Blog Customer FeedbackQualitative Feedback: Definition, Examples and How to Collect It
Qualitative Feedback: Definition, Examples and How to Collect It
Not sure why your customers feel the way they do? Numbers alone won’t tell you. Qualitative feedback is the key to understanding them—if you know how to collect it. In this post, we'll show you how!
Collecting customer feedback can be the silver bullet for your business. It can increase customer satisfaction, provide valuable insights about your customers, reduce churn, and increase profit.
However, it can also feel like such a mammoth task that just getting started can be overwhelming. 😵💫
This is especially true when gathering qualitative feedback. Qualitative data is incredibly valuable, but collecting and analyzing it requires a lot of time and attention.
Today, we'll show you everything about collecting and analyzing qualitative feedback. 👇
What is qualitative feedback?
Qualitative feedback is any feedback that provides descriptive insights that are not based on numbers or values. It focuses on the quality of someone's experiences, perceptions, and behaviors.
While quantitative feedback is all about numerical data (e.g. NPS survey results), qualitative feedback captures open-ended responses of the "why" behind them.
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Why is collecting qualitative feedback important?
Collecting qualitative feedback data is important for any business, regardless of its size or industry.
1. Understanding the "why" behind customer behavior
Quantitative metrics can tell you how happy (or not) your customers are on a scale of 1-5, for example. However, they don't tell you the 'why' behind that rating.
Qualitative feedback is powerful because it can help you understand customer needs by asking them why they feel in a certain way or what's wrong.
A customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) that we just ran is a perfect example of this:
First, users rate their experience with a new feature on a simple 1-5 scale. If they answer above 4, we thank them and the survey closes. If they answer below 4, we ask them what could be improved.
This is SO powerful in getting a quick snapshot of the current state of customer satisfaction while also getting meaningful product insights.
That brings us to the next point...
2. Identifying pain points and improvement areas
Through qualitative feedback collection, you can ask customers about their pain points and frustrations with your product. This is something that can't really be understood with quantitative feedback. Ever.
By using qualitative feedback examples, you can gain a deeper understanding of issues in your offer and ways to fix them.
3. Improving user experience and customer satisfaction levels
Qualitative feedback gives rich insights on how to improve the experience for customers who are already happy but could potentially be even happier.
In the previous example, I said that we only asked "what could be improved" from the users who scored low.
But it's very popular to also ask the high scorers about what they like the most.
This helps you also understand why the users like your product so much and double down on these things or even use them in your marketing copy!
4. Guiding product development and innovation
When you want to improve your product and exceed customer expectations but don't know where to go, in-depth insights from qualitative feedback are unbeatable.
For example, we just used our own survey tool to ask our customers which integration they'd like to see next:
- What integration should we add next? (three options)
- What would be the required functionalities? (open text box)
This helped us quickly identify which integration to prioritize first and how exactly users would use it. In total, it saved us a ton of development time because we had validated the idea and knew what to build from the get-go.
5. Building empathy with users
Not only do you get to see things from the user's perspective, but your feedback collection efforts will be seen as empathetic, too. Your interest in customers' pain points leads to higher satisfaction and, in turn, even more constructive feedback in the future.
Essentially, it's like building a feedback flywheel—the more you ask and listen for user feedback, the more they'll want to give it to you again.
6. Strengthening customer relationships
Customers who feel heard will stay with you for longer periods. To show them that you value their input, try to respond to as much feedback as you can.
Obviously, don't overdo it. We follow a simple rule: Respond when it’s helpful for both you and your user.
Types of qualitative feedback and how to collect them
There are multiple types of qualitative feedback and ways to collect them, depending on your available resources and the depth of insights you want to get. These are some of the most common ways to gather qualitative feedback: 👇
1. Open-ended surveys & questionnaires
Open-ended surveys are the most common way to collect qualitative feedback. This type of qualitative feedback has several major benefits:
- Easy to create & collect: tools like Featurebase make it easy to create in-app surveys in just a few minutes without any coding.
- Surveys and questionnaires can be distributed in any channel, from emails to text messages and in-app popups.
- All of the answers are centralized in one place—your survey software dashboard, where you can analyze them quickly (especially when using AI.
- You can quickly summarize your most important takeaways, whereas with discovery calls, etc., you have to transcribe and summarize them, which takes time and effort.
- The format is infinitely customizable, as you can ask any question.
- You can ask a mixture of quantitative and qualitative questions to first get a general overview of whatever you're measuring and also understand the "why" behind it. That's actually one of the most common methods:
This makes surveys an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to collect qualitative feedback.
2. Customer interviews
One-on-one customer interviews are arguably the best way to collect valuable insights. They can provide a wealth of information and extremely detailed feedback.
If you have the time and resources to interview customers, you can get detailed qualitative data through interviews. Unlike other formats, there is room for discussion, and you can ask follow-up questions to dispel doubts and gain insights about burning issues.
However, you also need to have good interview skills. One of the best books we've read on this topic is "The Mom Test"—it teaches you how to ask non-leading questions that actually help you understand your customers.
3. Focus groups
Focus groups allow you to collect qualitative feedback from a specific target audience segment. For example, if you have a productivity tool, you can invite only customers from the enterprise sector to ask them questions about ways to improve your app.
Focus groups typically consist of a handful of people with the same characteristics, such as industry, revenue, unique pain points, age, gender, and similar characteristics. A moderator guides the focus groups and asks questions, and the answers are used for qualitative feedback analysis later on.
A customer advisory board is a pretty popular way of doing it. It's essentially a group of key customers that your company invites to meetings to get feedback on the product, etc.
4. Usability testing
Usability tests take place when you give customers access to your product (an MVP or a testing environment) and jot down their experiences, including how they access certain features, where they click first, how easy they find the product to use, and more.
There are different types of usability testing, but the most common difference is between moderated and unmoderated testing.
In the former, test takers receive instructions, while in unmoderated testing, users are given free access to the tool to see what happens.
5. Customer support and chat logs
Gathering qualitative feedback does not necessarily involve reaching out to customers. You can simply use qualitative data analysis tools and review customer interactions to learn about common pain points and recurring themes.
6. Social media comments and online reviews
Whether you ask them or not, customers will share their opinions about you in various places.
You can use social media monitoring tools for websites and social media to find relevant comments about your product. Simply add your brand name as a keyword, and you'll get notified every time someone writes about you on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other platform.
These tools also offer qualitative feedback analysis and sort the mentions into negative, positive, and neutral buckets.
Review websites such as G2, Capterra, TrustPilot, and others are also exceptional places for collecting qualitative data. In addition to qualitative customer feedback, you'll typically get a star rating for your product.
Tip: You can use both of these platforms to get deeper insights about your competitors, too. Simply add their brand names as tracked keywords, and you'll get relevant qualitative feedback data in real-time.
7. User-generated content
If you're lucky, you'll capture much more than a review or a simple comment on social media. Some users can create longer content about your product, such as blog posts, videos, testimonials, and forum discussions.
Finding this qualitative data can be pretty easy. All you have to do is add the feedback to your centralized feedback board for further qualitative analysis.
8. Feedback forms and comment boxes
Want to gain valuable insights from your customers on autopilot without breaking a sweat? Feedback forms and comment boxes in your product let your customers give feedback on the spot.
You can use this passive feedback to learn more about customer expectations over time without having to go out of your way to ask for it specifically. It's also a super good way to show your customers you're constantly open for feedback.
Plus, you can later discuss their feedback in comments for lengthier discussions and discover more qualitative insights.
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Qualitative vs. quantitative feedback
Which is better, qualitative vs quantitative feedback? Ideally, you should collect both to get the most valuable insights.
However, before you start, here are the key differences between the two types:
The nature of data
Qualitative insights are descriptive and narrative and focus on the quality of experiences, perceptions, and opinions.
Quantitative insights are numerical and more tangible, focusing on quantity, such as ratings or percentages.
The depth of insights
Qualitative feedback allows customers to share as much as they want since the questions are typically open-ended.
Quantitative feedback assigns a numerical value to a customer's insight, such as a CES survey score. While this makes it easy to measure and compare feedback, it does not always provide enough details.
The complexity of the analysis
When choosing between qualitative or quantitative feedback, many businesses opt for quantitative because it's easier to analyze.
With the right tools, you can analyze 10,000 survey results in seconds. You'll learn the average result, which types of users tend to give higher or lower results, and how that compares to previous surveys you ran.
On the other hand, qualitative feedback is traditionally more challenging to analyze. Even with the help of AI and modern sentiment analysis tools, you'll still have to do a lot of manual work to identify recurring themes and pain points and draw conclusions.
The challenges of collecting qualitative feedback
While it can help gain valuable insights about your customers, qualitative feedback does have a few downsides:
- Time-consuming collection and analysis: Without the right tools, collecting and analyzing qualitative data can require hours upon hours every week and month.
- Subjectivity and bias: Qualitative feedback is swayed by the respondents' feelings, biases, and unique experiences like any other feedback type.
- Data overload and complexity: Feedback from various locations, which is usually unstructured, can overwhelm any business.
- Difficulty in quantifying results: While stacking up survey responses to an average number is easy, you can't easily quantify reviews of focus group insights.
- Issues with representative sampling: Not all users will be willing to provide qualitative feedback, which can lead to a skewed sample.
- Limited scalability: For most teams, scaling qualitative feedback methods requires hiring an additional team member.
- Interpreting ambiguous responses: Some customer insights won't be black and white, and it's up to your team to determine what the customer meant.
However, all of these challenges can be overcome if you use the right tool! 👇
Conclusion
Featurebase helps you collect all of your feedback in one place with the help of surveys, in-app forms, integrations, and a feedback forum.
You can easily analyze qualitative feedback with AI, prioritize ideas by customer revenue, identify impactful product decisions, and ultimately build something your users love!
The onboarding is amazingly quick, and it comes with a Free plan, so there's no downside to trying it. 👇
Start collecting & analyzing customer feedback with Featurebase today →
The all-in-one tool for customer feedback, changelogs, surveys, and more. Built-in the 🇪🇺.