Feedback engines give teams the ability to build data feeds into micro-interactions. They are dierent from long-form web surveys that are often static. Feedback engines offer short-bursts with few, impactful, pointed questions.

As someone who collects feedback for your organization, your goal is to design a program that engages with your customers throughout their buyer journeys. Start by defining your business objective. What problem are you trying to solve? What why are you trying to discover? Gather data from your analytics software to determine potential areas of focus. Time spent on a space and average soware session time are metrics that can help you identify what you need to problem- solve. Look for trends that look odd or that pique your interest. These are ideal starting points to ask the question “why.”

By asking questions throughout the customer journey, as opposed to just the beginning or end, you open yourself up to a wealth of knowledge about your customer's decision making processes. Follow these fundamental steps for building a an efficient and effective feedback engine.

05

06

Define your segments

Just like the demographics of the foot traffic that goes through a shopping mall differ, your website visitors all hold unique variables that should be used to segment your audiences. By segmenting your audiences, you have the opportunity to engage on a more personal level which will consequently drive a higher response rate.

Examples include behavioral targeting, web traffic source (search engine, bookmarks, referring domains), visitors who have browsed more than 2 pages, visitors who have or haven’t interacted with other on-site surveys, individuals who have purchased a specific number of items, or website visitors who demonstrate signals of a high bounce rate. For instance, you may see high bounce rates on your shipping page. You could ask audiences whether they think shipping rates are high or maybe even offer a discount in exchange for a survey response.

Here are some ways that you can segment your audiences for more focused, relevant feedback:

Referral traffic source 

# return visits

Ad channel

Device

Geography

Presence or absence of cookies

Custom properties or triggers

Known or unknown identity

Whitelist or blacklist per identity or IP

1

07

Ask questions strategically

The goal of an insights program is to uncover unbiased, objective perspectives to inform the direction of your company. How does a feedback engine fit into this overall business intelligence picture, technology-wise and strategy-wise? We talked to a leading non profit, GreatSchools, on how gathering feedback has helped them be more eicient with their grant money.

What is your goal?

Why are you at this particular page?

Why are you looking at a particular section?

Why is this information important to you?

What don’t you like about this content?

Are you feeling confused, and if so, why?

2

With a feedback platform like Qualaroo, you can easily build questions that target certain segments of your web visitors based on a variety of parameters.

JI KIM, PRODUCT AND ENGINEERING LEAD AT GREATSCHOOLS

Qualaroo helps us answer questions like the following:

Read the full case study on GreatSchools.

08

Using Net Promoter Score is also a great way mechanism to get a pulse on how users feel about your product, brand or service.

JI KIM, PRODUCT AND ENGINEERING LEAD AT GREATSCHOOLS

Understand where your audiences are coming from. When they’re browsing your website, they likely have a goal in mind.

When designing your questions, you need to keep context in mind—simple javascript can help you tailor your surveys to specific audience segments, traffic sources, in-the-moment product experience, and device (i.e. desktop and mobile). The goal is to create a smooth, unobstructive experience.

09

The Qualaroo team shares foundational tips and observations from working with hundreds of researchers, UX designers, product-builders, and marketers at varying stages of their discovery programs.

Often, companies will enter a research program with pre-formed assumptions of what they would like to build. Instead look at data that you already have. Are you noticing high churn rates at a stage of your account registration program? Launch a survey asking why.

Observe rather than assume.

Allow respondents to surface insights that you may not have considered rather than testing an assumption that you already have. This discovery process can fuel ideas for your engineering, product, marketing, and sales programs.

Use questions to help you brainstorm.

Otherwise you risk fatiguing your audiences or impeding their user experiences.

Keep questions short.

Even if your company has built a strong lead generation and nurturing program, there are data points that are impossible to quantify by tracking user actions alone. One simple question that you could ask is “how did you discover our product?” As user journeys become more complex, and last-click attribution models become obsolete, the way to get direct answers will be to ask direct questions.

Ask revenue and growth-oriented questions.

Ask adaptive questions.

Let’s say that you’re asking about whether a website experience was negative or positive. Instead of asking the same questions to everyone, adapt your follow-ups to initial answers. If someone answers “no,” for instance you can offer to follow up privately over email. To simplify this process, you can build a workflow with your CRM.

10

Ask why someone decided to buy a product or interact with a website feature rather than “what do you think” type questions. Ask questions that influence decisions you’re looking to make in the immediate to medium term.

Tie an action to every question.

Providing unique guidance to set up appointments, schedule reminders, reply back, and ask follow-up questions.

Asking targeted questions about what specific customers want or need help with achieving, to enable more productive appointments and working sessions.

As an example, here are some ways that teams across Twilio are using Qualaroo to improve customer onboarding, engagement, and retention rates:

Shortening communication cycles so that account reps can set up appointments directly from Qualaroo, rather than needing to schedule calls.

Providing clear step-by-step guidance with targeted questions Sourcing information to mock up customer experiences on the fly, by sourcing answers to questions in an expedited manner

Gathering data to share between groups for faster, more eicient collaboration.

11

Understand buyer persona and ask why they’ve visited your website.

Interest

Teams may not have time to filter through hundreds or thousands of comments, IBM’s supercomputer—Watson—does. Watson has multiple APIs, with one focused on sentiment analysis. So you can give Watson a block of text, and the supercomputer will return keywords, expressing whether a perspective was negative, angry, happy, or sad. Qualaroo can run feedback through the Watson API and sends data to data platforms like Tableau or Chartio and overlay with customer data. With more data, organizations can begin to see patterns. Companies can better tailor open-ended responses to individual customer experience through CRM outreach, for instance.

Based on behaviors, ask why a visitor didn’t make a purchase OR for those that convert, ask why they chose your product/service.

Conversion

Customer

Life Cycle

Engagement

Retention

Use NPS to understand how customers feel about you. (More importantly, act upon the feedback.)

Bases on customer activity, ask why they use the features they’re using. (Create a follow up to ask which features they’d like to see.)

Analyze feedback methodically

3

Perform a sentiment analysis

Overlay response data with your segments

Context is everything. Without understanding who your customers are and what they’re doing, we can never get to the why.

Here’s a framework example questions that you can ask in every stage of your customer’s lifecycle:

12

Using tools like Google Analytics combined with Google Tag Manager, you can track where and how visitors are coming to your website and app. In addition, you can track all the events they are taking while using your website or app.

Which pages on your website or in your app are most frequently visited?

The time frame a user is on your website or in app. At what point are they dropping off?

Which domain referred them to your website? And what are the actions being taken?

How many times have they visited your app?

Are they coming from a mobile or desktop?

Which geographic location are users coming from?

4

Examples include:

Understanding how, what, and where can help you figure out why. Your feedback engine enters the picture, here.

Create a continuous feedback loop

Often times, teams will launch surveys and then turn them off once they receive the results needed. If you’re constantly iterating on your product or service, then it’s important to ask for feedback through the customer’s lifecycle. The answers you receive from users today can change over time to the exact same question.

Setting up integrations with tools your teams already use will be an important part of this process. With Qualaroo’s feedback engine for example, you can feed response data into the following platforms.

Optimizely

Optimizely is an A/B testing platform. Combining Optimizely with qualitative insights from Qualaroo uncovers the real issues that are getting in the way of your customers. Understand why a variant in an A/B test won, and then double down on that reason. Or use Qualaroo to ask visitors a series of questions that determines their customer persona; then launch a Optimizely landing page to that persona. Conversion goes through the roof.

Salesforce

Synthesize feedback with your company’s customer database. Send responses and actionable insights directly into Salesforce to provide your team with qualified leads or relevant account details on the object level. Don’t let leads willing to chat with you fall between the cracks!

Synthesize feedback with your company’s customer database. Send responses and actionable insights directly into Salesforce to provide your team with qualified leads or relevant account details on the object level. Don’t let leads willing to chat with you fall between the cracks!

Tableau

Google Analytics

Qualaroo’s integration with Google Analytics shows how surveys drive and move site traffic, thereby illuminating sales funnel traffic. The integration yields a better understanding of the direct impact of Qualaroo surveys. Google analytics will track events and better show what your customers saw and how they acted; Qualaroo will tell you why, so you can know what to improve.

Mailchimp

This integration allows you to add the email addresses of your visitors to your existing MailChimp lists. This is done on a survey-by survey basis, so that your surveys can feed email addresses of your visitors to dierent lists and keep them segmented. You can also use multiple surveys to feed to the same list.

13

Through integrations, you can also share data across live chat and CRM soware. For a complete list of integrations and capabilities, visit: https://help.qualaroo.com/hc/en-us/sections/200324277-Integrations, which lists all current integrations.

Taking immediate action on feedback from your customers can decrease churn, increase lifetime value and create lasting impressions for your customers. You will also have data to guide product development decisions.

14

Take action

5

Feedback engines capture—and make of—fragmented data points that human eyes otherwise wouldn’t see. They enable you to:

Quantify return on spend.

Create referral programs that encourage growth.

Some of your customers will really love your product or service. Why not build a referral program for them, so they have an incentive to tell people about your company? Every audience is dierent and will find dierent incentives appealing. Use research is to determine what these incentives should be for your dierent audiences.

Feedback engines, by design, tell stories about your customers. By understanding where (and why) your website visitors get stuck—or

Optimize your product and marketing 

Let’s say you run a survey to determine how an individual discovered your product—through a billboard, ad, or maybe even another channel. You can align these responses with your sales database, to quantify return on spend. This information can help you assign a dollar value to your marketing investments in a straightforward way. You can then build lookalike models to further advertise to similar audiences online or invest in non-digital channels that are helping reinforce your sales.

where you see high conversion rates—you can make your user experience smoother. Keep finding glitches and roadblocks. Course correct. Always aim to do better.

15

Your Feedback Has a Shelf Life

There is a shelf life for response data. As markets change, the feedback you receive can change over time so it’s important to always be asking and always be acting upon.

Customer-centric, fast-moving organizations are aer one timeless question with respect to how users interact with them:

Improve loyalty.

Give users a channel to connect with your company, in a low-touch way. Being able to know your customer is essential to growth. More touchpoints will give you a comprehensive picture of who your user is and what he or she cares about.

Why?

Why did you choose to work with my company?

Why did a prospect choose another competitor?

Why are new users getting stuck at step #2 of the onboarding process?

Why are customers terminating their subscriptions?

When you’re able to answer these questions, you can solve business problems that define your product roadmap, increase engagement rates, connect dots between features and revenue, and reduce churn. You’ll also detect patterns in predicting more successful product launches.

But even though the questions are timeless, the answers may not be.

Your organization runs smoother, teams are on the same page, and customers guide you through judgment calls that you’d otherwise make in a silo.

Without research, the risks that we take become bigger. Our decisions are more uncertain. Could also mention here why it’s important to demonstrate to respondents that their feedback is being heard and acted upon - encourages promoters.