Surveys and feedback forms are useful tools for growth and marketing professionals. Before purchasing a product or service, survey forms aim to understand the customer's thoughts, expectations, and beliefs. After the purchase, feedback forms help get insights into customer experience, product usage, and the impact of your offerings on customers. In this blog, we will dive into surveys and forms - how they differ, when to use which, and best practices to make them.

Surveys Are the Voice of Your Audience

Surveys are a research technique. Think of them like conversing with your audience or customers on a mass scale to align your marketing messages. They help paint a picture of your customers' preferences, desires, and challenges. Here's how to make them count:

• Set the goal: Define what you want to learn from your survey. If there’s no clear goal, at least begin with a hypothesis. Is it to identify market trends, gather product ideas, or measure brand perception? Your goal or hypothesis will lead to better questions.

• Question Quality: Ask clear and concise questions. Mix quantitative queries (like ratings) with qualitative ones (like open-ended responses) for a well-rounded view of what’s happening in a target customer’s mind.

• Segmentation and Targeting: Personalize your surveys to specific customer segments for more relevant insights. If you have two kinds of buyers for a SaaS product - monthly buyers and annually subscribed ones - send them a specific survey each for sharper data collection.

Feedback Forms Are to Improve User Experience

Feedback forms come into use when gathering direct responses about specific products, services, or experiences. They help improve customer experience - product usage, service quality, or onboarding.

Whether it's about a website redesign or a webinar, these forms provide firsthand accounts of your customers’ experience - positive or negative. What makes a good feedback form?

• Specificity is Key: Target specific interactions. If you’re asking for feedback on a customer service call, use pointed questions like “Did you find the information shared on the call useful?” instead of “How was your experience?”. With this set in place, you can try AI form-building platforms like WorkHack to capture specific data points via logical conditions.

• Encourage Honesty: Indicate via the form that the data will be kept secure. Or you could also take anonymous feedback where you don’t ask personal details but at least ask a qualifying question to know which “segment” the customer belongs to.

• Follow-Up Opportunities: Use feedback forms to reassure customers that their concerns will be resolved by a certain date and time. Plus, thank customers for positive feedback to encourage further communication and increase trust in your brand.

Survey Forms vs Feedback Forms: Quick Summary

The main takeaway is that survey forms are meant to be used for exploration before the purchase has happened in a specific customer segment or across all. Conversely, feedback forms occur when the customer already engages with your product or service.

With this basic difference set in place, create a survey or a feedback form with the right intent and examine the results to take action.

If you want to use a growth experimentation AI-Forms platform, check out WorkHack forms, where we already have templates to pick and use in interactive forms that are quick to ship and collect data fast.