Customer feedback is like that honest friend who tells you when you have spinach in your teeth. You might not always want to hear it, but ignoring it is way worse.
Understanding and acting on different types of feedback is one of the best ways to build products that people love to use.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through the main types of customer feedback, how to collect them, and how to make sense of all that data without losing your mind. Let’s dive in!
Why customer feedback matters for UX
Customer feedback is pure gold for UX research.
It tells you what’s working, what’s not, and most importantly, why.
If you’re designing without feedback, you’re basically throwing darts blindfolded. Feedback helps you prioritize features, fix pain points, and make data-driven decisions that improve the user experience.
Not all feedback is created equal. Some types help spot usability issues, while others uncover emotional responses or feature requests. Knowing which type you’re dealing with helps you ask better questions and get actionable insights.
Main types of customer feedback
Here’s a breakdown of the most common types of customer feedback you’ll come across:
- Direct feedback (surveys, user interviews)
- Indirect feedback (customer behavior data, screen recordings)
- Solicited feedback (in-app questions, surveys)
- Unsolicited customer feedback (social media posts & comments, forums, online reviews)
- Quantitative feedback (ratings, scores)
- Qualitative feedback (open feedback)
None is better than the other, but the best apps and software are built by creating a comprehensive customer feedback strategy. You want to get as much information from as many customer interactions and touch points as possible without overwhelming the customer with feedback forms and requests.
Talk about a challenge. Next up, let’s go over different methods to collect customer feedback.
Surveys: Quick, scalable insights
Surveys are one of the most popular ways to collect customer feedback. They’re like the Swiss Army knife of user feedback tools—versatile, easy to use, and great for gathering opinions at scale.
But designing effective surveys requires more than just throwing a bunch of questions together. In this section, I’ll explore how to make the most of surveys in your UX research.
What are surveys?
Surveys are structured sets of questions designed to gather specific information from users. They can be distributed via email, in-app pop-ups, or even social media. The goal is to capture both quantitative (numbers-based) and qualitative (open-ended) feedback.
Common survey types include:
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Measures how happy users are with a product or service
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Gauges customer loyalty with questions like, “How likely are you to recommend us?” .NPS surveys help you collect quantitative data as well as qualitative comments
- Customer Effort Score (CES): How easy it was to get a job done with your product. Aka. How much effort it took to get something done
- Product Feedback Surveys: Focus on specific features or user experiences.
Surveys are best for getting a broad understanding of user sentiments quickly, especially when you need feedback from a large audience.
When to use surveys for customer feedback
Surveys are perfect when you need:
- Quantitative insights: Like customer satisfaction scores or feature usage stats.
- Broad audience input: When you want to hear from many users at once.
- Benchmarking: Tracking changes in user sentiment over time.
For example, sending a quick survey after a user completes a purchase can reveal insights about your checkout process. Or, a pre-launch survey can help prioritize features based on what users value most.
Tips for Designing Effective Surveys
- Keep It Short and Focused: The longer the survey, the fewer people will complete it. Aim for 5–7 questions max if possible.
- Use Simple Language: Avoid jargon or overly technical terms. Questions should be easy to understand.
- Mix Question Types: Combine multiple-choice questions for quantitative insights with open-ended ones for qualitative feedback.
- Ask One Thing at a Time: Double-barreled questions (like, “How was the product quality and support?”) confuse users and muddy the results.
- Test Your Survey: Run a quick test with a small group to catch any confusing questions or technical issues.
Usability Tests: Observing Users in Action
Usability tests are like watching someone try to build IKEA furniture without instructions.
You quickly see what’s confusing, what works, and what breaks. Let’s explore how to conduct effective usability tests to improve your product.
What Are Usability Tests?
Usability tests involve observing real users as they try to complete tasks on your product. The goal is to identify pain points, confusing navigation, or any other obstacles that prevent a smooth user experience.
Common Methods for Usability Testing:
- Remote usability testing: Users complete tasks from their own devices.
- Moderated research: A facilitator guides users through tasks while observing.
- Unmoderated testing: Users follow pre-set tasks without guidance
When to Conduct Usability Tests
Usability tests are best during:
- Prototype phases: Catch UX issues before coding begins.
- Pre-launch: Ensure new features are intuitive.
- Post-launch: Identify and fix real-world issues users face.
In short, at all stages of the customer journey.
How to Set Up and Run a Usability Test
- Define Clear Tasks: Make tasks specific and goal-oriented, like “Find and purchase a blue T-shirt.”
- Choose the Right Users: Test with people who match your target audience.
- Observe, Don’t Interfere: Avoid guiding users—let them struggle if they need to. This reveals what’s broken.
Especially the third part is difficult, but it’s the most crucial step, as you get actionable feedback on how customers perceive you.
Usability Test Limitations and Best Practices
In most cases, you only need five to seven users to uncover major issues. Make sure you are collecting feedback on real-life scenarios instead of made-up situations.
This way, you’ll be able to pinpoint how customers feel at which stage of the process.
One key thing to keep in mind is that positive feedback should also be acknowledged. It’s so easy to just focus on the negative feedback and dissatisfied customers’ POV, but make sure you don’t change something that was working!
Moderated Research: Deep-Dive Conversations
What Is Moderated Research?
Moderated research involves one-on-one or small group interviews led by a researcher. It’s perfect for exploring motivations, emotions, and deeper insights that other methods might miss.
However, this is a very resource-heavy way to get qualitative data. It requires a lot of effort from your customers or target audience, and it also requires a lot of input from your end.
This method provides one of the best insights into customer expectations, customer pain points, and customer needs in general.
When and Why Moderated Research is Essential
Use moderated research in two different instances. First of all, for exploring new concepts and understanding how users perceive new features.
Second of all, for digging deeper and getting to the “why” behind user behavior.
How to Conduct Effective Moderated Sessions
- Prepare Open-Ended Questions: Ask questions that encourage users to share their experiences, like “Can you walk me through how you use this feature?”
- Record sessions: For the best analysis, you should record the session to spot any unconscious bias.
- Stay Neutral: Avoid leading questions that can bias responses.
- Don’t comment: Keeping your comments to a minimum helps the participants be truly open.
- Don’t get defensive: Thank them for feedback, and leave it at that. Trust me.
Real-Life Example: Trustmary’s Moderated Research
Whenever we develop new core features for our software, we get our high value customers and ICP target audience to tell their honest opinions before we start coding, but also with beta versions.
The interviews are done via Google Meet, and recorded for further analysis.
We’ve been able to uncover some great pain points and develop our product faster and more efficiently from the get-go.
This is also a great strategy to improve customer loyalty of those high value customers. After all, we’re creating the software to the direction they want it to go to.
Customer Reviews: Unfiltered, Public Feedback
Customer reviews are user-generated feedback left on platforms like Google, Amazon, or app stores. They’re honest, public, and often brutally so.
When to Leverage Customer Reviews
- For feature validation: Reviews often suggest improvements or highlight missing features.
- Competitor analysis: Check what users complain about in competitor reviews.
How to Analyze Reviews Effectively
- Tag Common Themes:
Group reviews by themes like bugs, pricing, or customer support. - Sentiment Analysis:
Tools like MonkeyLearn can help identify positive, neutral, or negative tones.
Sentiment Analysis Reveals Customer Complaints
A good way to bulk analyze all your online reviews is to import them to a single software and do a sentiment analysis.
It helps you determine whether the emotional tone of voice is positive, negative, or neutral.
Social Media Feedback: Real-Time Conversations
What Is Social Media Feedback?
This feedback comes from tweets (or Xs? What are we supposed to call them now?), comments, and posts where users freely share opinions. It’s raw, real-time, and unfiltered.
Companies should regularly monitor social media mentions, and respond promptly and politely.
Tools for Monitoring Social Media Feedback
- Hootsuite: For tracking mentions and hashtags.
- Brand24: For sentiment analysis and keeping track of all brand mentions, even podcasts.
- Mention: Monitor, analyze and manage your social media presence with one tool
Identify Hashtag and Keyword Trends
Hashtags and keywords act as the pulse of social media conversations. By monitoring these, you can spot trending topics relevant to your industry.
How to Identify Trends:
- Hashtagify: Helps you discover trending hashtags related to your keywords.
- Twitter Advanced Search: Filter tweets by date, sentiment, or hashtags for deeper insights.
- Google Trends: Useful for seeing if a topic is picking up beyond social media.
Example: If you notice a spike in hashtags like #UXFail or #UserExperience with negative sentiment on posts about your brand, it might signal a widespread UX issue that needs attention.
Customer Support Data: Direct Insights from Help Interactions
Customer support data is like a treasure chest of raw, unfiltered feedback straight from users who took the time to reach out. Every ticket, chat, or phone call is a clue about what’s confusing, broken, or missing in your product.
These insights come directly from people who care enough to ask for help instead of just leaving. Focusing on improving the pain points mentioned by these people will help improve customer experience as a whole.
What Is Customer Support Data?
Customer support data is all the information collected during interactions between users and your support team. This includes:
- Support tickets: Issues logged via email or support portals.
- Live chat transcripts: Conversations with customer service reps.
- Call recordings: Audio from phone support sessions.
- Help center searches: Queries users typed into your knowledge base.
This data provides a direct line to user frustrations, common pain points, and feature requests. Unlike feedback from surveys or social media, support data comes from users who have already hit a wall and need a solution—making it one of the most actionable types of feedback.
Why Customer Support Data Is a Goldmine for UX Insights
- Real Problems, Not Hypotheticals:
When users contact support, they’re dealing with real issues—not hypothetical ones. Analyzing this data helps prioritize fixes based on actual user pain. - Uncovers Hidden UX Issues:
Support tickets can reveal patterns in UX problems that analytics might miss, like unclear error messages or confusing navigation paths. - Feature Request Trends:
Repeated requests for the same feature suggest a clear demand. It’s like users handing you a prioritized product roadmap. - Emotional Tone Matters:
How users describe their issues can highlight not just what’s wrong, but how frustrating it is. Emotional language in support tickets signals areas that need urgent attention.
How to Analyze and Categorize Support Data
There are five steps to take in analyzing and categorizing customer feedback coming from customer support interactions.
- Tag & categorize issues
- Identify patterns
- Use text analysis tools
- Prioritize by frequency and impact
- Map user journey
Sounds easy? Good. I’ll explain them a little deeper.
- Tag and Categorize Issues
Start by tagging tickets based on themes like “login issues,”“billing problems,” or “feature requests.” Most help desk software lets you create custom tags. - Identify Patterns
Look for recurring issues. If 30% of support tickets are about resetting passwords, it might be time to simplify that process. - Use Text Analysis Tools
AI tools can help you process large volumes of text, identify keywords, and analyze sentiment quickly.
These are also great insights for your marketing and help documentation teams! Creating content around the most common questions might be a good marketing strategy.
- Prioritize by Frequency and Impact
Combine ticket volume with impact to prioritize what to fix first.
- High volume + high impact: Fix immediately.
- Low volume + high impact: Address soon.
- High volume + low impact: Plan for later.
- Map to User Journey:
Match support issues to stages in the user journey (onboarding, checkout, post-purchase). This helps you pinpoint where UX improvements are needed most.
In-App Feedback: Gathering Insights During the Experience
In-app feedback is like catching a user’s thoughts right in the moment—when they’re interacting with your product and everything’s fresh.
Unlike post-purchase surveys or support tickets, in-app feedback captures real-time reactions, making it incredibly valuable for UX research and product improvement.
What Is In-App Feedback?
In-app feedback is feedback collected directly from users while they’re using your app or website. This can include:
- Rating prompts: Like the “Rate Us” pop-up on mobile apps.
- Feedback widgets: In-app buttons asking, “Was this page helpful?”
- Micro-surveys: Quick, one- or two-question surveys embedded in the app.
- Bugs and feature requests: Options to report bugs or suggest new features directly.
Unlike email surveys or social media feedback, in-app feedback captures immediate reactions. It’s often more accurate because users don’t have to recall their experiences later—they tell you what’s working or not while they’re in the middle of it.
How to Implement In-App Feedback Without Disrupting the Experience
Collecting in-app feedback is powerful, but do it wrong, and you’ll annoy users instead. Here’s how to get it right:
- Choose the Right Moments
Timing is everything. Interrupting users during checkout? Bad idea.
Prompting feedback after they complete a task successfully? Much better.
Best times to ask for user feedback:
- After key actions: Like completing a purchase or finishing a tutorial.
- When users seem stuck: For example, if they spend a long time on one screen without progressing.
- After a set period of use: Prompting a rating after a user has interacted with the app a few times.
- Keep It Short and Simple
Nobody wants to fill out a lengthy survey while they’re using an app. Stick to one or two quick questions at a time.
- Good: “Was this feature helpful? Yes/No.”
- Bad: A full survey asking about multiple features.
Pro Tip: Use micro-surveys—short, focused questions that users can answer in a tap or two.
- Use Contextual Feedback Options
Make it easy for users to give feedback specific to what they’re doing.
- In-app widgets: Small buttons saying “Report a problem” or “Suggest a feature” on each screen.
- Swipe or tap actions: Simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down icons for content or features.
- Offer an Incentive (But Don’t Overdo It)
Incentives like discounts or in-app credits can boost feedback rates but be careful. Overusing incentives can lead to low-quality responses.
In other words, people click through your survey to get the prize. That’s not ideal and might even lead to you developing your product based on inaccurate data.
- Close the Customer Feedback Loop
If users take the time to give feedback, show them you’re listening. Close that customer feedback loop as fast as possible.
- Acknowledge: An automated “Thanks for your feedback!” message.
- Follow up: Let users know when their feedback leads to changes or improvements.
Customers love to feel heard! Making customers feel appreciated can make a significant difference in your customer retention rates. So remember to follow-up with people about their feedback!
Customer Feedback Tools: Streamlining the Process
Collecting and analyzing customer feedback can feel like juggling flaming swords—there’s a lot to manage, and if you drop the ball, it can burn you.
That’s where customer feedback tools come in.
They simplify the process of gathering, organizing, and analyzing feedback so you can focus on what really matters—improving user experience, the overall customer experience and growing your business.
What Are Customer Feedback Tools?
Common types of customer feedback tools include
- Survey tools: Help you gather customer feedback through NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys.
- In-app feedback widgets: For capturing real-time insights while users interact with your product.
- Review management tools: For gathering and showcasing customer reviews.
- Analytics and reporting tools: For turning feedback data into visual reports and actionable insights.
How to Choose the Right Tool for Your Needs
With so many feedback tools out there, picking the right one can be overwhelming. Here’s a simple checklist to help you decide:
- Define Your Goals First
Are you looking to improve user or customer experience, validate new features, or boost customer satisfaction? Your goals should guide your choice of tool.
Remember to check how they integrate with your existing tool set!
- Ease of Use Matters 🛠️
A tool that’s hard to use won’t get used—simple as that. Choose a solution that’s intuitive for both your team and your users. - Integration Capabilities
Your feedback tool should play well with your existing tech stack—like CRMs, email marketing platforms, and analytics tools. - Multi-Channel Feedback Collection
To get a complete picture of user sentiment, you’ll want a tool that can gather feedback across multiple channels—email, in-app, social media, and more.
Your customer feedback strategy should align with the channels your customers use.
Common Mistakes to Avoid with Customer Feedback
I’ll keep this list short and sweet to emphasize its importance.
Let these really sink in.
- Ignoring Unsolicited Feedback: Just because you didn’t ask doesn’t mean it’s not valuable.
- Leading Questions: Questions that hint at a “right” answer can skew your feedback.
- Not Acting on Feedback: Asking for feedback and doing nothing with it frustrates users.
Making Sense of Feedback Without Drowning in It
Feedback is great—until you have too much of it. Here’s how to handle it in three simple steps.
- Categorize Feedback:
Sort it by type, like usability issues, feature requests, and bugs. This makes it easier to spot patterns. - Prioritize by Impact:
Focus on feedback that affects the most users or the most critical parts of the user journey. - Close the Loop:
If users took the time to give feedback, acknowledge it. Share what actions you took or plan to take based on their input.
UXArmy Makes Feedback Collection a Breeze
Collecting feedback from multiple channels can quickly get overwhelming—that’s where UXArmy comes in.
As an all-in-one feedback and user research platform, UXArmy simplifies how you gather, organize, and analyze customer feedback across every touchpoint.
- Unified Dashboard: Manage survey responses, usability tests, and in-app feedback in one place—no more switching between tools.
- Remote Usability Testing: Run tests with real users and get video recordings of their interactions, complete with heatmaps and click paths.
- Custom Surveys: Create NPS, CSAT, and open-ended surveys with drag-and-drop ease.
- Sentiment Analysis: Automatically categorize feedback as positive, negative, or neutral to quickly spot trends.
- Seamless Integrations: Connect UXArmy with your existing tools like HubSpot, Slack, and Google Analytics to turn feedback into actionable insights faster.
Ready to take your feedback strategy to the next level? Try UXArmy for Free and see how easy it can be to collect and act on customer feedback!
Understanding the different types of customer feedback is like having a cheat sheet for UX research. By knowing what each type can tell you—and how to gather it effectively—you’ll make smarter design decisions and build products users love.
So, start collecting that feedback and turn those insights into actions! Your users (and your product metrics) will thank you.
