Feedback widgets are one of the best ways to boost customer feedback and figure out what your users really want. But setting up your own feedback widget and maximizing its potential is not as easy as one might think.

Let’s go over what user feedback tools are, how they can help you, and how to streamline feedback widgets for your business. Plus, we’ll tell you why you should give our very own feedback widget tool a try.

What Are Customer Feedback Widgets?

Generally speaking, widgets are elements inserted into your website’s code that help display certain information. Essentially, they are small bits of software that serve specific functions. In this case, feedback widgets help you connect to your customers and collect information from them. This information can include everything from their user experience, ratings or reviews, customer testimonials, or quick surveys.

While it might not seem like a vital resource, the information you gather from feedback forms can give you important insights and data points that will help you along your product journey. A customer feedback widget can tell you:

• Where your customers are in their journey with you
• The most common pain points
• How satisfied they are with your customer service
• Why and how your product is being used the most
• What demographics use your product the most

The Benefits of Having A Feedback Widget

On top of what we’ve already talked about, customer feedback widgets can be helpful in many other ways as well. Here’s a few of them.

More Information For Customer Support and Development

Feedback widgets can help give customer support teams background information that can help them solve customer queries and tickets quicker and easier than before. 

Product feedback can also help you figure out any common pain points your users may have, in turn making it easier to figure out which items your development team should prioritize before their next release.

More Feedback for Less Effort

Feedback widgets are a great way to make giving feedback easy and pain-free for your users. Let’s face it--getting feedback from your customers can be difficult, and if your customers have to dig for a way to give you their thoughts, they might not want to do it. But by giving them an easy and convenient way to give your team simple feedback, you can encourage your customers to give you insights you might not get otherwise.

Organize Your Support Flow

Having a simple customer feedback tool on your site can help you organize your support tickets by type--for instance, user experience, bugs, or feature requests. It’s a great way to streamline and deal with large amounts of feedback at once, so you can get back to your customers quicker and more efficiently, and even figure out which pieces of feedback to prioritize.

Show Your Customers You Care

Last but not least, allowing for open communication with feedback widgets and showing a willingness to hear from users are great ways to show your customers you care about what they have to say. This in turn can make them feel valued, cementing their loyalty to your product and helping you retain your user base.

Top Tips

Now that we’ve gone over how feedback widgets can help you, let’s discuss how to get the most out of them.

Keep It Brief

Feedback widgets aren’t meant to collect large amounts of information, and shouldn’t be used as such. Remember: you’re trying to entice your users to give you information, not make it hard for them to do so. Simply put: ask for what you need, and nothing more.

One of the best ways to make sure your feedback widget isn’t too clunky and hard to navigate is to beta test it, both within your team and with some test users. Having real users try out your feedback widget can help you know what works and what doesn’t.

Don’t Frustrate Your Users

Widgets are meant to make it easy for your customers to give feedback on your product. But if you complicate things too much and add too many steps or options, your users might get frustrated and give up, negating one of the biggest benefits of these widgets in the first place.

Make sure your feedback widgets are easy to navigate and as simple as possible. Get to the point of whatever information you collect, and get rid of all unnecessary steps. Do you want a quick review of how easy it is to use your product? Just ask that question–and make a longer survey available if you want–but don’t continue to ask a bunch of follow-up questions on what they do and don’t like in the widget itself.

Likewise, it’s also important to give your users an out. Not everyone will want to participate, and that’s okay. But don’t make them feel forced into answering, and be upfront about your expectations.

Keep Design in Mind

The placement and design of your feedback widget is just as important as its contents. You’ll need to make sure the widget is clean and user-friendly; don’t overwhelm your users with unnecessary logos, images or walls of text.

Furthermore, it’s important to think about where exactly your feedback widget is going to go. You’ll want it to be prominent and visible from your home page as well as your other high-traffic pages to get maximum exposure. 

Keep things sorted & prioritized

In order to make the most out of all the feedback you get from your users, you’ll need to have a good system for collecting and organizing it. This will allow you to better analyze it for trends and common pain points, and even help you better plan out your next steps in your product journey,

UserVitals is a great way to help you collect customer feedback from around the internet–for example, from feedback widgets, social media sites and other integrations–and sort it by location, type and label to make it even easier for you to see the bigger picture.

Check out more about our platform here.

How to Use UserVitals’ Feedback Widget

We’ve also recently launched our new, stand-alone feedback widget for everyone from small teams to startups. It’s easy to install and configure and best of all, it’s free!

Our widget is also heavily customizable: you can choose the location, questions asked, and much more. We gather information on new and existing customers to help you figure out where the feedback is coming from as well, and integrate with platforms like Slack, Zapier and email. You can set up notifications for each new piece of information, and view all of it together in your widget inbox.

Learn more about our new feedback widget today.