4 ways to collect real-time feedback from your customers

Tired of fixing problems after they’ve already cost you?

By the time most feedback reaches you, it’s too late—the damage is done. But collecting real-time customer feedback helps you identify issues as they happen, giving you the chance to fix them before they impact satisfaction, retention, or revenue.

It’s a fast, cost-effective way to understand what your customers love (and what’s not working). That way, you can fix problems before they grow and amplify what’s already making a positive impact.

In this post, we give you 4 different ways to collect real-time customer feedback on your website (and beyond) so you can focus your energy where it matters most and create experiences your customers love.

1. Add a feedback button to your website

A feedback button gives visitors navigating your website the opportunity to leave quantitative feedback (like 1-to-5 satisfaction stars or angry-to-happy emojis) and qualitative comments about what they like (or don’t) in real time.

A Contentsquare Feedback Collection button in action

Website feedback buttons help you

• Collect continuous feedback without interrupting the customer journey (users can use the button without needing to navigate away from the page) 

• Give customers a way to self-report issues, like broken web design elements or unclear content, so your team can quickly intervene

• Get a quantitative baseline to measure the overall user experience (UX), which you can also monitor for drops

How to do it: use a website feedback tool like Contentsquare’s feedback collection via Voice of Customer to add a feedback button to your website. On your Surveys page, click New survey and select the ‘Collect feedback’ creation method to start the survey creation page with a feedback button set up.

You can also customize your feedback button or widget to

• Change colors and emoji styles

• Pick where it shows up on the page

• Edit the follow-up question

• Choose if you want it to display sitewide or only for specific pages, actions, or users

Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer (VoC) capabilities let you fully customize your feedback tools, so the data you collect is actionable and aligned with your business priorities

💡Pro tip: website feedback isn’t always clear—an angry comment or a happy emoji, in isolation, might not tell you exactly what your website visitor was experiencing. 

The solution: combine responses with other behavior insights data to understand the big picture. With Contentsquare, you can go straight from a feedback response to the corresponding session replay, giving you the context you need to take action.

Click the ‘Session replay’ button to watch the corresponding replays from feedback responses

2. Trigger website surveys based on user actions

Not all real-time customer feedback is equally important to your business; triggering a website survey on key pages or after users take a certain action—like abandoning checkout or scrolling to the bottom of a product page—allows you to focus on the most impactful feedback first. 

For example, if you’re using Contentsquare, you can trigger a survey to appear when a user action or event you've specified is present on a page, such as

• When a user leaves the checkout page without completing their purchase. Ask something like: "It looks like you were about to place an order. Can you tell us what stopped you?"

• When Contentsquare detects multiple rapid clicks (rage clicking) on a specific element. A survey could appear saying: "We noticed you might be having trouble. Is there anything we can do to help?"

• If a user starts filling out a form but leaves before submitting. Trigger a survey like: "Was something unclear or missing? Let us know how we can improve this form."

Targeted surveys help you

• Identify (and fix) tangible causes of drop-offs in your conversion funnel

• Reveal why users are angry or frustrated, particularly when triggered after a rage click 

• Make data-driven decisions with a wealth of qualitative data, so you know where to focus your efforts and what optimizations to prioritize

How to do it: head over to Contentsquare Surveys, then select a survey template or use our AI capability to create a survey based on your prompt. You can then customize your survey questions and appearance, and target certain devices, pages, and user segments.

Use Contentsquare AI to create a new website survey

To take advantage of the real-time nature of this tool, set up response forwarding so responses are sent to your team’s communication tool of choice—including Slack and Microsoft Teams—as soon as a user fills in a survey.

💡Pro tip: if you’re A/B testing designs with a tool like Optimizely, Contentsquare Surveys lets you trigger a survey on a specific page variant. Collecting real-time qualitative feedback alongside quantitative test results helps you understand why winning designs perform better and gives you ideas to iterate on in future tests.

Surveys help you get answers from your customers without getting in the way

3. Set up a live chat app

Live chat gives your website visitors the opportunity to leave instant feedback and receive a real-time response from an automated chatbot or customer support agent.

For example, at the bottom of each Contentsquare help doc, we ask users “Was this article helpful?” If they click ‘No’, a live chat app is triggered, which asks, “Need help? You can submit a ticket to our Support team here!” The real-time responses help us update our content so more users can easily get answers to their questions fast and easy.

A live chat app is triggered if users click ‘No’ on any of our help docs so we find out how to improve

Live chatbots help you

• Troubleshoot and solve user problems straight away

• Create support tickets and follow up on issues at a later date if required

• Collect information about the most common topics or website features your customers struggle with, so you can turn their negative experience into a positive one. For example, if users repeatedly miss a specific piece of information, consider making it more prominent or providing more guidance on how to find it.

How to do it: use a tool like Zendesk, HelpScout, or Intercom to add a live chat widget to your website. 

💡Pro tip: if you’re using Contentsquare, you can filter session replays by users who clicked on your live chat button to see how they browsed and what they struggled with before they asked for help. 

As they view session recordings relating to individual support tickets, this helps customer success agents better solve issues in real time, and gives web design and UX designers the insights they need to improve website design and aid conversions. 

Get a closer look at your user experiences and a better understanding of survey response context with Session Replay

4. Run in-depth user interviews

Running user interviews, either remotely or in person, gives you the chance to collect detailed real-time feedback face-to-face.

A Contentsquare remote user interview with an automated transcript

User interviews help you

• Collect real-time qualitative feedback on any project, even if it’s still in development

• Validate website designs straight away without waiting for issues to occur

• Get a richer understanding of how your UX works as a whole by asking follow-up questions 

How to do it: Contentsquare’s Interviews capability lets you recruit participants from your existing audience or find people who match your target audience from our testing pool of 200,000+ participants. All interviews are automatically recorded and transcribed so you can highlight and share notes with other team members. 

💡Pro tip: the best way to get valuable real-time feedback from your user interviews is to ask open-ended questions (i.e. nothing that can be answered with ‘yes’ or ‘no’). 

If people are struggling to give you longer answers, encourage them to elaborate by asking follow-ups like, “Can you tell me more about that?” or “What specifically did you find interesting/challenging about that?” 

For more tips, see our guide to mastering user interviews. 

Turn real-time feedback into long-term growth

Real-time feedback gives you instant insight into what’s happening on your website, which makes it very tempting to just jump in and start making changes! 

But you first need to take a step back and look at feedback in the context of insights from heatmaps, session replays, and other digital experience insights tools. By understanding the bigger picture, you’ll confidently prioritize high-impact fixes that satisfy users and drive business growth.

Observability for product teams: the what, why, who, and howFAQs about real-time feedback