How to collect customer feedback and actually make it count 

Collecting feedback needs to be personalized, not a one-size-fits-all, impersonal message that is easy for customers to ignore.

Optimizing customer journeys is a surefire way to differentiate yourself from the competition. If you can offer a personalized, meaningful, and painless experience, you will already stand out among your audience and boost your CX Maturity.

To truly understand your customers and improve their experiences, you need to collect feedback. But it’s about how, when, and where you do it. Brands that take a more thoughtful approach by asking smarter questions, choosing better channels, and making feedback part of the experience gain a competitive edge. They collect richer insights faster.

88% of brands say they collect customer feedback, but the way you ask matters just as much as the fact that you ask.

Collecting feedback needs to be personalized, not a one-size-fits-all, impersonal message that is easy for customers to ignore.

We had a webinar with Joanna de Quintanilha from Forrester about CX Maturity. She gave us some great insights into the importance of collecting feedback and how it influences a brand’s maturity.

Watch here:

In this guide we will cover:

• How to collect customer feedback more effectively
• How to summarize that feedback into meaningful insights
• What to do with it once you have it

Because collecting feedback is only step one. The real value comes from what you do with it.

What is customer feedback and why does it matter

Customer feedback is any insight, comment, or data point that reflects how someone feels about your brand, product, service, or experience. It can be direct like a completed survey or a chat message, or indirect, like a social media mention or a complaint logged with your support team.

Feedback comes in many forms:

• Star ratings and reviews
• Open-ended survey responses
• Support tickets and chat transcripts
• Verbal comments during interviews or sales calls
• Behavioral data (like app usage or website drop-offs)

At its core, customer feedback helps you answer one key question: Are we meeting customer expectations, and if not, why?

But feedback isn’t just useful for measuring satisfaction. When done right, it becomes a strategic advantage, especially in industries where competition is fierce and expectations are high:

• Retail: product preferences, shopping pain points, and opportunities to improve the buying and return experience
• Banking: identify friction in onboarding, trust gaps in digital channels, and ways to enhance customer support
• Telecoms: uncovers service reliability issues, support satisfaction, and early signs of churn
• Healthcare: insights into patient experience, communication gaps, and care quality across digital and physical touchpoints

How to collect customer feedback

So where should you start? Here’s a five-step breakdown on how to collect the feedback you collect from customers:

Step 1: Segment your audience

Before collecting feedback, decide who you want to hear from and why. Segmentation ensures you’re not collecting generic responses or data that isn’t comparable to other data. Instead, target feedback that helps improve specific parts of your experience.

Segment by:

• Lifecycle stage: new customers or loyal customers
• Touchpoint: purchase, support interaction, app usage
• Behavior: churn risk, high usage, recent complaint
• Demographics or industry: for B2B or regulated sectors

Step 2: Choose the right channel and timing

To get high response rates and honest feedback, meet customers where they already are. The best channel is the one they already trust and use regularly.

Common feedback channels include:

• Email: great for post-purchase or periodic check-ins
• SMS: higher open rates, ideal for quick feedback
• In-app or on-site prompts: ask while the experience is fresh
• Chatbots/live chat: collect input after interactions
• Phone or video interviews: for high-value, qualitative insight
• Social media listening: monitor what people say without being asked

Check out our blog on the most popular channels by country.

Step 3: Ask the right questions

To make the most out of your surveys, and to get the answers you really need from customers, make sure to mix quantitative and qualitative surveys. You don’t want to just ask how the experience was, but to find out why it was the way it was.

For example:

• CSAT: short-term satisfaction
• NPS: loyalty over time
• Open text fields: context behind the score
• Emojis and sliders: quick, mobile-friendly input to measure sentiment

Step 4: Summarize and organize the feedback

Asking those open-ended questions is highly valuable, but many teams struggle with organizing all that data. It’s important to be prepared. Use tags, themes, or AI-based tools to:

• Group comments by topic (e.g., pricing, delivery, UX)
• Track sentiment trends
• Highlight recurring pain points

Step 5: Turn feedback into action

Collecting feedback only matters if you act on it. To build genuine relationships and long-term loyalty, brands must prove they’re not just listening, they’re also responding.

Start small:

• Target specific customers who have had a poor experience to offer them a personalized service
• Prioritize fixes based on frequency or emotional impact
• Run experiments guided by real customer input

Methods of collecting customer feedback

Here are some of the most effective methods to collect customer feedback:

1. Surveys: Send short, focused surveys via:

• Email (after purchase or support)
• SMS (for high open rates)
• In-app popups (after a key user action)

2. Live chat and chatbots: Use chatbots to ask quick questions or escalate to human support. Save and analyze transcripts for trends.

3. Customer interviews: Nothing beats real conversations. Use structured or open-ended questions to dive deeper into motivations, frustrations, and goals.

4. Social media listening: Monitor mentions, comments, and shares to gather candid feedback at scale.

5. Review sites and testimonials: Scan public reviews on sites like for recurring issues or praise.

6. Support tickets and complaint logs: Every support request is a window into customer needs. Categorize and track them for larger trends.

7. On-site behavior analytics: Use heatmaps, session recordings, and funnel analysis to understand where users struggle or drop off.

How to summarize customer feedback effectively

Collecting feedback is just the start. The real value comes from turning raw comments into clear, actionable insights. To do that, you need a structured approach that makes it easy to spot patterns and prioritize improvements.

1. Organize your data sources

Bring all your feedback into one place. Whether it’s NPS scores, online reviews, support transcripts, or survey responses. This ensures nothing slips through the cracks.

2. Tag and categorize by topic

Classify feedback under themes like user experience, pricing, support, or product features. This makes it easier to zoom in on specific areas that matter most to your business.

3. Group similar themes

Use affinity mapping or clustering techniques to combine related feedback. For instance, if several comments mention “payment errors” or “checkout crashes,” group them under a single theme.

4. Analyze sentiment

Look beyond the words to understand the tone. Is the feedback positive, neutral, or negative? Sentiment analysis helps you measure not just what customers are saying but how they feel.

5. Prioritize insights

Not all feedback carries the same weight. Focus on issues that appear frequently or have the biggest impact on customer experience.

Manual vs. AI-based summarization

Manual methods: Many teams still rely on spreadsheets, sticky notes, or whiteboards to sort and group feedback. It’s simple but time-consuming.

AI-powered tools: AI platforms can automatically cluster, tag, and summarize large volumes of feedback, saving time while surfacing trends you might miss manually.

How to use customer feedback

So, what should you do with all this feedback you’ve just organized? Feedback is only valuable if it drives improvements across your business. Here’s how different teams can turn insights into impact:

Product teams

• Prioritize feature requests based on customer needs
• Fix bugs faster with real-world evidence
• Close the loop by testing changes and validating updates with users

Marketing

• Extract testimonials and social proof to boost campaigns
• Identify pain points to refine messaging
• Create helpful content that addresses FAQs and common objections

Sales

• Use feedback to overcome recurring objections
• Highlight customer wins and success stories in pitches
• Share what top users love to make demos more compelling

Support and CX

• Train agents on recurring customer issues
• Spot knowledge base gaps to improve self-service
• Automate repetitive tasks using patterns from ticket trends

UX and design

• Enhance journey mapping with real user experiences
• Prioritize UI fixes where frustration signals are strongest
• Test prototypes directly with users who gave constructive (even negative) feedback

When teams across the business align on how to use customer feedback, it transforms from scattered comments into a shared growth engine. The end goal of collecting feedback is about acting, improving, and showing customers their voices truly matter.

Common feedback mistakes to avoid

• Ignoring feedback you don’t like
• Only collecting from one channel
• Over-relying on NPS or ratings without context
• Not involving the whole team in the feedback loop
• Failing to follow up after changes are made