending a NPS survey, you might only want to target the users who have been using your product for at least 3 months.

Another reason why you should segment your list for different surveys is because there are a lot of different type of respondents. There are a lot of what we call, “unqualified users”. You can’t really avoid this. As your list grows bigger and your trial sign ups goes higher, you will get a lot of people that sign up for your app, but never use it or never convert. Using user feedback surveys is a great way to segment these people out, but in the beginning you should segment your current list of subscribers and customers for your first survey.

Yet by definition, there’s nothing you can do to convert unqualified visitors because they aren’t looking to buy what you’re selling. So, unless you’re testing out a new market, it doesn’t benefit you to survey someone who doesn’t need, want, or use your service. Not only would their answers offer no valuable data, but obtaining them would be a waste of resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

So this goes back to segmenting your list of qualified users based on the goals that you set. Let’s go back to the example where you want to send a customer feedback survey out in order to figure out the best feature to add to your product roadmap. For this specific case, it would not make any sense that you send out this survey to users who are subscribed to your blog, but not an active customer. A qualified user in that case will be someone that’s already paying for your product and getting value of it. Those feedback are the ones that matter and make an impact.

In that situation, another good segment of users will be people who churned. The ones that stopped using your app or did not come back to purchase again after 60-90 days. Asking them what features or products that they want to see next and then actually offering those products in the near future will delight them and reactivate them.

More things to consider before sending out your initial survey is to actually come up with a long term survey plan. How often will you be sending out these surveys? A mix of open ended questions in combination with NPS and website feedback widget is the best way to get the best out of everything. Tweaking the survey questions and sending different follow up surveys based on the respondent’s response is another great approach. Discuss with your team internally on the best practices.

In summary, what you want to find out and who you survey are inextricable—it’s critical you receive feedback from those who are directly affected by whatever issue you’re trying to solve or question you’re trying to answer. I know you might be asking, what questions should I be asking my customers? Don’t worry about that for now. In the later chapters, I will cover all of those in detail. For now, you can just start planning with your team ahead of time and prepare to blast those surveys.

See you in Chapter 4!

Chapter 4: Creating Your Very First Survey Question

Now that you have the fundamentals down and you’ve finished brainstorming with the team, it’s time to move onto creating your very first survey question. While at first this part may seem pretty straightforward, asking the wrong questions can actually make things a lot more difficult for you and your team. On the other hand, asking the right questions will allow you to gain more accurate insight on the ideal research you are trying to gain insights for. Let’s briefly start by going over the two types of user feedback survey questions.

The two types of user feedback survey questions

Open ended questions – When it comes to creating a user feedback survey question, it is quite important that we create “high value questions.” A high-value question is one that creates a learning experience for either the questioner and the person being questioned. Naturally, the best high-value questions provide insight for all parties concerned.

One characteristic of most high-value questions is that they are open-ended instead of closed-ended. An open-ended question is designed to encourage a full, meaningful answer using the subject’s own knowledge and/or feelings. It is the opposite of a closed-ended question, which encourages a short or single-word answer.

Let’s go through a quick example. Let’s say you just finished attending a conference and one of the conference host walks up to you and ask, “What did you learn most from this conference?” That is considered as an open-ended question. The most powerful thing about this question is that not only does it allow the person who is asking you the question to gain actual feedback from the attendee but it also helps the attendee reinforce it in their own minds. People are more willing to give more actionable feedback and go through more thoughts along in the process.

Open-ended questions are also great ways to begin a conversation with a potential customer and develop that initial relationship building. Here are a few examples of open ended questions:

What are the top priorities in your business at the moment?

What do you love most about feature XYZ?

Where did you hear about us?

Close ended questions – The second type of question that you can ask in your user feedback surveys are close ended questions. Close ended questions should result in shorter Yes/No, True/False, Agree/Disagree questions.

There are a wide variety of closed-ended question types for survey creators to choose from, including: Multiple choice, semantic differential, drop down, check boxes, ranking, and many more. Some examples include:

Did you enjoy the event?

Will you attend the event again?

Do you like my service/product?

It is a good practice to include both open ended as well as close ended questions when creating your survey questions. Some product managers like to start with a series of open ended questions to lead the user into the survey funnel and then narrow down their actual needs with close ended questions.

Marketers might want to start with a close ended question to get the respondent to micro-commit first and then follow up with another trigger action such as collecting a lead’s email address.

Marketers also like to segment and place different respondents into different list and buckets depending on their response. This is apart of creating a survey question with trigger logics. With that said, let’s move onto some of the best survey questions that you can start off with.

Survey questions to ask

Question 1: Where exactly did you first hear about us?

Goal: This question will help you find out what your most effective marketing channel is. You can see your customer’s referral path with any analytic tool, but that only tells you the LAST site they visited prior to yours. By asking this question instead, you may discover that your customer heard about your product from a podcast they listened to last month, or that a speaker at a popular conference mentioned you.

Best practice: Send this in your welcome email or in an another email 1-2 days after sign up so their memory is still fresh.

Question 2: What are you hoping to accomplish with us?

Goal: This question is used to discover your customer’s use-case as well as find out how they perceive your value. This is highly helpful to guide product on which features to prioritize, improve your marketing message, or help you sell to your customer by understanding their intentions.

Best practice: Send this with your welcome email or on the second email in your campaign. Asking in your welcome email will give better answers on the marketing messaging, while on a later email will be better for product insights.

Question 3: What persuaded you to upgrade your account?

Goal: Once a customer has upgraded their account, it’s important to discover what the levers were. Which features were most useful to them?

Best practice: Ask this question in the congratulatory or confirmation email your customer receives when they upgrade.

Question 4: Why did you decide not to buy/subscribe?

Goal: When someone decided not to use your product, wouldn’t you want to find out why? You may discover that they found another product, your prices were too high, your product was poorly designed, or perhaps they were just kicking the tires around. Armed with this knowledge, you can make changes to win future customers.

Best practice: Send this 30-90 days after a customer trial period has ended. If you don’t have a trial period, you can use another event that signals a customer is not going to convert.

Question 5: What would you miss most if you could not use us?

Goal: This question will help you discover your most useful features or product strengths. Your customers are likely using a lot of features, but there is probably one they find more useful than the others, and tell their friends about. By discovering your ‘killer’ feature you improve both your product offering and marketing message.

Best practice: This is best sent to your engaged users. I would send this email to users 1-3 months after they upgraded their account.

Question 6: How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?

Goal: This is a standard Net Promoter Score question and is highly correlated with customer satisfaction. Use this as an opportunity to reach out and help customers who are dissatisfied, or encourage customers who are very happy to promote your product.

Best practice: You should send this to all converted customers bi-annually or quarterly and try to improve the score over time. Another smart idea is segmenting your customers to discover which subset is the most satisfied. You can then market heavily to those customers.

Now you know the two different types of survey questions, the best practices for preparing for a survey questions, and some examples of good user feedback survey questions that you can start asking your customers today!

See you in Chapter 5!

Chapter 5: Best Tools For Surveying and Getting User Feedback

Welcome to Chapter 5 of The Most Straightforward Guide To User Feedback Surveys. In this chapter, I will be going through the best tools for collecting user feedback through surveys and some of the questions you need to ask yourself before choosing a tool.

There’s no shortage in tools when it comes to user feedback surveys. Matter of fact, if you run a quick Google search for user feedback survey tools, you might be overwhelmed by the results. The most important thing is that you have to narrow down these tools based on your needs and the goals you and your team set.

Here are some questions that you must consider before choosing a user feedback survey tool.

Questions to ask before choosing a user feedback survey tool

Do I want to send long form or short form surveys? – In the previous chapter, I went over the differences between long form and short form surveys, their disadvantages/advantages and many more. It is important to consider how much data does your company really need before choosing a tool.

Do I need a website feedback widget? – At YesInsights, our ultimate goal is to create the most robust all in one user feedback platform for you to gain accurate feedback in all ways possible. This is why we have one-click and NPS surveys along with a website feedback widget. Is your company only going to be sending out surveys through email to your existing list of users or are you looking into a quantitative and qualitative solution to analyze your funnel as well? If you are looking for feedback for your blog’s content, then it might be necessary to choose a user feedback survey tool that has a website feedback widget.

Does the tool have good analytical data? – At the end of the day, you’re surveying so that you can gain more insights and data. Does this tool that you are selecting have a good live feed along with a good analytical dashboard where you can track every respondent as well as export results? You have to also consider if the tool has the ability to segment users and place them in different bucket list based on their responses. Most tools that integrate with a 3rd party app like Zapier will have this built in.

Will the tool look good on mobile? – Most of us already know that the majority of the people out there are on mobile nowadays. We carry our phones in our showers, text on it on the bus, read articles while riding the elevator and many more. You want a tool that is mobile friendly, so that respondents can answer your feedback survey questions even on the go.

Does the tool come with a free trial? – Pricing does play an important role when it comes to selecting a user feedback tool, but what’s even more important is whether or not the tool comes with a free trial. In order to know if the tool is the right fit for your company, you should select a user feedback survey tool that offers a free trial, so you can see if it’s a good fit.

Does it allow customization, auto follow up emails, landing pages, and more? – You can do a lot more with a user feedback survey tool than just collecting actionable feedback. A good user feedback tool will allow you to explore new growth channels, come up with referral marketing strategies, upsell, trigger repurchases, and many more. Ensure that you select a tool that is robust and can perform all of the above.

Does it integrate with your current tools? – Integration is a major key factor when it comes to deciding on a user feedback tool. For example, a good chunk of our users sign up for YesInsights because of our Intercom integration. The intercom integration is a must for SaaS companies looking to get user feedback to improve their user onboarding experience. We also integrate with Drip, ConvertKit, Hubspot, Zapier, and many more which helps our customers a lot.

User feedback survey tools

With those questions in mind, now you can start to look into user feedback tools and narrow your list down based on the answers.

YesInsights – YesInsights is an all in one feedback platform for you to take the guesswork out of knowing what your customers want through one-click/Net Promoter Score surveys and a website feedback widget. With YesInsights, you can send surveys through any email service provider without the need of complex code and gain actionable feedback in minutes.

You can also trigger a website feedback widget to appear on certain pages of your application to gain actionable feedback from users that aren’t on your existing list. Most users experience a 80%+ response rate on all surveys sent and YesInsights integrates with Zapier, Drip, Mailchimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, Sendgrid, Intercom and many more. Also comes with a free trial.

SurveyMonkey – SurveyMonkey is one of the biggest players in the survey market, but it’s mainly geared towards long form surveys. It allows you to create external surveys with pre-built templates for most use cases and comes with a free plan. You can set custom URLs, redirects and many more.

GetFeedback – GetFeedback allows you to send mobile-friendly elegant looking surveys. This is more of an enterprise solution, but has one of the best survey creator UIs out there. One of the most powerful things about Getfeedback is the Salesforce integration that allows you to update your sales leads based on the survey response directly within Salesforce. Other features include personalized branding and customized html backgrounds.

Qualtrics – Another well known enterprise survey solution. An extremely fully robust survey platform for market research and user feedback. Qualtrics offers advanced survey logic, research, and logistics, plus a handful of services based on what your business might need. If you don’t have an established customer base, Qualtrics Panels management finds your target audience, builds and monitors your sample, and then delivers the results to you.

SurveyGizmo – If you’re seeking a solution that includes an API and custom templates, then you should look into SurveyGizmo. In addition to the powerful API, SurveyGizmo allows you to send feedback surveys in different languages, so if you’re running a company that targets the international scene, SurveyGizmo might be a good option for you.

There are a lot more user feedback survey tools that you can choose from, but those are the ones that came to my mind when I was putting together this guide. At the end of the day, you should select a tool that is easy to use and that you and your team can get comfortable with learning. Some of the tools are over complex due to it’s features and that might not be what you need depending on the stage of your company.

See you in Chapter 6!

Chapter 6: Conclusion

We’ve learned a lot about creating user feedback surveys and the value behind user feedback surveys. Regardless on the tool or method you choose to create user feedback surveys, it’s important to lay out a foundation as early as possible and start implementing it right away. Don’t wait until last minute before you start collecting user feedback.

Alex Turnbull from Groove says, “Learning the reasons why your customers cancel is painful, but it’s unquestionably valuable. I did nothing to systematically collect and measure the feedback I was getting. There’s no way around it, it still sucks when people point out where you’ve failed them. But actively collecting and leveraging that feedback has become one of the most important drivers for continuous improvement at Groove.”

From that, we can learn that we should actively collect feedback from the customer before they even think about cancelling their account with you.

It has already been mentioned in the previous chapters, but a continuous process of improvement, based on the feedback from your users, is the key to sustainable growth for your startup or business.I hope you learned a lot from this guide and if you found this useful, please share this guide with your friends or download the e-book copy and keep it for references.