We know that customer’s opinions and feedback are important because they impact the sustainability of a company throughout its lifecycle. Listening to your customers pays off–you’ll learn about their pain points which will help you to improve your product, making it more useful to current and potential users. This is an essential part of a company’s growth.
Even though we know how important understanding your customers’ needs are, we often fail in designing surveys and forms that actually work–forms that are easy for customers to fill in and for your team to process and extract conclusions from. It’s not uncommon for companies to struggle to gather feedback that is actually useful or even get enough responses.
In this article, you’ll find samples of feedback forms for your customers that will help you get more responses and more useful feedback to improve your business.
What makes a feedback form work?
A good feedback form will get you plenty of answers. Follow these tips to design feedback surveys that your customers will want to fill in.
1. Make intentional questions
There’s no point in spending time designing a great feedback form if you don’t know why you’re asking what you’re asking—you’ll be wasting your time and your customer’s. Be sure to be intentional: do your research about what information you’ll need to get from your customer to allow you to improve a product.
Questions like “What do you think?” can be too broad and won’t give you the specific details you need. Make sure you focus on those details. However, letting customers write freely by including a “free text” box is a great idea to let them write about things you might not have necessarily anticipated. Multiple choice fields will only give you the answers you’re assuming.
The best way to be intentional is to cut down the numbers of questions so you only ask those that have the clear objective of understanding your customers’ experience with your website, product or service. The fewer questions you ask that will get you to this goal, the better.
Lastly, your forms should avoid jargon and use consistent and plain language that is easy and straight-forward to understand.
2. Timing matters
Sending a survey, or surfacing a feedback form, at the right moment will get you more answers. For example, asking for feedback on a live chat experience is something worth doing. The timing is ideal as the person has just been assisted by an agent and the interaction is still fresh in their mind. Compare that experience to sending a feedback form for a physical product immediately after the customer placed an online order. It’s unlikely they will go back to find the feedback form after the product arrives a few days later.
Powersports company BRP embeds surveys in their email campaigns after a customer support case is closed so that they are served up in a contextual way. This results in better engagement, stronger completion rates, and more customer data.
3. Give customers a voice
This tip is also related to being intentional: you need to prove that your user’s feedback won’t be put in a folder and forgotten. Don’t ask about someone’s feelings towards a product if you know you won’t care about their opinion enough to consider making any changes to that product. Your customers need to know that their opinion is heard and taken into account.
For example, after every service interaction at YETI, customers receive an email survey that gives them a voice to share their experience and allows the company to take immediate action based on feedback. Real-time survey responses give management the ability to recover customers instantly, helping to reduce churn and improve loyalty.
4. Use the forms as if they were one of your products
Surveys are also a way for a brand to present itself in front of consumers. Make sure your form is customized using your colors and logos so that you also communicate your identity through the survey. This way, your clients will remember who they are taking the survey for and your respondents know who you are when they choose to reply to your questions.
5. Good feedback forms have good design
Even if you’re not a designer, there are some basic design principles that you can follow to make your survey easy to use and visually appealing to your customer.
- Leave plenty of white space: Your form should appear uncluttered and visually clean so that people don’t feel it’ll be time-consuming and difficult to fill in.
- Label the form fields: Placing each label close to its corresponding field reduces the time it takes for a user to complete the form. The further the label is from the field, the more the user’s eye has to travel back and forth to avoid making a mistake. This increases time, effort, and frustration.
- Make all fields optional: It’s up to people to decide what they want to fill in and what they don’t. By making some fields compulsory, you risk users abandoning the survey before they complete it.
- Use a logical flow: Follow an order so that you’re asking about the interaction in the same flow as it’s experienced.
- Let users chose their preferred device: To increase the chance of people responding to your survey, make sure it looks good and it’s easy to respond to no matter which device they come from. In other words, the form should be responsive.
Seven samples of real feedback forms that work
Now let’s apply all of those principles to identify great examples of forms that work in real life. Here are seven that we actually enjoyed filling out ourselves:
IAM Weekend
IAM Weekend is a yearly conference for creative thinkers and organizations to discuss the future of internet culture. Right after the conference, the organizers sent a form out which felt like the conference itself: the survey was fun and refreshing to fill in.
Plus, knowing that your comments will be read by the organizers and your opinion will impact future editions helps make attendees want to fill in the survey.
Ubeeqo
Car-sharing service Ubeeqo nails it with their email sent to people that ended up not using their service.
The email’s a winner for a couple of reasons: they are clear about why they chose to contact the recipient (“You signed up to Ubeeqo a month ago but it doesn’t look like you’re interested in any of our services”). It was sent by an actual member of the customer service team, instead of a general email address. This helps to give the feeling that this is a personalized email that wants to know what you think. Finally, it tells you how short the survey is (5 minutes). Overall, one has the impression that your feedback will really impact the service.
In the survey itself, instead of asking really broad questions, they narrow it to the recipient’s reasons for not using their app and use the brand’s identity.
International Center for Journalists (ICFJ)
Why bother filling in a long survey if nothing is going to be done with your responses? The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) recently asked journalists to spend 15-20 minutes to answer a survey. The outcome? The findings will be part of a major report on the digital gap facing the industry. To increase the likelihood of getting more responses, the ICFJ gave those journalists that complete the whole survey a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card.
Apple
Apple takes customer feedback very seriously. In fact, there’s a whole page dedicated to submitting feedback about any of their products. The brand collects all kinds of information and it makes it really easy to submit feedback as well as obtaining support.
Apple collects feedback not just on their products but also on the interaction with employees after an appointment with the Genious Bar at the Apple Store. By timing this survey with the visit, Apple is able to gather important insights about the performance of their staff as well as their general experience at the Apple Store. These findings are key to improve the customer’s experience and make it memorable.
Yeti
Outdoor gear manufacturer Yeti doesn’t waste the opportunity to listen to their customers, that’s why they send a survey after every interaction. Whether it be after someone talks to a service representative or makes a purchase on their website, Yeti customers instantly receive an invitation to provide feedback on their experience. Yeti then gathers important metrics that help fortify customer loyalty, enhance the customer experience and improve agent training.
Volotea
Here’s a great example of a customer satisfaction survey from Volotea that measures the qualitative experience after flying with this European low-cost airline.
In such a competitive environment, Volotea needs to make sure that the service it provides satisfies their customers. If not, they risk losing them to other airlines. This feedback survey is a fantastic way to benchmark how satisfied travelers are after flying with Volotea right after the trip.
Create survey forms that impact your business
Understanding how your customers interact with your product or service is an essential part of improving your business. The right kind of feedback form is the one that your customers fill in. Don’t risk a low response rate by sending surveys that don’t resonate with your customers.
Learn how GetFeedback can help you exceed customers’ expectations—start your free trial today.
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