Customer feedback is the cornerstone of successful UX design, providing valuable insights that inform a business how to improve and deliver better products and services. That said, collecting customer feedback and understanding how to use it to drive the UX design process can be challenging. In this article, I’ll examine why customer feedback is important, some methods for gathering feedback, and best practices for integrating customer feedback into a UX design.
Why Customer Feedback Matters
Customer feedback is essentially any information that customers have provided about their interactions and experiences with a business and the products and services it provides. This could include their general opinions, what they dislike, what is working for them, and what they think could use some improvement.
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The insights a team gathers from customer feedback can inform the UX design process, helping to ensure the success of a company’s products and services going forward. In other words, consistently using customer feedback is a way of future-proofing an organization.
There are, of course, many other ways of ensuring a company’s future success, including regular audits, prioritizing strong communication, implementing risk management, and investing in high-quality employee training. However, soliciting customer feedback is often at the top of the list for a reason: To be truly successful, a company must have loyal customers who continue to return and buy what they’re selling. There is no better way to please your customers than by listening to what they have to say.
This is why customer feedback is so important. However, stating that customer feedback enhances the user experience is a bit of a simplification. There are actually many advantages and benefits that a business can experience by using customer feedback, including the following:
more product innovation
improved service quality
higher perception of value
better understanding of customers
higher customer satisfaction and retention rates
enhanced decision-making
cost reductions
Another advantage is that customer feedback can help a company eliminate biases from their product designs. Many products unintentionally carry biases from the designers who made them, but when designers know exactly what customers want and how they interact with a product, a team can create something that strips away biases and is made just for customers.
Methods for Gathering Customer Feedback
Before diving into methods for gathering customer feedback, it would be helpful to understand the different types of customer feedback, which include the following:
direct feedback—As the name suggests, this type of feedback comes from communicating directly with customers about their opinions and experiences—for example, through phone calls, email messages, and even in-person interactions.
indirect feedback—While this type of feedback is unsolicited, it still comes directly from the customers—often in the form of online reviews or social-media comments.
inferred feedback—Perhaps the most subtle type of feedback, inferred feedback comes from analyzing customer data such as their online behaviors, which can include purchasing habits and browsing patterns.
Once you understand the types of feedback that exist, you’ll have a better idea of where to look for feedback. To make this easy for you, I’ll outline some methods of gathering customer feedback.
Surveys
Surveys and questionnaires are a great way to obtain direct feedback from customers. You can create targeted questions to unveil very specific information that your UX team might be looking for to help them improve a company’s products and services. This is a very structured approach that can give you exactly what you are looking for to better understand customers.
Online Feedback Forms
Another great way to obtain direct feedback is by placing feedback forms on a company’s Web site that customers can fill out at their leisure. While surveys and questionnaires can sometimes include biased questions and, thus, be limiting, feedback forms let customers say whatever is on their mind at the moment, without their being directed by specific questions.
Focus Groups
Focus groups can help customers feel more comfortable opening up about what they think. Instead of placing one individual on the spot, focus groups let customers open up in a more supportive setting. The key to using this method is to create a comfortable environment and have someone guide the conversation without controlling it.
Interviews
Interviews allow a more engaging one-on-one interaction with customers, during which you can get their opinions and thoughts. They let you have more in-depth conversations with customers by letting you dig deeper into their responses and asking follow-up questions. However, it’s important to ensure that customers feel comfortable and confident that you won’t judge them for their opinions. Active listening is also key.
Behavior Analytics
This method of gathering customer feedback is all about collecting online user data, then analyzing it to identify patterns or trends in users’ behaviors. Analytics can reveal useful information about customers’ shopping habits and preferences that customers might not be willing to admit openly. You can gain these insights from various kinds of data such as click-through rates, bounce rates, pageviews, and looking at the amount of time customers spend on different pages.
Social-Media Comments
Monitoring a company’s or product’s social-media accounts is another way of gaining indirect feedback from customers. Many online users feel very comfortable on social-media spaces. Therefore, they often comment freely, giving their opinions about a company, its services, and its products. This is not only a great way to get to know your customers and what they think but also lets you engage with customers in real time and quickly address any concerns they might have.
While these are some common and easy ways of gaining customer feedback, there are many other methods that you can also use, including the following:
usability testing
customer-support tickets
online review platforms
A/B and multivariate testing
beta testing
You can also reach out to customers by email to ask for their feedback. Or, after customers have made a purchase, you can send them a thank-you email message, including a request for feedback on their experience.
Best Practices for Integrating Customer Feedback into the UX Design Process
Knowing where to collect feedback is one thing, but having a framework for deriving insights from that feedback to inform your UX design process is another thing altogether. Here are some tips to help you successfully integrate customer feedback into your UX design process.
Clearly define your feedback goals.
Identify who you want to collect feedback from and why.
Choose your methods and tools for gathering feedback.
Remember to remain unbiased when collecting feedback and keep an open mind.
Sort and organize the feedback by the topic to which it pertains such as aesthetics, usability, sentiment, or technical feedback.
Analyze the data to identify common patterns or recurring trends.
Prioritize the feedback by categories such as feedback on which you need to act right away that would provide substantial value or low-priority feedback that offers limited value, but would still be useful.
Implement the feedback by making changes to the product.
Test the changes and see how users respond.
Iterate and improve, as necessary.
If you have a lot of feedback, but aren’t really sure what to do with it, brainstorming tools can help. Brainstorming sessions can be great for getting teams involved and ideas flowing. Brainstorming tools can help you organize the ideas so you can turn the best feedback and ideas into action.
Final Thoughts
On a final note, it’s also important to build an internal feedback system that works for your product teams. Gathering external feedback from customers is one thing, but you also need an internal means for everyone to communicate about that feedback and provide their own.
The key to doing this is fostering effective communication through Slack channels, Zoom, or other messaging platforms. You also need to automate workflows and capture the feedback in databases so everything is streamlined and easy to access. This ensures that your teams can make the most of customer feedback and easily provide their own ideas and insights to turn that feedback into better UX designs.
As a freelance writer, living in the Northwest region of the United States, Ainsley has a particular interest in covering topics relating to good health, balanced living, and better living through technology. When not writing, she spends her free time reading and researching to learn more about her cultural and environmental surroundings. Read More
