Active vs Passive Customer Feedback: Which Works Better for SaaS?

Collecting customer feedback is crucial for SaaS products to stay competitive and meet user needs.

But, understanding the best methods to gather this feedback can be challenging. Many SaaS startups struggle with feedback management, making it difficult to provide good customer service.

Did you know that 40% of customers will stop doing business with a company if they receive poor service?

In this guide, we'll explore how you can use both active and passive feedback to improve customer service.

TL;DR - active vs passive customer feedback

• Active feedback involves directly asking customers for their thoughts through methods like in-app surveys, email surveys, and user interviews. It provides targeted, specific insights that help improve products and services.
• Passive feedback is gathered without directly asking for it, using methods like feedback buttons, social media monitoring, customer support tickets, and product usage analytics. It offers continuous, unbiased insights and avoids survey fatigue.
• Both active and passive feedback are essential for a balanced feedback strategy. Active feedback engages customers directly, while passive feedback provides a realistic view of user behavior.
• Featurebase helps you collect both types of feedback with in-app surveys, feedback forms, and AI-driven analysis, making gathering and acting on customer insights easier.

What is active customer feedback?

Active feedback involves directly asking the customers for their thoughts and suggestions.

It includes methods like surveys, direct questions, and feedback forms.

The main benefit of active feedback is that it allows you to gain targeted insights directly from the user's perspective. This way you can identify the most impactful areas for improvement and make informed decisions to enhance your product or service.

In-app surveys are one example of active feedback collection (made with Featurebase).

Advantages of collecting active feedback

Collecting active feedback offers several key benefits for businesses:

1. Valuable product insights: It provides you with precise information about which features or customer segments are most impactful, helping you refine your products, services, and overall customer satisfaction.
2. Immediate responses: You can gather instant reactions and opinions, allowing you to quickly address issues and make timely improvements.
3. Enhanced customer engagement: Actively seeking feedback encourages direct interaction with your customers, increasing engagement and showing your commitment to understanding and meeting their needs.
4. Comprehensive overview: By using various feedback methods, such as NPS surveys and feedback forms, you gain a well-rounded understanding of the customer experience, helping you identify both strengths and areas for improvement.

How to collect active customer feedback

There are several effective methods for actively collecting customer feedback, both within your product and through other channels. Here are some of the most common active feedback collection methods:

1. In-app surveys

In-app surveys are an excellent way to gather feedback directly from users while they interact with your product. These surveys can be triggered by specific user actions or events, ensuring that the feedback you receive is timely and relevant.

For example, tools like Featurebase offer in-app surveys that can provide real-time insights into the user experience. The key benefits of in-app surveys include:

• Real-time insights: You get immediate feedback while the experience is fresh in the user's mind.
• Customization: You can tailor survey feedback questions to gather targeted information.
• Convenience: Users can provide feedback without leaving the app, making it easy and seamless for them.

Popular types of in-app surveys include:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty by asking how likely users are to recommend your product.
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Gauges immediate satisfaction, often using simple scales or emojis. You can also optionally include a text field to collect both quantitative and qualitative feedback.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): Assesses how easy it is for customers to use your product, providing insights into potential friction points.

2. Customer feedback email

Not all feedback will come from within your app, though. Email still remains a powerful tool for collecting feedback, especially from customers who may not spend a lot of time in your app.

With the right customer feedback email, you can leverage valuable data from an important section of your customer base. A short, personalized email ending with a clear call to action (CTA) helps you make the most of this type of feedback source.

3. User interviews and focus groups

User interviews and focus groups offer a more in-depth way to gather active feedback. By engaging customers directly through meetings or focus groups, you can gain richer insights than you would through standard surveys.

These methods allow customers to express their needs, goals, and experiences in their own words, giving you a deeper understanding of what it takes to develop products that truly meet their expectations.

The insights gathered from these interactions can be invaluable for refining your product development process.

What is passive customer feedback?

Passive feedback provides valuable insights by gathering information without directly asking your users for it.

You can think of these types of feedback collection methods as "always-on" since they are readily available to users when they need them.

Here are a few characteristics of passive feedback:

• Indirect collection: Gathered through observation rather than direct questioning.
• Continuous data: Provides ongoing key insights as it tracks user interactions over time.
• Behavioral insights: Offers a realistic picture of how users engage with your product.

✨ Start collecting & managing customer feedback with Featurebase for free →

Advantages of collecting passive feedback

Passive feedback offers two key advantages for users that can complement active feedback, including:

• No survey fatigue: Users aren't burdened with constant surveys, so they can provide feedback in their own time.
• Greater customer loyalty: Always-on feedback collection methods show users that you're always willing to listen to them.

How to collect passive customer feedback

There are several passive strategies that you can leverage for feedback collection. Here are four of the most common ones:

1. Feedback widgets

In-app feedback widgets allow you to gather user feedback directly within your product. They work well because they help product managers collect relevant insights without interrupting the user experience.

By placing these widgets at key interaction points, you can capture specific and relevant feedback from users. These widgets can significantly enhance customer engagement by making it easy for users to provide feedback without interrupting their experience.

2. Social media monitoring

With 62.3% of the global population using social media, your customers are likely to share their thoughts online every day. Those thoughts could include opinions on your products, too!

Aside from social media channels, customers are eager to share their thoughts on product review sites, too.

You can use brand monitoring tools to stay informed about user trends and sentiments on your product. Similarly, you can track user interactions with your social media posts to determine engagement.

3. Customer support tickets

Analyzing customer support tickets provides deep insights into common user problems and feature requests. This method captures feedback from users who have reached out for help.

A great practice is to organize support tickets by customer segments. This gives you an idea of which groups are the most dissatisfied and what you can do to improve their experience.

It's also helpful for prioritizing features in your product. For instance, if you're getting a lot of support tickets for a particular issue, you could focus on the relevant feature that helps resolve it.

4. Product usage analytics

Customers can express their thoughts and feelings on social media. But, to understand how they behave while using your product, it's helpful to leverage product usage data.

These analytics show what features customers use the most, what part of the app they spend the most time on, or where they face issues. By combining it with other types of customer feedback, you get a well-rounded picture of the customer's pain points.

Active or passive feedback: Which one is better for you?

Deciding between active and passive feedback depends on your specific needs and goals. But, it's ideal to combine both methods to have a complete picture of customer satisfaction.

Active feedback is structured and targeted, while passive feedback offers more realistic insight without causing survey fatigue.

Active feedback methods provide opportunities to engage with your customers and enhance customer engagement. On the other hand, passive feedback methods show customers that you're always willing to listen.

As a result, both methods foster customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Capturing and analyzing these types of feedback can be daunting. However, with the right feedback management tools, this job becomes much easier.

Featurebase is an intuitive feature-tracking tool that helps you collect both active and passive feedback. With a dedicated feedback forum, in-app widgets, and different surveys, it helps you make the most of your customer's opinions.

You can also create specific customer segments and target them with targeted surveys. A neat statistics page helps you visualize the results of your survey.

Final thoughts

Collecting and leveraging feedback is essential for any SaaS product's success. Active feedback provides targeted insights, while passive feedback offers continuous, unbiased data.

Featurebase helps you collect both active and passive customer feedback with the help of in-app surveys, feedback forms, and integrations. It comes with AI analysis features, survey templates, and feature voting, helping you get a complete picture of customer satisfaction and focus on the most impactful ideas.

The setup is super fast and comes with a Free Plan, so there's no downside to trying it out. 👇

Start collecting customer feedback with Featurebase for free today →