Customer feedback is the information customers share about their experience with a company's products, services or support — ratings, comments, complaints, suggestions and reviews. Businesses collect customer feedback to measure satisfaction, find problems early and decide what to improve next.
Types of customer feedback
- Solicited (active) feedback — feedback you ask for, such as a survey after a purchase or a support ticket.
- Unsolicited (passive) feedback — feedback customers give on their own: online reviews, social media comments, emails to support or a feedback button on your site.
- Direct feedback — said to you, for example in an interview, a chat or a survey answer.
- Indirect feedback — observed rather than stated: what people say about you elsewhere, or behavior such as cancellations, returns and unsubscribes.
- Quantitative vs qualitative — scores you can track over time (a 1–5 rating) versus open comments that explain the "why" behind the score.
How to collect customer feedback
- Online surveys sent by email or embedded on your website — the most scalable method. See online survey.
- Metric questions: Net Promoter Score (NPS) for loyalty, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) for a specific interaction, and Customer Effort Score (CES) for how easy something was.
- Reviews and social listening on review sites, app stores and social networks.
- Customer interviews and support conversations for in-depth, qualitative insight.
- Exit or unsubscribe surveys asking customers why they leave.
Keep surveys short, send them soon after the experience, and ask one clear question per topic. Our guide on customer satisfaction surveys has question examples, and a ready-made feedback survey template gets you started in minutes. Collecting feedback does not have to start with a licence: our roundup of the best free survey software covers the tools that handle rating scales and exports on a free plan.
Why customer feedback matters
Customer feedback shows where expectations are met or missed, which features or services to prioritize, and which customers are at risk of leaving. It also gives you real customer language for your marketing and testimonials, and it shows customers that their opinion counts — which supports loyalty and retention.
How to act on customer feedback (close the loop)
- Centralize responses from surveys, reviews and support in one place.
- Analyze scores and group comments by theme to spot recurring issues.
- Prioritize and act on the changes with the biggest impact.
- Close the loop: reply to the customer, thank them and tell them what changed. Follow up quickly with unhappy respondents. A simple thank-you email works well here; our customer thank-you email templates give you ready-made designs.
- Measure again with the same questions to see whether the score improves.
With Mailpro you can create an online survey, send it to your contacts in an email campaign and follow the results in the survey statistics.
Mailpro and customer feedback
Turn customer feedback into decisions
Create an online survey with Mailpro, send it to your contacts by email and follow the answers in your survey statistics. Swiss-hosted and GDPR-compliant.