Customer Success

4 Templates To Get Honest Product Feedback

April 14, 2021

Honest Product Feedback Hero Image

One of the key factors in analyzing how great your product is is asking for honest feedback from your users. They’re the people who know its strengths and weaknesses first-hand. This is why, at Nickelled, we offer an in-app optional feedback survey feature for users to fill in at the end of their onboarding tours.

In this article, we’ll examine 4 different survey templates to see what works best to get honest product feedback. Firstly, though, let’s remind ourselves why product feedback is so important and how to leverage it for the most effective results.

Why Product Feedback Is Important

Getting honest feedback from users is essential to improving your product. 

If the people using your services tell you they like something, you want to make sure to keep doing more of it. Equally, if your users are finding problems, struggling to use aspects of your product or just generally aren’t enjoying it, you need to know where you’re going wrong so you can fix it.

That’s why you should make getting honest product feedback a key part of your customer success strategy.

How To Make The Most of Honest Product Feedback

There are several things to bear in mind to ensure you get your users’ honest, constructive feedback and make the most of what they are telling you.

  • Set a goal. What do you want your users’ feedback for? Whether it’s to improve your service or measure your net promoter score, use this objective to tailor your feedback surveys.
  • Ask the right questions at the right time. If you want to know why users are canceling their subscription to your service, ask them on the cancelation page. Make sure your questions are targeted and intentional.
  • Make your surveys simple. No one wants to spend their time filling in long, complex feedback forms. Make the experience seamless and ensure your users know you’re grateful for their time.
  • Consider your distribution channels. Google forms linked by email have the potential to be longer and therefore get more qualitative feedback, but email embedded surveys have the best completion rate, at an average of 74%. However, if you want feedback on a specific part of your website, web or mobile app, you should do a survey on that platform on the page you want feedback on.
  • Compare user feedback against your analytics. If you’re getting negative feedback on your subscription renewal page, chances are your users aren’t signing back up with you. And vice versa. Say your stats show users abandoning a certain onboarding guide. Ask them why. Add a survey and generate data on exactly what you need to improve.

4 Templates To Help You Get Honest Product Feedback

Now you know why your business needs honest product feedback from your users to thrive, let’s look at the best ways to get that data. In this section, we’ll take a look at four different templates to help you decide what will work for you.

When choosing the right template to get honest feedback from your users, it’s useful to keep a number of factors in mind:

  • How much feedback you want: whether it’s a simple rating of how much your users would recommend your service, or a qualitative response giving examples of how you can improve.
  • When and where you’re asking: a survey received by email link can be a lot longer than an in-app feedback box.
  • Your own brand: your survey is an extension of your brand communications. Bear in mind your style and tone when adapting your template – a feedback form featuring emojis may not be right for everyone!
  • Your users: different types of users reply to surveys. An effective feedback form should be well received by those wanting to give your service a great review, as well as by the unhappy users who will ultimately help you improve.

#1 Yes/No Box

Nickelled in-app product feedback

One of the features of Nickelled’s onboarding solutions is our in-app optional feedback survey that businesses can add at the end of every guide. It’s a simple yes/no box asking if learners found the content helpful or not. If they give it the thumbs down, they’re then asked for more information with an open text survey.

Yes/no feedback boxes are:

  • Simple and streamlined. The question is clear and it’s obvious to users that it will take no more than a few seconds of their time to respond. 
  • Versatile. Thanks to their size and simplicity, yes/no boxes can be implemented pretty much anywhere you want to ask for feedback without intruding on the user’s experience: embedded in an email, on your website, in your mobile or web app, or even in a chat box.
  • Useful for basic feedback on specific features. Limited responses mean they’re more effective to understand how users feel about particular aspects of your service rather than their experience as a whole.
  • Easy to analyze. You get a clear idea of whether users did or did not like your product.

#2 Satisfaction Rating Scale

If you require more detailed data on how your users feel about your service, you might instead choose to survey them with a satisfaction rating scale. In the examples above, there’s a numerical scale from 1 to 5 sent by Dropbox, and a survey asking users to select a description that best matches their experience. You could equally ask for a star rating, or for a rating from 1 to 10. The satisfaction rating scale is also used to work out Net Promoter Score, or NPS.

Satisfaction rating scales are:

  • Versatile and unobtrusive. Users can be surveyed in your mobile or web app, on your website, or in an email, like with this email-embedded Dropbox example.
  • User-friendly. Users can see it will take just a few seconds to select their rating. Dropbox reminds their users of this in the text underneath.
  • Good for asking targeted or general questions. You can ask users specific questions about particular aspects of your service, for an overall rating of your product in general, or to work out your NPS.
  • Customizable. Depending on your branding and your audience, you could offer users a number scale, a star rating or a range of emojis to submit their feedback.
  • Easy to analyze. Even more so than yes/no boxes, satisfaction rating scales give you detailed results to show your users’ honest product feedback.

#3 Open Text Survey

Collecting feedback via an open text field

Depending what type of feedback you want, asking for a simple satisfaction rating like the above templates may not be enough. A useful option to get detailed honest product feedback is an open text survey. This is when you ask your users a question and provide a text box for them to write their response in their own words.

Open text surveys are:

  • Great for qualitative feedback. Users evaluate your service in their own words so you know exactly how they feel and what you need to improve.
  • Best for asking targeted questions. If you ask too general a question, many users will consider the survey too time-consuming to complete. For those who do take the time to answer, their answers may be too lengthy and general to give you comprehensive product feedback.
  • More likely to overwhelm users. Having to enter text may well seem too time consuming and too much effort for a lot of users. They risk lower response rates: while your feedback will be more detailed, there could be less of it.
  • More time-consuming to analyze. Unlike a satisfaction scale or a yes/no box, open text surveys don’t give clear feedback results immediately. It is necessary to read through responses to categorize them into positive and negative, find where you can improve, and truly understand how your users feel.

#4 Multi-Answer Survey

A multiple-choice product feedback form.

All of the above templates have their benefits in asking your users for honest product feedback. To get a comprehensive idea of how users really feel, you could create a survey that combines multiple ways to ask for feedback. 

One way of doing this is starting with a yes/no box and asking users to fill in an open text survey depending on their response, as in Nickelled’s example above. Alternatively, you could use a longer survey template like the Skype example:

Multi-answer surveys are:

  • The best option for qualitative, constructive feedback. Asking for more detail means you’ll have a better idea of what’s going right and wrong in your service, so you can act on specific issues.
  • More time-consuming for users. It’s essential to make these longer surveys as simple as possible to show users it won’t take too much of their time to give their feedback. Make sure your survey is streamlined, the question is specific and the options are simple and clear to read.
  • Limited by space. Having a longer format, these surveys require more space. While they would work on a website or web app or as a link in an email, templates like this may well seem too long on mobile apps.

Find Out What Your Users Really Think

Getting honest and constructive product feedback from your users is key to improving your service and therefore growing as a business. As you’ve learnt in this article, there are different ways to ask your users for their feedback.

Whether you want qualitative or quantitative data and whichever feedback template you choose, it’s essential to keep your feedback objective in mind and to ensure your survey is user-friendly. 

Asking targeted questions at the right time via a simple, streamlined survey is the best way to maximize response rate and help you get honest product feedback.