Maximizing User Engagement with Effective Customer Service Feedback Surveys

Customer feedback surveys are the bread and butter of today’s product teams. It’s how you gain insights into continuously improving your product’s user experience. It’s also a valuable way to engage your customers and earn their loyalty. The best companies are those that effectively collect and apply customer feedback from customer service surveys. However, not all customer feedback is equal. For every instance of user engagement to count for something, you need to create an effective customer feedback questionnaire that gets meaningful responses from your customers.

So today, let’s dive into what it takes to collect effective customer feedback. In particular, we’ll cover the following:

• How you structure your customer service survey
• How you time the customer service survey
• How to incentivize customers to complete the customer feedback survey
• How to analyze and implement customer feedback data
• How to continuously monitor customer feedback and engagement

Let’s get into it.

Customer Feedback Survey Benefits for User Engagement.

First, let’s briefly go over why customer feedback surveys are beneficial for user engagement.

It lets you learn more about your customers.

Customer feedback surveys provide valuable insights into user preferences, pain points, and expectations. By analyzing survey responses, you can gain a deeper understanding of how your customers interact with your product, and figure out opportunities for improving user engagement.

It helps you improve your product over time.

Once you have your insights, you can then make adjustments and iterations that respond to customer feedback. These improvements are crucial to raising your user engagement metrics as well as growing your revenue.

It builds trust and loyalty with your customers.

When your clients see that you’re actively seeking and acting upon customer feedback, it demonstrates how you are committed to customer satisfaction and continuous improvement. This strengthens your relationship with your customers, building trust and loyalty which directly affects user engagement. 

Now, let’s get into the action, starting with how to structure a survey.

How to Structure Effective Customer Feedback Surveys?

In order to get good answers, you have to ask good questions. It’s the same with customer feedback surveys. 

So, what makes good customer service survey questions?

Make clear and concise survey questions.

First of all, keep it simple. People are going to abandon customer feedback surveys that are too complicated. Remember, you’re asking users to perform an action that they are free to skip. If you make it too difficult, they’re going to drop out. 

Here are some tips on how you can do that: 

• Keep it short: Shorter the better. No one wants to read an essay while doing a survey. 
• Avoid jargon: It may be familiar to you. But it may be an alien language to your users.
• Make it readable: Steer clear of complex words. Always use the easiest possible word choice for high readability.

Create a balanced mix of question types.

Second, have a variety of question types to keep things interesting for the user. Have a mix of multiple-choice, rating scales and short answer questions. 

Plus, having a balance of different question types raises the general quality of your answers. Not everything can be covered by a simple NPS survey. Sometimes you need more contextual answers through open-ended questions.

Build in-app surveys.

Context is key when it comes to surveys. For example, an email survey that asks for customer feedback on your product is not ideal, because your user is off your product when the survey is delivered. 

The best way to have a higher response rate for your customer feedback survey is to keep them in-app.

Feedback Surveys Timing and Frequency.

How you deliver it is just as important as what you deliver. You can create the world’s most effective survey. But it’ll still fail if you push it at the wrong time. If you spam the user with surveys too many times, you’re going to see survey fatigue.

So, how do you deliver surveys in the most effective way? Two answers: timing and frequency.

Why timing is important for motivating customers to participate in surveys?

Timing plays a significant role in motivating your customers to participate in surveys. 

For example, let’s say you send the survey about a specific interaction a day after. First, the user has likely forgotten about the interaction so the accuracy of the customer feedback will be lower. More importantly, it will come at a moment when the user is doing something else, which means a high chance of abandoning the survey. 

As such, timing is key when it comes to raising user engagement. Think about how urgent the survey is. Is it a customer service satisfaction survey about a very recent interaction? You should send it right away when the memory is fresh. 

Then think about the context that the survey is being presented in. When and where during the user’s flow is your survey being delivered? Balancing these elements decides how well timed your customer feedback survey is.

Balance between survey frequency and user engagement.

As we all know, too much of a good thing is no good at all. It’s the same with surveys. While collecting customer feedback regularly is valuable, peppering them with constant barrages of surveys can lead to irritation and lower your user engagement metrics instead. 

So you need to strike a good balance by spacing out your surveys and prioritizing quality over quantity.

Avoiding survey fatigue.

Survey fatigue is when respondents decide to abandon the survey or ignore it because they have either lost interest, or they’re tired of the survey. Survey fatigue is a common plague for customer feedback surveys, and they lead to many negative effects such as: 

• Lower response rates
• Low quality answers   
• Loss of brand trust 

Now, according to Hubspot’s 2023 research on 158 people about surveys, here were the top reasons for why people abandoned the survey they were on: 

• Too many questions (23.4%) 
• Weren’t motivated to answer questions about the survey topic(s) (10.8%)
• Unsure what impact the survey responses would have (8.9%) 
• Questions required them to think too deeply (8.2%) 

Based on the above, here is some advice to avoid survey fatigue. 

Limit Survey Frequency: Avoid bombarding customers with too many surveys. Space them out so that your customers aren’t overwhelmed. 

Keep Surveys Short: Instead of overloading your customer feedback questionnaire, be concise and focused. Research suggests surveys with 1-3 questions have the highest average completion rate at 83.34%. 

Multi-channel feedback collection: Offer various options for customer feedback, such as email, live chat, or in-app widgets, so that customers can choose their preferred method of communication.

Monitor Response Rates: Keep track of survey response rates over time to identify any signs of fatigue or declining user engagement. Adjust your survey strategy accordingly based on customer feedback and response patterns.

Provide Purpose and Clarity: Clearly communicate the purpose of the survey, how the customer feedback will be used, and the expected time commitment. Such transparency lets people know that their actions will have an impact. 

Segment Your Survey Targets: Segment your customer base and target surveys to specific groups based on their profile to make it more relevant.

Ways to Incentivize Customers to Complete Customer Service Surveys.

Trying to get people to answer a customer feedback survey could feel like herding cats. Giving a little nudge through incentivizing customers can significantly improve response rates. 

How to motivate customers to share their feedback?

Enticing customers with money or gift cards is not the only way to incentivize users to complete surveys. Here are some other methods of offering incentives for customer feedback. 

Prize draw: Don’t want to pay out 500 gift cards? Just get a few and hold a sweepstake. 

Free product packages: Offer your own product. It could be a month of the paid plan offered for free, or a prize draw for a year’s worth. 

Survey data: Customers may want to know what the results of the survey are, and it could be very valuable to them. So offer to send them the customer feedback data once it is completed. 

Knowledge: Offer a white paper or a case study that relates to your customers’ interests in exchange. 

Physical merchandise: Go old school. If you have company merchandise in stock, like a T-shirt or a mug, offer that as compensation.

Examples of successful incentive strategies.

Offering incentives work, and there are plenty of examples and research to back it up. 

Jeff Sauer, a sales coach, ran an experiment where he sent out two versions of the same survey. One offered a chance to enter a sweepstake for a $100 Amazon gift card, while the other didn’t offer anything. 

The result was that the survey response rate was 50% higher for the group with the incentives.

Additionally, PeoplePulse, an online survey software, sent out two versions of the same surveys to its clients. One with an invite for an incentive. One without.

Surveys that offered incentives had at least 15% lift in response rate, and in one case, had 20% lift in response rate with only one query of the survey, while the non-incentive version had a follow up.

Analyzing and Implementing Customer Feedback Survey Data.

Like turning ingredients into a fine dish, you have to turn your raw customer feedback data into something that results in meaningful improvements for your product.

How to analyze and interpret survey data?

Here are a few ways you can turn your survey data into actionable insights.

Organize your customer feedback:

Break down survey responses by different user segments or cohorts based on factors such as usage frequency, subscription tier, or demographics. This allows you to identify patterns and trends specific to different user groups and actions.

Visualize the Data.

Utilize various types of graphs, charts, heatmaps and others to visually represent customer feedback questionnaire data. This way you can easily identify trends, patterns, and outliers at a glance.

Identify key issues and patterns.

Once you have it all organized, you’ll be able to see patterns within the data. Certain segments of users may answer a different way from another. Customers who live in a certain place may have distinct perspectives on your product than another. 

For open-ended survey responses, utilize text analysis to identify what keywords are popping up repeatedly. Identify common issues and sentiments to understand user perceptions.

Benchmark Against Competitors.

Zoom out a bit. Compare your product’s user engagement metrics with industry benchmarks or with direct competitors to identify areas of strength and areas for improvement.

Examples of action plans based on survey results.

Here’s an example of how customer feedback led to real world results straight from Beamer HQ. 

Pepper Content, a leading content marketplace, faced challenges in consolidating and managing user feedback and feature requests efficiently. They were using different platforms for gathering customer feedback and managing product updates, which resulted in a very messy process full of friction. 

So Pepper Content turned to Beamer to streamline its user communication efforts. By leveraging Beamer’s customer feedback features, Pepper Content was able to consolidate and automate its feedback loop, making it much easier for its customers as well as for its team members to gather survey responses.

One key insight came out of Peppertype, Pepper Content’s AI content generation platform. Feature requests for custom prompts poured in, and Pepper Content saw that this could be something leveraged by marketing teams at companies. 

Pepper Content leaped into the B2B opportunity, and as a result, this segment of their business now generates $180K in MRR.

Implementing Customer Feedback for Business Improvement.

This is the final stage of your customer feedback loop. It’s when you take all that you’ve learned, and apply for tangible results.

How to use customer survey results for business growth?

Here are a few different ways how customer feedback can contribute to business growth. 

Identify and fix issues: These can be as simple as bugs that annoy your users, to massive usability issues that are contributing to churn. Whatever it is, listening to feedback allows you to continuously improve your product. 

Find new opportunities: Suggestions and feature requests from your customers can reveal new business opportunities that you can tap into. 

Validate and test new features: When you release a new feature, you can try to beta test the product with a smaller group of users to improve your chance of success when you launch it to everyone. 

Engage dissatisfied customers: Actively listening to customer feedback allows you to see which customers are not satisfied or are not actively engaging with your product. Once you know, you can then re-engage those customers and prevent them from churning. 

Improve strategic decisions: Feedback from customer service survey questions can become a litmus test to whether you’re on the right track or need to switch gears. It reveals where your weaknesses and strengths are, so you can adjust your strategy to adapt to the customer feedback.

Examples of successful implementations based on survey feedback.

Here is another example from us. 

GetResponse, an email marketing platform, came to Beamer in order to find a better way to communicate with their customers about updates. Aside from their main use cases, GetResponse also implemented Beamer NPS to gain feedback from their Enterprise customers.

As a result, the team was able to achieve two successful outcomes. 

First, GetResponse discovered that NPS surveys “dehumanized” the process of giving negative customer feedback, which meant users were more honest. This enabled their account managers to detect detractors more early on and prevent churn. 

Second, GetResponse used a Zapier integration to send each NPS response directly to responsible account managers through Slack. This instant access to customer feedback allowed GetResponse to act quickly, which strengthened their relationship with customers and boosted their loyalty.

Monitoring User Engagement and Progress.

Engaging customers for feedback is a continuous process. Which is why constantly  monitoring user engagement is vital for maintaining the effectiveness of customer feedback campaigns.

Tools and methods for monitoring customer survey response rates.

Your customer service satisfaction survey can give you valuable insights, but simply shooting off surveys can’t be the only thing you do. You need to approach it from multiple perspectives.

Monitor your product analytics: Simply being in tune with how your users are using your product can reveal a lot about your user engagement metrics. 

Embed in-app surveys: Putting your customer feedback survey right into the product allows you to constantly receive answers to your feedback engine without you having to actively send out customer feedback surveys. 

Analyze customer support interactions: Analyze conversations from customer support interactions to see if there are patterns in the issues or requests from customers. And of course, after the interaction is done, you can send a customer service survey to see how satisfied they are. 

Listen to social media: Listen in on social media platforms for mentions of your product. Additionally, you can try to engage people on social media. Amplify promoters, and ask detractors what you can do to improve. 

Conduct user interviews: For more in-depth customer feedback, conduct one-on-one interviews with your customers for detailed insights.

Engage with online reviews: Track reviews on websites like G2 or Capterra to see what people are saying about your product. Similar to social media, you can also try to engage users for additional insights.

How continuous monitoring helps to improve user engagement?

Continuous monitoring of customer feedback is instrumental in enhancing user engagement in several ways.

Identifies Engagement Dropoffs. Monitoring engagement and customer feedback helps identify where users drop off, or what features are underused. You can use this data to re-engage customers and improve your engagement rate.

Identifies Pain Points. By continuously monitoring feedback, you can quickly identify recurring problems customers encounter, such as usability issues or friction in their experience.

Helps Personalization. Regularly collected feedback can reveal user preferences and behavior trends, allowing you to tailor your engagement for different user segments.

Anticipates User Needs. By constantly tuning into customer feedback, you can gain valuable insights into what features users are looking for.

Identifies Churn Risk. Monitoring customer feedback helps identify users at risk of churn. at-risk users. You can proactively reach out to these users to address their concerns and increase retention.

Improves Customer Support. Continuous feedback makes life easier for your customer success teams. They can use feedback data to provide faster and more relevant solutions to issues. In addition, they can send a customer service satisfaction survey for additional insights.

Iterate to Perfection.

Lastly, there is no such thing as the perfect customer feedback survey. Every product and its users have unique circumstances. Experimenting with different approaches to collecting customer feedback, and applying each lesson to the next survey, is the best way to get meaningful responses from users that will impact user engagement metrics.

And if you’d like to get started immediately on improving user engagement, try Beamer. It only takes a few minutes to set up, and you can try for free.

Learn more about effective NPS implementation in this guide for SaaS companies.