How to Collect Customer Feedback with Google Forms

Google Forms is one of the most versatile tools in Google’s arsenal. It’s free, easy to use, and with a little imagination, can be used as a great tool for collecting customer feedback.

You don’t have to be an expert at feedback management to do it right.

Today, we’ll walk you through the process, discuss its downsides, and go over some alternatives that may better help you.

✨ Featurebase is a free alternative to Google Forms that is specialized for collecting customer feedback →

How to collect customer feedback with Google Forms: step by step

Before starting, you’re going to need a free Google Workspace account. After this, create your first form by heading to the forms page. 👈

1. Choose a template or go from a blank form

Google Forms has many templates for collecting information, including one for customer feedback:

Alternatively, you can create your own feedback form from scratch, choosing your own questions and formats.

But, for the sake of simplicity, let’s choose the Customer Feedback template.

It’s very rudimentary, but it gives you some idea of the types of questions you can ask and the kinds of fields and customizations you can use.

There are also survey form templates, as well as many others, that let you collect instant feedback from large groups of people.

2. Add the title and the description

Explain why you're collecting feedback and what you intend to do with it. This can actually help with your form completion rate.

For example, if customers know that the end goal is to improve the product rather than just explore their purchasing habits, they may be more inclined to complete your forms.

You can do some basic modification too, such as changing the header image.

3. Add the questions

Now you come to a major decision: do you want to collect qualitative or quantitative feedback... or both?

Google Forms supports questions that can be used for all feedback types.

For example, you can use an open field for a long answer to collect qualitative feedback. Or you can use a scale to get quick, easy-to-analyze insights about your customers’ thoughts.

For qualitative feedback:

• Short answer
• Paragraph

For quantitative feedback:

• Multiple choice
• Checkboxes
• Dropdown
• Linear scale
• Multiple choice grid
• Checkbox grid

You can mix and match the question types to collect the kind of feedback you need from your customers. Make sure to check the “required” field for the questions your respondents must answer instead of those that are optional.

You can also choose the correct answers in some of the question types, but we don’t suggest doing this as you want to give the room for the customer to share their honest feedback.

4. Share the form

To share a Google Form, all you need is a single link that you can copy and paste wherever your customers are. For example:

• In an email
• On a landing page on your website
• In a live chat box
• In an SMS
• Or anywhere else that allows links in the form of text

This allows you to share your online forms just about anywhere.

While Google Forms is great, it disrupts the seamless experience for your customers. Instead of directing them to your website for feedback, where they would be automatically logged in, it sends them a Google Forms link.

5. Analyze the feedback

As responses start coming in, you can review them in Google Forms or through a Google Sheet. In other words, you can automatically generate a sheet that automatically populates every time a new answer comes in, and this will be saved on Google Drive.

This is especially useful for qualitative feedback and long-form answers. For quantitative (numerical) feedback, you’ll get a breakdown of the percentages and values directly in Google Forms.

Why Google Forms is not ideal for customer feedback

The familiarity, ease of use, and the fact that it’s free - Google Forms has a lot going for it. But at the same time, it’s like using a butter knife to cut a watermelon. Sure, it’s doable, but is it really the best way to get the job done?

1. You have to close the feedback loop manually

To inform a customer that you've received their feedback and are working on their feature request or bug report, you have to send out emails manually. Open the Google Sheet, grab the contact details and email addresses, and start reaching out.

For a handful of you, this may not be a huge issue. However, if you receive hundreds of feedback items per month, you’ll very quickly get lost in the communication. Even worse, your customers won’t feel appreciated when they send in their feedback.

Many free feedback tools automate this process with automated emails and responses:

2. There are not that many (good) sharing options for feedback forms

You can share Google Forms with a link, but that’s about it. Modern feedback tools allow you to embed feedback forms in your website and, more importantly, in your product.

This lets customers leave feedback immediately when they have an issue.

For example, if someone has a glitch in their dashboard, they can’t leave feedback right away. Instead, they have to find a Google Form link, fill it out and send the information in. At that point, they may not have all the right information, including a screenshot and details of what went wrong.

A proper customer feedback tool like Featurebase can be added to your website and app, which means that the feedback button is always one click away.

3. It’s not a centralized feedback system

Customers will leave feedback everywhere, including customer support calls, live chat, emails, review websites, and more. And it’s up to you to put all that feedback into one place.

Google Forms only lets you collect it one way - through the form you share.

But, a good feedback tool pools all of your feedback entries into one place and also has an option that allows users to vote on each other's ideas.

This makes it easy to categorize, prioritize, remove duplicates automatically, and much more. These are just some of the many advanced features that Forms lacks.

4. You have to group topics and prioritize manually

Many of the feedback entries that come in will revolve around similar topics. In fact, some of them may even be duplicates. Google Forms won’t recognize this and it will add everything as separate entries in a Google Sheet.

This not only makes it difficult to analyze who submitted what, but it also makes prioritization significantly harder. All the entries are scattered in one sheet and you’ll have to manually find which ones are relevant and deserve the attention of your team.

On the other hand, a feedback tool such as Featurebase does all of this in the background. With Featurebase, duplicate entries are removed, and similar entries are grouped with to the power of AI.

This lets you prioritize based on different aspects that matter to your business - How long the customer has been with you, their monthly payments, how well the suggestion aligns with your current roadmap and more.

Should you use Google Forms to collect customer feedback?

Shortly: If you’re just starting out with feedback collection, maybe yes.

Longer: However, bear in mind that if you choose this option from the start, it’s going to take more time to transfer those feedback entries into a more capable tool later on.

While Google Forms is free and easy to use, it should not be your primary feedback tool.

Instead, try Featurebase. It's free and helps you collect feedback with neat in-app feedback widgets, integrations, surveys, and voting boards. You can also prioritize ideas by customer revenue, keep everyone automatically in the loop, and much more.

The onboarding is amazingly quick, and it comes with a Free plan, so there's no downside to trying it.

Start collecting customer feedback with Featurebase today for free →