How to gather more qualitative feedback?

You are a UX designer. It is quite difficult for you to gather feedback from your users whereas your company have obviously many customers. And you want to change this situation. This article is for you.

Ask directly to users what they feel

When you were studying UX, you learned the importance of conducting interviews to gather user feedback. So you learned different techniques for listening and numerous methods for synthesizing your work like personas, journey map, empathy map, etc. This is great!

But as you start your UX job, you now encounter difficulties in meeting these users:

• Some people in your company don't want them to be bothered.
• Some mention that it's too complicated to engage with them.
• Others insist they've already spoken with them, so they don't permit you to do so.
• Or you simply don't find the time to meet them.

The thing is you cannot always talk to your users. Even if you learn a lot about that. Even if you really want to. So how could you go further? Surveys with an open field.

Indeed, users can express themselves. You obviously do not have to design what they want, but without any idea of their needs and ideas, you are stuck.

Launch a NPS survey

One first approach to gather feedback is by soliciting reviews about the entire experience, to measure the overall perception of the customers. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is particularly well-designed for this: it measures their loyalty.

To measure that, the goal is to ask a question with a response scale from 0 to 10. The question follows the template: "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?"

The percentage of promoters (rating of 9 to 10) is subtracted from the percentage of detractors (rating of 0 to 6), resulting in a metric ranging from -100 to 100. The last part of customers are called the passive ones (rating of 7 to 8).

• From 1, loyalty to your business is average.
• From 30, loyalty to your business becomes good.
• From 50, loyalty is excellent.

There are 3 big advantages to begin with the NPS:

• An increase of this indicator means more revenue.
• It must be already done in your company, so data must be already here.
• It allows you to ask for qualitative feedback with the follow-up question.

The Net Promoter Score is not just a metric for measuring customer loyalty, it has tangible implications for business growth. In the context of B2B companies, a 10-point increase in NPS carries significant weight. CustomerGauge's insights suggest that this uptick correlates with more than a 3% increase in upsell opportunities.

On a different note, according to data from PwC about customer satisfaction in 2021, more than 90% of companies actively collect customer feedback, particularly through NPS studies. As a UX person, it might be beneficial to connect with marketing teams to explore how such data can be shared with your service.

To go deeper, it is important to add a follow-up question. These are examples of good follow-up questions:

• "Do you have any additional feedback for us?"
• "What is the primary reason behind your score?"
• "What should we improve?"

By doing that, you will be able to have data about the needs and questions of your users. Through segmentation, you can create panels of individuals whom you can reach out to for further discussion, meaning more qualitative feedback!

"Happiness scores tell you what is happening but never ever explain why."
— Tomer Sharon, senior UX researcher

Finally, there are at least 2 different ways to solicit feedback. Generally, marketing teams have a process in place to manage the NPS. This involves selecting a tool, configuring it to send the survey after a specific action, and responding to individuals who provide feedback with tailored templates. There are numerous tools for this purpose, such as Hotjar, GetFeedback, or SurveySparrow.

If you want to start with your own resources, you can create a survey using platforms like Typeform, SurveyMonkey, or Google Forms. In my consulting experience, I typically aimed for 50 responses from around 1000 emails.

Launch a CSAT survey

CSAT is short for Customer SATisfaction. The goal of a CSAT survey is to understand how people are satisfied about your product and services. It also aims to find actionable feedback to improve them. However, the rule is to be specific about what you are measuring.

"For these to be useful for making the product better, scores must be feature-specific. Measuring specific phenomena gives you ability to focus efforts and save resources."
— Tomer Sharon, senior UX researcher

A CSAT survey typically consists of one or several questions with a scale from 1 to 5. The main question follows the template: "Are you satisfied with... ?"

To calculate a CSAT indicator, divide the number of satisfied customers by the total number and express it as a percentage:

• 0-40% — poor CSAT
• 40-60% — okay
• 60-80% — good CSAT
• 80-100% — excellent

CSAT surveys offer several advantages: they are easy to execute, everyone recognizes them, they are not too demanding for respondents, and you can also associate a follow-up question to gather more qualitative feedback.

Analyze your results from the verbatims

Having NPS and CSAT scores is beneficial, particularly for management. However, you probably want to go further, especially now that you have some feedback.

The initial step is to identify the various verbatims, specific parts of the text that hold particular significance. Based on that, you can do different processing, like tagging them with a topic. There are several tools to do that by hand, like Notion or Excel or more specific ones like Dovetail or Condens.

However, to accelerate this part, you can use AI-powered tools like Synopsis. It assists you in automatically identifying, rephrasing, and tagging verbatims.

Once you've pinpointed all the topics, you can construct comprehensive dashboards that allow you to comprehend the primary subjects discussed by your customers. It is particularly useful when you want to create your panels to engage in discussions with them.

Using an AI tool for feedback analysis enables you to focus your time on the relevance of your data collection rather than the manual treatment of the data.

Call back your users

Once you identified the topics in your feedbacks and the segmentation of your customers (promoters, passives, detractors), you can create your panels:

• Detractors complaining about the subscription page
• Promoters and passives talking about the video player features
• Recent customers talking about the customer service

"To understand any happiness number, you must invest in qualitative research. And no, an open-ended survey question does not count."
— Tomer Sharon, senior UX researcher

With your panels, it's time to reach out to these individuals. If you have their contact information, you can deepen your engagement by reaching out through written communication or, even better, by giving them a call. Responding to their feedback demonstrates that you value their input.

And voila! You've successfully gathered more qualitative feedback through an automated feedback collection method. You can now improve your empathy skills with real discussions with your customers!

Sources

• Key Experience Indicators: How to decide what to measure? — Tomer Sharon
• NPS Impact on Revenue: Correlations & ROI — CustomerGauge blog
• Leviers de la satisfaction client 2021 — PwC & AFRC
• 7 NPS Question Examples That Will Deliver Better Insights — Refiner blog