Best Tools and Widgets for In-app Feedback Collection

Collecting feedback has slowly become one of the most important activities for any customer support team out there. Even if you’re not looking to improve a certain aspect of your SaaS product, getting some feedback will not hurt your efforts at all. In fact, you can gain valuable insights that can help you refine your offer and stand out against the competition.

There are countless ways to collect feedback from your customers, and not all of them work well for every business and audience out there. Today, we’ll talk about in-app feedback, i.e. collecting it directly from your own SaaS application.

Why collect feedback from within your app?

For the most part, customers won’t leave any feedback on their own. However, 70% of them will leave a review if you ask them. Asking them to leave it directly in the app has a couple of benefits that we’ll go through now.

1. The ease of use

As customers can leave feedback directly in the app that they’re using, they don’t have to write emails, go to social media or third-party review sites.

They’re already there in the product they’re about to review. Since you already know who they are (you have their name and email and other contact and product usage deetails), you can make sending feedback as easy as filling a single text field.

1. More accuracy

What better place to leave feedback about a design flaw in your app than that very app? If you force customers to go through different steps to leave feedback, they may lose sight of the aspects of your app they want to talk about.

1. Easier to manage data

When most of your customers leave feedback in one place, it’s easier to manage and store the feedback data. When you use a feedback tool such as FeedBear, you can then put all the data from your app on a feedback board, prioritize it and sort it and push it to a roadmap.

Having said all that, most SaaS apps don’t have a native feature for getting feedback from their customers. Today, we’ll take a look at some of the best tools for providing customer feedback within your SaaS application.

Types of in-app feedback tools

There are two main types of tools that allow you to capture feedback within a SaaS application:

• Active
• Passive

Active tools are those which require the user to take an action (fill out a form or survey, rate a part of your app, etc.). Passive tools collect feedback in the background - your customers don’t have to do a thing.

Which one is better? The reality is that both play a vital part in determining what a user thinks about your SaaS product. However, there is no replacement for actually going out and asking your customers questions rather than waiting for them to come to you with feedback. Being proactive is key when collecting quality feedback from your customers.

Active tools and widgets

There’s no better way to find out what a customer thinks about your app than asking them. These tools let you ask the questions and your customers can respond right in your application.

FeedBear

As they’re using your app, your customers may run into problems they want you to solve. FeedBear lets them voice their opinions immediately instead of sending an email to customer support, or using another method to contact you (the harder it is, the lower the probability they’ll ever get in touch with you).

With an in-app widget and a straightforward, fast user experience you get a lot more feedback.

FeedBear lets you collect feedback from various sources and put it on a feedback board. This is the place where it all starts - feature requests get pooled into one location. This way, similar and duplicate requests can’t happen.

Using FeedBear, you can send your customers to your feedback board directly from your product. Most FeedBear users add a link to this board from the product footer or in the support conversations within the product.

The second way is to embed a feedback widget directly within your web application and let customers give feedback and ideas in your app without taking them anywhere else.

What’s more, customers can vote on ideas in the board. If a request resonates with them, they can give it an upvote so it reaches your product team sooner.

You can then immediately turn your most desired features into a plan for the future. This means creating a product roadmap - private or public, your choice. FeedBear lets you do that with just a few clicks.

Once the features go live, everyone that requested them, left a comment or upvoted gets a notification and an email - the ideal way to close the feedback loop. You can also create a changelog to keep new and existing users informed about the changes going on.

Some notable features of FeedBear include:

• User identification
• Duplicate prevention (as a customer starts writing the title for their feedback, they get suggested the existing posts with the same/similar name)
• Color customization
• The ability to hook the widget to any website element you wish

The great news is that you can try out FeedBear for free! Sign up today to get started.

Pricing starts at $49/month.

Pendo

If you want your customers to leave feedback directly within the product, Pendo is one of the most popular apps out there. Just copy and paste a few lines of code and Pendo’s feedback widget will show up for everyone who uses your app.

Pendo is not designed as a feedback app exclusively. The in-app aspect allows you to communicate with customers in different ways. You can leave them messages to guide them in specific directions.

Want your customers to try out a new feature that you just launched? Need to onboard them in a way that is natural and doesn’t require lengthy email sequences? Pendo could fit the bill with ease.

You can place the specific message you want on the pages that you want them to show up. That way, you can use Pendo to get feedback about a page/feature as the customer is on that page. At any time, they have the option of requesting a feature directly from the app instead of going through other, more formal channels.

This is just one aspect of the app and there are lots of other useful features in Pendo. However, the downside is the pricing. You won’t see it available publicly but different sources online say that prices start at $2,000 per year and up, with some going up to $30,000 per year.

While Pendo is a superb feedback app, the price is a rather limiting aspect that will deter most SaaS companies that want in-app feedback alone.

Passive tools and widgets for feedback collection

As mentioned, these are the tools that run in the background of your website or app, collecting data about your customers - what they do and which actions they (don’t) take.

Google Analytics

The number one tool you should be using is the one most marketers and product specialists neglect. Analytics is Google’s most basic, free offer and with some tinkering, it could give you more insights than most paid tools out there.

Source

When set up properly, it can show you which pages get the most traffic, which pages are underperforming, where your customers come from and how they reach your app website.

To get the most out of GA, make sure to set up goals related to different activities in your app. For example, if you set a goal where a customer comes to your website, signs up and starts using a key feature of your app, you’ll see that goal performance immediately in your dashboard.

Despite being free, Google Analytics has one major flaw. It’s rather quantitative in nature so you’ll see lots of different metrics with no meaningful way to interpret them. You’ll know that a page is getting less views than you want, but you won’t be able to tell why.

This is where qualitative feedback tools like Hotjar come into place.

Hotjar

One of the best-known UX and design research tools in the market, Hotjar has been around for years, making lives easier for product, marketing, and sales. There are several aspects of the tool that make it a great choice for collecting feedback passively.

First of all, there are the session recordings. With the permission of the visitor, Hotjar records their activities from the moment they land on your website until they leave. For a SaaS application, this can tell you the exact patterns someone takes while getting to a feature in your app.

Perhaps you have a feature that is crucial for new users and your UX is making it difficult for your customers to access it. Through recordings, you can see if your assumption about your product are correct or not.

Moreover, Hotjar has a famous heatmap feature. As customers go through your pages, they get marked in different colors. Based on the amount of time they spend on a certain aspect of the page, it changes colors. The more people spend time in a certain angle/section, the “hotter” it gets.

These are great ways to collect feedback passively and learn about potential roadblocks in your user experience. Besides these, Hotjar has a survey feature to collect feedback in a more active manner, but it’s not as advanced as proper survey tools.

Wrapping up

So, what’s the better alternative, passive or active tools for collecting feedback within your app? The truth is, it’s best to use both to allow your customers to tell you their own story as well as collect the feedback they don’t want to share willingly.

And if you’re looking for one tool that makes it easy to collect feedback and keep your customers in the loop about new changes to your product, give FeedBear a try! From collecting feedback in a board to creating a product roadmap and a changelog, we have all the features any product manager, marketer, or sales professional might want. Sign up today for a free trial to get started!