Real-Time Customer Feedback: Definition, Benefits, and Best Practices for SaaS

Customer feedback is crucial for offering deep insights into your SaaS product. This is especially true if your feedback process allows you to capture user opinions in real time.

According to a Microsoft study, 77% of customers view a business more favorably if it actively seeks out and acts on user feedback. Therefore, collecting real-time feedback helps you not only improve your product but also earn your customers’ trust.

In this guide, we will explore real-time feedback in detail and how you can start collecting it to build better products. 👇

Summary

• Definition: Real-time customer feedback is collecting user opinions and reactions immediately as they interact with your product, providing the most up to date and actionable insights.
• Benefits: Real-time feedback helps you build customer trust and loyalty, improves engagement and response rates, and allows for immediate issue identification and quick improvements.
• Collection methods: Effective methods for gathering real-time feedback include in-app surveys, feedback widgets, and live chat options, each offering unique advantages for capturing passively customer sentiment.
• Best practices: Focus on collecting both qualitative and quantitative feedback, ensure you close the feedback loop by acting on and responding to feedback, and keep feedback asks short and relevant to the user’s experience.

What is real-time customer feedback?

Real-time customer feedback is the immediate collection of user opinions and reactions as they interact with your product. 

Real-time feedback, whether right after an online transaction or at the end of a chat with customer support, offers the most accurate description of a user’s thoughts. This is because the experience is fresh in their minds, allowing for an honest reaction.

A real-time feedback system will help you address user concerns right away and gain valuable customer insights.

✨ Collect real-time feedback with Featurebase for free →

Benefits of real-time customer feedback

Real-time customer feedback is super important for SaaS products. It offers many benefits in addition to traditional feedback collection:

1. Builds customer trust and loyalty

Real-time feedback demonstrates that you value your customers' opinions. When users see that their input is quickly acknowledged and acted upon, it fosters a sense of trust and loyalty.

Your responsiveness shows that you are committed to providing an exceptional user experience. As a result, you boost customer satisfaction and retention which leads to business growth.

2. Accurate and immediate

Real-time feedback is captured when the user’s experience is fresh, ensuring the accuracy of the information. 

The immediate nature of this feedback reduces the chances of recall bias, where customers forget crucial details over time.

3. Boosts customer engagement and response rates

A real-time customer feedback system, including in-app widgets or chat support, is more engaging for users.

The convenience of these readily available feedback methods results in higher response rates. This is because users are more likely to provide thoughtful feedback when it doesn’t interrupt their workflow.

4. Enables you to identify issues right away

Real-time feedback allows you to catch and address issues as they occur, minimizing their impact on the user experience.

Early detection of problems helps prevent widespread user frustration and potential churn.

5. Helps you make quick improvements

Instant user feedback provides actionable product insights that you can implement quickly. This agility allows for fast-paced software development, aligning it more closely with user needs. ⚡

For instance, if you get real-time feedback on how confusing it is to navigate your app, your team will be able to make adjustments right away. As a result, existing users won’t be dissatisfied for long, and future users won’t face similar negative experiences from the get-go.

How to collect real-time customer feedback

Collecting real-time data is not difficult at all. Here are the 3 most popular methods of collecting it.

1. In-app surveys

In-app surveys are short, simple feedback forms within your product that users can fill out immediately. You can trigger them right after certain events, like support chats, onboarding completion, etc.

But their biggest advantage for users is convenience. Since customers don’t have to leave your app and visit a third-party site, they are more likely to provide feedback.

On the other hand, your business benefits in terms of scalability. In-app surveys help scale up (quantitative) data collection and reach a wider audience.

There are tons of different types of surveys and questions you can ask to measure different things. But some of the most common ones for SaaS are:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Customer loyalty metric that measures how likely a user is to recommend the product to others.
• Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT): Measures immediate customer satisfaction, typically by using emojis. You can also queue a follow-up text field to collect additional qualitative feedback.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): Measures the perceived effort from customers in using your product. It operates on the principle that the less effort a customer puts in while using your app, the more satisfied they will be.

Therefore, in-app customer feedback surveys provide a quick and easy way to better understand customer behavior.

2. Feedback collection forms

Placing feedback forms at various customer touchpoints in your app will help you passively collect user insights. Since they are readily available, they allow customers to provide feedback on their own time.

The biggest advantage of such “always-on” feedback collection methods is that customers don’t suffer from survey fatigue. Instead of feeling obliged to fill out a questionnaire, they provide their thoughts as they occur to them on your app.

As a result, you get higher response rates and a realistic picture of your customers’ opinions.

3. Customer support chat

The live chat option is a great way to engage customers in dialogue while helping them resolve their problems.

During support interactions, users often provide valuable insights into their experiences, preferences, and pain points.

As a result, your team gains a deeper understanding of what your customers are looking for. Meanwhile, your customers feel heard and valued, which boosts their loyalty to your business.

Feedback tools, like Featurebase, help you consolidate this feedback into one easy-to-manage place. Users will also be automatically updated about the status of their feature requests and more.

For instance, if a user requests “dark mode”, they’ll be subscribed to the relevant feature post on the feedback board.

This automatically creates an issue for your developers to implement. And the user will get an automatic email notification when their request is live.

Best practices for collecting real-time customer feedback

Collecting real-time feedback is not rocket science, but there are a few best practices. Let’s look at a few most important ones:

1. Focus on both qualitative and quantitative feedback

Collect a mix of qualitative and quantitative data to gain a comprehensive understanding of user experiences.

Qualitative feedback provides in-depth insights, while quantitative data offers measurable and actionable metrics.

Quantitative data helps you identify trends, and qualitative data provides an explanation of those trends and patterns. Both types of feedback combine to help you make informed decisions about improving your product.

2. Close the customer feedback loop

Always respond to the feedback you receive. Inform customers about the actions taken based on their input. This closure reinforces that you value their feedback and are committed to improving their user experience.

Changelog tools are excellent for consistently updating customers on the status of their valuable feedback.

Featurebase, for instance, lets you intuitively publish product updates and automatically send users emails about it to help keep everyone in the loop.

But the best way, again, is to bring those updates inside your app. This is where your users are most active and engaged.

3. Keep feedback requests short and relevant

To encourage more users to provide feedback, ensure that your asks are concise. Plus, the closer your feedback request is linked to their recent interactions with your app, the more likely they are to respond.

In Featurebase, you can trigger surveys right after a dedicated action, giving you the latest feedback possible.

Examples of real-time customer feedback collection

Now that you understand the theory let’s look at a few real-world examples of SaaS businesses collecting real-time feedback.

1. How we do it

One way we at Featurebase collect real-time customer feedback is through Intercom's support chats. We channel feature requests to voting boards using our Intercom integration.

But I think the more interesting example is what we do on our Integrations marketing page.

The problem is that users come to research our tool and may look for specific integrations that we don't have. Then, they usually skip to the next competitor without giving it a second thought.

However, we added a survey popup asking users what integrations they would like to see us add next. 👇

It offers a nice overview of what integrations we might be missing. But the best thing about this feedback system is that it engages potential customers that we can respond to and nurture.

2. Slack real-time feedback example

One of the best things about Slack is its commands. Slack has a product-wide /feedback command to let Slack users submit feedback to Slack itself. This works in any workspace.

You can do the same thing for your own product with our Slack integration, which lets users use the / command to submit feature requests to your voting boards.

3. Asana real-time feedback example

It’s never good to see a customer go, but Asana uses this opportunity to gain more insight into them. As soon as a user cancels their plan, they are met with a survey that asks them why they want to leave.

Exit surveys like these are a great way to show that you’re open to negative feedback and improvement and demonstrate your commitment to ensuring a great user experience until the very end. 

Even if you fail to retain the customer, you learn something valuable that helps you further improve your product.

4. How Jira collects real-time feedback

JiraJira knows the power of collecting feedback right after a key interaction. When you publish a project page, Jira triggers a survey that asks you to rate your experience.

This type of customer feedback collection is helpful for both the business and the customer.

Final thoughts

Real-time feedback from users is powerful for SaaS products. It provides immediate and actionable insights that enhance customer experience and product quality. It also helps you build stronger customer relationships and make timely improvements.

Featurebase is one of the best tools for collecting real-time feedback, with features like in-app feedback forms and surveys. With its user-friendly interface, Featurebase helps you gather, analyze, and act on feedback efficiently.

The onboarding process is incredibly simple, and it comes with a Free Plan that allows for unlimited feedback, so there's no downside to trying it. 👇

Start collecting real-time feedback with Featurebase today!