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Collecting customer feedback is a valuable business strategy. It means you can find out what customers need from you, prioritise suggestions, and identify development priorities.

In this article we’ll look at 3 ways you can encourage customers to give you valuable feedback.

1. Redirect suggestions from other support channels to an online customer feedback tool

You probably already receive suggestions from your customers through different support channels, such as social media, email, and your help desk.

Instead of trying to collect these in one place manually, which is time-consuming and ineffective, simply ask customers to add their suggestions to your feedback management tool (a simple feedback board can be better than something more complex).

We use a short note like this:

Thanks for the suggestion. You should add this suggestion to our feedback board. This allows other customers the chance to comment on it and vote it up. Or you might see that someone has already made this suggestion and we are working on it.

Instead of seeing their suggestion disappear into the email ether, they visibly see that you take customer requests seriously and are working hard to improve your product.

This should increase customer satisfaction at a point when customers generally are feeling a bit cross with your product.

Just make sure it is easy for customers to add a suggestion or vote on one: don’t ask them to log in, for example, or create an account. Your feature request board provider should reduce fraud and vote rigging through ‘under the hood’ technical measures instead.

Also, make it easy to add images, which can help explain a problem. At Feature Upvote, we provide a form like this to encourage customers to give feedback:

Example from Feature Upvote of a suggestion form

Once customers have added their feedback to your online board, or upvoted identical feedback, then you’ll be able to see which ideas and suggestions are the most popular. This way you build-in a sense of priority to your customer feedback, without having to make value judgements.

2. Ask your customers directly for feedback

Asking for feature requests via your existing promotion channels is also an effective way of inviting feedback.

Even if customers aren’t stuck at that precise moment, you’ll reassure them that you are there when they need you, and that you are committed to improving your product. These are all good qualities and will help convert trial customers and retain existing customers.

Example of a feature request via Twitter
Ask for feedback via social media

Customers need to be able to see these links as soon as they get stuck and want to give you feedback. So, for example:

For more ideas about how to get customers to give you feedback see our article: How do I get customers to add suggestions?.

Conclusion

As well as following our advice above, there are three important things to remember when seeking feedback:

Ready to give Feature Upvote a try?

Getting direct feedback from customers at the time they are thinking about a pain point, or a new feature is invaluable and Feature Upvote facilitates this for us easily.

The product works well, support has been fantastic, value for money is spot on, and I’m hooked. I’d be lost without my customer input from Feature Upvote. I look at it every day.

Heather Paunet, Untangle’s VP of Product Management