Definition
Verbatim feedback is qualitative evidence captured as close as possible to the way a person expressed it. It may be an open-text survey response, a comment submitted through a feedback form, a review, a support message, or a transcript excerpt. The defining feature is preservation: the wording is retained instead of being reduced immediately to a theme or score.
Teams use verbatim feedback to hear the customer’s language directly, identify recurring needs or pain points, and generate hypotheses for further investigation. A single comment can be vivid and useful, but it does not by itself show how common an issue is. Strong analysis combines verbatims with response volume, audience or journey context, and observed behavior.
Verbatim feedback is not the same as quantitative feedback. A rating such as an NPS score or a conversion rate summarizes a measurable result; a verbatim explains the person’s perspective in more detail. Both can be used together: Contentsquare describes open-ended follow-up questions as a way to understand the “why” behind numerical ratings.
What does that mean
It means keeping a person’s own words instead of changing them into a short label right away. The exact words can reveal what felt confusing, helpful, or frustrating to that person.
Why this matters
Verbatim feedback adds human context to metrics and helps teams form better questions about an experience. Marketing and Ecommerce teams can use it to understand hesitation or abandonment; Product and UX/UI teams can use it to discover needs and prioritize improvements; Data teams can compare themes with behavior and segment differences.
Use cases
Understand why people hesitate or leave
Marketing and Ecommerce teams may see a page with a high exit rate or an abandoned journey without knowing what caused the problem. An open-ended survey or feedback prompt can capture the visitor’s words at a relevant moment, such as before leaving or after an important step. Reviewing recurring verbatims alongside journey and conversion data helps teams distinguish unclear messaging, missing information, friction, or a technical obstacle, so they can improve the experience and reduce avoidable abandonment.
Turn customer language into product improvements
Product and UX/UI teams often have many possible improvements but limited evidence about which problems matter most. They can collect verbatim responses to questions such as what users value, what frustrates them, or what they would improve, then group similar comments into themes and compare those themes across audiences. This creates a clearer evidence base for roadmap discussions while keeping the customer’s original language available for interpretation and communication.
Connect what people say with what they do
Data and UX/UI teams may have a compelling comment but not enough context to explain what happened before it was submitted. They can connect a response to the relevant session, page, event, or segment and compare the reported issue with observed behavior. This helps validate whether the comment reflects a broader pattern, identify the point of friction, and prioritize changes based on both customer impact and behavioral evidence.
See it in practice
TechSmith used on-page surveys to ask visitors about frustrations and what they valued, then organized the open-ended responses into themes. The team combined those customer words with behavioral data to guide UX and product decisions, rather than relying on assumptions alone.
How Contentsquare helps
Surveys collect open-ended responses at relevant moments, analyze response themes and sentiment, and connect feedback to related session replays.
Voice of Customer brings survey and feedback collection together with behavioral context so teams can act on customer insights more quickly.
Session Replay lets teams watch what a respondent experienced before or after leaving feedback, helping them investigate the context behind a verbatim.
User Segmentation helps compare feedback and behavior across relevant audiences, such as device groups, customer cohorts, or users who completed different journey steps.
FAQs on verbatim feedback
A comment such as “I could not tell which button would continue” is verbatim feedback when it is preserved as the respondent wrote or said it. The wording can later be tagged as a navigation or clarity issue, but the original comment remains available.