10 best ways to collect software feedback

Customer feedback is invaluable to any organization and as customer expectations grow, companies must excel in the customer experience arena. Salesforce recently reported that 89 percent of business buyers expect companies to understand their business needs and expectations. The only way to know customer expectations is to get feedback and understand what your customers need. Software companies can especially benefit from getting feedback because they’re constantly adding new features and improving their product experience as well as better managing their customer experience.

Below are 10 ways software companies can collect customer feedback.

1.   Win/loss surveys after the sales cycle

Salespeople need feedback so they can refine their sales approach. Most of the time they just guess why the customer didn’t choose them, but they would be able to sell more if they knew why. Many companies focus on surveys during the service cycle, but getting feedback after the sales cycle can make a huge impact on your sales and bottom line. By sending out a quick survey right after the opportunity has closed, you can capture invaluable insights into what the customer was thinking when he chose to buy your software or go with another provider. This can help not only the sales team but the product team as well.

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2. Onboarding feedback

The onboarding process is the first experience your customer has with your software. Sure, they saw a demo during the sales process, but now they get to understand its full capabilities and how it can impact their company. You want to delight the customer during this process because it sets the stage for the rest of their experience with you. After the onboarding process, it’s important to get customer feedback for two reasons. First, you need to know if the customer was dissatisfied with any part of the onboarding experience so you can close the loop. Second, you need to understand how you can improve the onboarding process and make it better for future customers.

3. Customer support feedback

When your customer interacts with one of your support agents, you want to ensure the customer leaves the conversation satisfied and has his questions answered. Asking for feedback after the customer leaves the conversation can help you determine if you still need to close the loop with the customer, and it gauges the health of your support team. Even asking one simple question, “were you satisfied with the service you received today” or “was your question answered?” can go a long way.

4. Relational NPS

There are two types of NPS surveys: relational and transactional. Transactional NPS surveys customers after an important event or transaction, while relational NPS surveys customers on a regular basis, such as at the end of every quarter or year. Relational NPS surveys are ideal for businesses because it can assess the health of your business relationships and you can see how your customers rate your business over the long-term. You can also use NPS benchmarks to compare to business to your competitors and understand where you stand. In this survey, there’s no mention of the customer’s recent activity or purchase, it’s just the standard NPS questions.

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5. Cancellation survey

While it’s hard to hear criticism, cancellation surveys are important to understand why the customer chose to cancel your service or switch to another provider. By finding out the main reasons your customers are leaving, you can add the product feature that will keep customers around or fix the issue that customers commonly have. This will not only decrease your churn rate, but it could also increase your subscription rate. Some common questions in this type of survey include:

• What was your favorite among the services we are providing?
• Is there something we can change?
• How was your experience with us?

6. Always-present chat

Many consumers who purchase software may have questions about the product before or after they purchase it. In fact, according to Inc, 44 percent of online consumers say that one of the most important features on a website is the ability to have their questions answered by a live person. The consumer is more likely to buy your product if they can get their questions answered quickly and in real time.

7. Open-ended feedback

For software companies, open-ended feedback is important because your customer might want a feature or integration that you haven’t thought of offering. These questions can give deeper insights and bring to life the attitudes of your customers. While you might not find statistical significance through open-ended feedback, you can gain qualitative insights that could result in you tweaking your product.

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 8. Behavior-based intercepts

Behavior-based intercepts are modal intercepts (popup or slideouts) that fire under certain criteria, such as when a user has not tried a new feature that you rolled out within the last month, or if they are using a feature often and there is a better way to do things (like a bulk upload feature instead of manual entry). These intercepts can be used to drive adoption and usage (YAY!) or can be helpful to understand if your customers haven’t used a feature because it’s not relevant to them or they don’t understand how to use it. If the feature is not relevant to the majority of users, you may want to replace that feature with something they value more. If they don’t know how to use the feature, this is an opportunity to provide training videos or additional support, so the customer can get more out of your product.

9. Site intercepts to recruit users into a panel

It can be hard to find panel members who understand the technical aspects of your product, and website intercepts can be a great way to recruit people already familiar with your product to your panel. You can also recruit people into smaller groups to test different features in beta programs. These users can provide insight into if a certain feature is helpful and intuitive.

10. Reporting bugs/issues

It’s important to collect feedback when users are reporting bugs or issues so you can understand if there is a collective issue and address it. For instance, if many users are reporting a login issue with your software and they’re all using the same web browser, then you immediately know what the problem is. It can also be helpful to add a screenshot capture feature so you can see exactly what the user is seeing.

Whether is positive or negative, customer feedback is invaluable to the decision-making process. Top companies are constantly asking for feedback so they understand how they can improve. To learn more about digital CX software or programs, view our webinar on Designing a World-Class Digital CX Program or if you prefer reading, you can download our digital CX eBook for free