Types of Customer Feedback: Direct & Indirect Feedback Signals to Understand Customers

Direct and indirect signals are two types of customer feedback that help businesses understand customers, meet their needs, and drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention, along with overall business performance.

Customer experience (CX) influences how customers feel about a brand and whether they become repeat customers, ultimately shaping customer loyalty and retention.

The challenge is that many businesses lack both a clear picture of the type of customer experience they’re offering and insights into steps they can take to improve it. That’s where customer feedback comes into play.

Customer feedback helps companies understand their customers and measure customer sentiment, which enhances CX. Savvy organizations leverage different types of customer feedback from across channels and customer interactions to ensure customers feel heard, uncover customer needs in the moment, and improve customer experience.

Data-Rich Signals: The Types of Customer Feedback You Need to Know

Direct feedback, indirect feedback, and inferred feedback are the main types of customer feedback that every organization should collect and analyze. They are sourced from the customer signals attached to touchpoints and interactions throughout the customer journey.

Within these types of customer feedback, the data gathered falls into the category of structured data or unstructured data.

Direct customer feedback

Everyone knows direct feedback — it’s been around for decades. The earliest formats in the modern age were paper surveys and physical comment cards for reviews. Today, thanks to technology, the ability to capture direct feedback is much more widespread.

Customers can now tell a brand exactly what they think through surveys and feedback forms served to them through countless channels, such as emails, text messages, website popups, QR codes on flyers, and more. They can also share their feedback through video, helping CX leaders get a more complete picture of their customers’ experiences.

Indirect customer feedback

Indirect feedback is unsolicited, meaning it’s composed of signals in which customers aren’t asked a question or given a dedicated channel to provide feedback. This often takes place in channels such as online review websites, social media comments and mentions, and contact center calls, emails, and live chat sessions.

Information and activity from an organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform, point of sale (POS) system, visit patterns, event data, and digital experience analytics all fall under indirect customer feedback as well.

Inferred customer feedback

Inferred feedback is a collection of insights gained by tracking operational and behavioral data, without relying solely on your customers’ solicited or unsolicited opinions.

Inferred feedback differs from indirect feedback in revealing underlying trends and preferences without requiring customers to articulate their thoughts. It is a vital source of feedback for influencing proactive product and customer service improvements.

Brands can gather inferred feedback from website clickstream data, transaction history, and customer behavior patterns.

Structured customer feedback

Structured data is quantitative data that can be categorized into a specific field in a database or spreadsheet. It includes multiple-choice survey responses, ratings, customer demographic information, and transactions.

Unstructured customer feedback

Unstructured data is qualitative data drawn from unstructured sources — think strings of text, such as the responses to open-ended survey questions, social media comments, online reviews, contact center call logs, emails, and live chat transcripts.

AI-powered text analytics and speech analytics can be used to analyze and assess the meaning of large volumes of unstructured customer feedback data to reveal common topics, insights, and trends hidden among these customer interactions. The AI analyzes vocal attributes — tone, pitch, and inflection — for granular insights into the sentiments that may go unnoticed in written feedback or manual evaluations.

5 reasons why customer feedback is central to customer experience

Customer feedback is crucial for a customer experience strategy. It’s the clearest indicator of what customers are saying and how they’re feeling. With it, a brand knows its biggest opportunities — and challenges. Without it, a brand disappoints customers and their loyalty shifts to the competition.

Here are the reasons why customer feedback is important:

1. Identifies areas for optimization: Customer feedback helps an organization identify where products and services are falling short of expectations. By listening to feedback, a brand transforms challenges into opportunities driving the business forward.

2. Enhances customer satisfaction: When organizations take customer feedback seriously and make changes based on it, the brand achieves greater customer satisfaction. Customers feel valued when their opinions are heard and acted upon, which leads to increased loyalty and repeat purchases.

3. Unlocks a competitive advantage: Consistently collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback allows an organization to create personalized experiences for each and every customer. Brands that listen to customers are less likely to face a tidal wave of customer service inquiries and are more likely to attract (and retain) customers over time.

4. Increases revenue: By using customer feedback to improve customer experience and delight customers, brands increase sales revenue.

5. Inspires product development: Customers know what they want, and a brand finds that out in customer feedback. Once it’s obtained, organizations leverage the insights to either improve existing offerings or introduce entirely new ones.

CX professionals recognize the importance of customer feedback and use it as motivation to plan and launch a successful customer experience program.

Brands Need Direct & Indirect Customer Feedback to Succeed

Brands across industries rely on customer feedback to improve their products and services, innovate, and keep customers coming back. Collecting, analyzing, and acting on different types of customer feedback helps companies improve customer and business outcomes, from customer satisfaction and loyalty to longer-term sustainable revenue gains.