Your website is typically the gateway to your business for your new and returning customers who want to find information, learn about your brand, and possibly purchase some products. It’s how they get help when they have an issue, how they discover what makes your products and organization unique, and frequently the primary way they make purchasing decisions.
But too many businesses aren’t sure how to optimize their websites for these essential tasks and create an exceptional online customer experience. There’s a solution at hand - capturing website feedback. It allows you to discover issues that even your most experienced company experts have missed so your website experience is exceeding customer expectations every day. And since customer expectations and website capabilities change frequently, your website should always be improving with the help of user website feedback.
What exactly is website feedback? It’s information and opinions you gather from your website visitors and customers through on-page surveys, feedback buttons or forms, or other on-site methods. Website feedback has many uses, but it primarily helps businesses like yours understand what customers think and how they feel about various aspects of your website. It’s a powerful tool to make your website and your customer experience as a whole better.
Data collection
Capturing feedback on your website allows your business to collect a wide range of actionable and accurate data from your website users. It can also help you uncover issues and bugs so they can be addressed and solved in a timely fashion before they become a larger problem. So how do you collect user feedback in a way that provides you with the data you need while offering a good user experience as well? The answer is website feedback surveys.
While there are other ways of gathering data via website analytics tools, such as Google Analytics or Heatmaps, those tools provide you with data that simply tells you what users are doing on your site. They don’t allow you to capture why they’re taking those actions, or if your website is providing them with an excellent or disappointing experience.
Adding website feedback surveys can help you gain a more well-rounded picture of how your website customer experience is in its current state, and what improvements you can make in the future. There are many uses for, and types of, website surveys so you can find the ones that work best for your business.
Website feedback survey
Wondering how to ask for website feedback? Website feedback surveys offer an effective, low-effort way to collect quantitative and qualitative feedback on your site. Website feedback surveys are an excellent tool for getting to know the needs of a website and its users.
Feedback surveys can be used to collect data about any stage of your website customer journey, from initial research to the post-purchase experience. It may uncover issues your business didn’t know about - for example, your users might complete purchases but find the requirement to create an account with lots of personal details added to be irritating, and that may discourage them from returning next time. You will only find this information out if you ask customers directly about their experience using a website survey.
There are several types of website feedback surveys that you can use on your site.
Popup surveys appear in the middle of a user’s screen at a predetermined action or time on the site so your customers can’t miss it and must take some sort of action to continue on the site. These surveys are effective but can get annoying, so they should be used with caution.
On-page surveys appear in a corner of the user’s screen without disrupting the task they’re taking at the moment. They allow users to give you customer feedback when they’re ready in an unobtrusive way.
Feedback widgets are buttons that live at the edge of your web page. Users can choose to click on the widget if they have opinions or feedback to offer with minimal disruption to the user experience of your website.
User data
The more you know about your customers, their needs, and their opinions about your products and your brand, the stronger your customer experience program will be. Gathering data leads you to a greater understanding of customer expectations and how you’re performing against them.
You can use website surveys to gather user data such as demographic information, lifestyle information, preferences, desires, pain points, and much more. Before you begin conducting a website survey to gather user data, be sure you know what you’ll use the data you’re collecting for. It can be easy to jump in and try to collect as much data as possible, but your users’ time is limited, and they’ll abandon your survey if you’re asking for too much.
User experience data
Website surveys can help you with the often tricky of collecting user feedback to improve your website’s UX. Good UX design is based on both solid user research and the clear intention to address and solve problems and fulfill the needs of your users. Since UX is unique to each business, you can only improve yours by asking your current and ideal customers what they want and need from your website and how you’ve currently providing it.
You can use targeted website surveys to uncover any pain points in your digital user experience throughout the customer journey. For example, you could survey customers immediately after they make a successful purchase to see if they encountered any frustrating issues along the way, or after they have contacted your customer service team with a question about an issue or product.
Acting on the data
Once you’ve gathered various data points with your website surveys, the process has just started. Now you need to act on the information and opinions your customers and users have taken the time to share with you. Depending on the feedback you receive and your business goals, there are several different ways you can act on your website feedback data.
Improve user experience
Capturing website feedback can help your business better understand issues that are dragging down your user experience. Problems like bugs, usability issues, and unneeded steps in the customer journey can all work to make your customers less than satisfied with their experience on your website. Fixing these frustrating issues helps to improve the customer experience on your website on an ongoing basis.
The user experience of your website plays an important role in your overall customer experience. Your customers likely visit your website for a large variety of reasons, including initial product research, information gathering, browsing products to compare to competitors, making purchases, and getting help from your customer service team. If your business primarily operates online, your website is the face of your business for your customers. Even in brick-and-mortar-focused businesses, your customers will still visit your website for browsing, product research, and to find out more about your company.
Creating an exceptional user experience is essential in these digitally-focused times for businesses in every industry. A poor user experience can drag down your conversion rates and decrease sales, which hurts your bottom line. Customers are unlikely to return to a website that provided a poor user experience.
On the other hand, an excellent user experience can increase positive engagements with customers and make them eager to return to your site for repeat purchases. And since retaining existing customers is much less expensive than attracting new ones, focusing on UX is great for your profits in the short and long term.
What are UX metrics and their goals?
UX metrics can be divided into two main categories: attitudinal and behavioral.
Attitudinal metrics measure how users feel about your brand or what they say about your product. Behavioral metrics measure how users act on those feelings - how users interact with your product and what they do with it. Measuring both kinds of metrics gives you a full picture of what your website experience looks like, why customers feel a certain way about it, and how those feelings translate into behaviors.
Behavioral metrics can be tracked via tools like website analytics platforms and through data you’re likely already collecting, like how often customers complete their purchases and repeat them down the road. But these metrics only give you part of the picture - you won’t know why customers are behaving this way unless you have additional data sources.
This is where attitudinal metrics come into play. These metrics, which you can gather in user feedback methods like website surveys, feedback forms or buttons, or customer interviews, allow website users to tell you what happened in an interaction and how that interaction made them feel about your products or business as a whole.
Combining both kinds of metrics gives you a wealth of insights into the whole spectrum of your digital user experience. You’ll learn how users feel, and how those feelings cause them to behave - do they come back for repeat purchases or churn frequently? Which interactions are driving customer loyalty, and which ones are causing frustration? It’s all in the behavioral and attitudinal data.
The goal of UX metrics, of course, is not to merely gather data. These metrics can help you measure, compare, and track the quality of your user experience over time. They will tell you which parts of the user and customer experience need improvement, which improvements to prioritize, and how those improvements are working over time once they’re made.
These metrics are highly effective because they’re focused on the experience of your users, not the priorities of your business. While your business can’t ignore its own goals, of course, in order to create a truly exceptional customer experience you must focus on the needs of the customer first. Your business success will follow once you’ve provided an industry-leading customer experience thanks to your website feedback.
Discover bugs
It happens to the best-designed websites - an update happens and a bug creeps in somewhere. These bugs tend not to be a big deal, as long as they’re found and fixed swiftly. Website feedback methods that customers can access any time, such as feedback forms and feedback buttons, can help alert your business to bugs as soon as they appear so you can get everything working again quickly. Making it difficult for users to report problems and bugs means your site will remain buggy for longer than needed and provide a poor experience for many other users.
Improve usability
The user experience of your website will suffer if you have usability issues such as buttons that are hard to find, pages that are difficult to read, and images that are slow to load. Your users can tell you what problems they find on the website that detract from their experience if you ask them for their feedback and gather UX metrics.
Increase conversion rate
If you’re like most businesses these days, you make at least some part of your sales online. Ecommerce is a growing field, and many businesses have not gotten the UX component of online shopping nailed down just yet. Website feedback can help your business improve your conversion rate, or the number of website visitors who make a purchase, by finding and fixing user issues that are negatively affecting it.
For example, you may survey website users and find that you need to tackle some homepage optimization so users can find what they’re looking for quickly and avoid frustration and page abandonment. You may also uncover issues such as a buggy purchase button or a purchase page that requires too much personal information, and those are common issues that lead to users not converting to customers.
Use your website feedback to make it easier and more pleasant for users to convert to customers - remove any friction or issues that are getting in the way. Finding and fixing these issues can reduce shopping cart abandonment by discovering if there is a problem with your checkout page that is getting in the way of making purchases. Your website should make it as easy as possible for users to convert to customers - use feedback to find out what’s making it more difficult than it needs to be.
Improve customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is essential to the success of your business. Satisfied customers will return regularly to your products, recommend your business to their network, and be loyal brand advocates and supporters. And since your website is one of the main ways customers will interact with your business, your website needs to offer a highly satisfying experience.
Website feedback gives you the information necessary to improve customer satisfaction. It can identify what you can do to improve satisfaction, and also point out the areas that are currently satisfying your customers so you can enhance and promote those as well.
Customer loyalty
Customers become highly loyal when they feel they are more than just purchasers of products - they’re building a real relationship with your business. Asking customers for their feedback and input can enhance customer loyalty because they will feel like a valued part of the company instead of just another order number. And once you make improvements based on their feedback, users will be happy and loyal because they’ll know their concerns have been successfully addressed - your company listened to them and took action.
Customer trust
Website users need to know they can trust your business before they feel comfortable handing over their credit card information and personal details to make a purchase. You can increase customer trust in your website by showing them you’re actively listening to their feedback, swiftly addressing their concerns, and working hard to improve their customer experience online.
On the other hand, if users visit your website more than once and encounter the same issues over and over again without improvement after they’re given you feedback, they’re unlikely to make a purchase, unlikely to return to your site, and possibly even likely to tell others about their negative experience. That affects trust in your brand and your reputation as a business.
Customer retention
In today’s crowded marketplace, consumers have more options for making purchases than ever. That means your business needs to prioritize customer experience and satisfaction to stand out from the crowd and prevent customers from leaving to go to a competitor.
You can improve customer retention by proactively seeking customer feedback about your website and optimizing it based on that data. Eliminating issues on your site that are causing customers to churn or leave without making a purchase can increase your retention rates and earn you more profit from each customer, while also cutting down on new customer acquisition costs.
Key takeaways
Capturing and acting on website feedback can help you take your business’s user experience to the next level. Gathering and analyzing this feedback from your website users and customers is easy with GetFeedback’s all-in-one customer experience platform, including our simple and effective platform for designing and delivering website surveys and analyzing the data so you can delight your customers every day with confidence.