4 inspiring examples of user feedback's impact on real businesses

Want to discover the user feedback tactics a popular ecommerce business employed to gain a 400% return on investment (ROI)? Or learn how an online real estate company used customer feedback to spot and resolve bugs that could have hurt conversions?

Keep reading to discover how four companies tapped into deeper customer insights with user feedback.

How user feedback insights impacted 4 businesses

From retailers to airlines, start-ups to 10,000-employee-strong corporations—everyone benefits from collecting user feedback and having more customer touchpoints.

We’ve compiled four inspiring case studies from companies that leveraged this crucial qualitative data to improve user experience (UX) and increase conversions.

1. How Matalan gained a deeper understanding of their customers 

🤔 The situation: the UX team at Matalan, one of the UK’s leading fashion and homeware retailers, wanted to increase conversion rates and improve their ecommerce website’s UX.

Karl Rowlands and Lucy Walton from Matalan’s UX team had a limited budget for gathering customer insights, mainly relying on guesswork guided by quantitative data. While they had no problems assessing performance and tracking numbers, they were missing the why behind the data.

Ultimately, they needed a deeper understanding of their user base to make smarter, more impactful decisions. 

💪 The action: Matalan was transitioning its ecommerce website from adaptive to fully responsive, and wanted to collect as many user insights as possible during the process.

Along with other tools in the suite, surveys proved invaluable in understanding their website’s UX and inspiring new A/B testing strategies.

Karl and Lucy integrated survey data with Looker Studio (previously Google Data Studio) to create a dashboard of centralized user responses so they could easily review results and break them down into actionable insights.

Matalan’s user experience dashboard summarizing their feedback results

With their creative solution in place, the team could assess user behavior throughout the transitional period, gradually gathering impressions and gaining visibility into what their users were experiencing. 

🏆 The result

• User feedback helped Karl and Lucy’s team spot bugs in the checkout process and resolve them before they became a major blocker to customers, resulting in a 1.23% increase in conversion rates 

• Feedback also revealed what customers liked or disliked about the company, and what they needed. This gave the team more ideas to trial with A/B testing, earning a 17% boost in successful tests. 

• Overall, Matalan saw a whopping 400% ROI in just 9 months of investing in user feedback tools

🔥 If you’re using Contentsquare

Want to replicate Matalan’s success? Contentsquare Surveys lets you hear genuine opinions from your customers so you can spot bugs and make data-driven optimizations that prioritize their needs.

Customizable to your site and adaptable to a range of different content, Surveys can be tailored to your business goals—so you get the customer insights you need, straight from the source.

2. How TechSmith improved their website’s UX

🤔 The situation: to make intelligent, customer-centric product developments and reduce assumptions, the team at software company TechSmith needed input from the real people they were designing for. 

💪 The action: TechSmith’s goal was to gather tangible insights into how customers navigated the site to make data-driven decisions. The team wanted a user feedback tool that could be easily integrated with other software. This way, the entire company could have access to—and benefit from—their learnings.

They paired Google Analytics with experience insights to analyze both traditional, quantitative data and complementary behavior analytics insights:

• They triggered a survey after a user undertook a certain series of actions so they could target open-ended questions and gather feedback from specific customers and experiences

• Heatmaps revealed where users spent the most time on each website page

🏆 The result: combining heatmaps with surveys—seeing what users said and did—provided a strong case for redesigning parts of TechSmith’s website. By making more areas of their landing pages clickable, the team vastly improved their UX.

TechSmith also integrated surveys with other tools, building a database of responses categorized by topic, theme, and user location by exporting the results to Google Sheets. 

Now, they had user insights translated into a concrete strategy for the business.

🔥 If you’re using Contentsquare

Keep teams and partners in the loop for maximum responsiveness by linking Surveys with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more.

Then, review Heatmaps to see where users focus their attention and what they do on your page.

Gather all your insights in one place, filter by the most relevant insights, and export your results into a centralized location for easy analysis.

3. How Spotahome used feedback to make data-driven improvements

🤔 The situation: Spotahome, an online platform for sourcing rentals in various cities, wanted to learn more about their users, reduce the guesswork involved in their website developments, and make data-driven site optimizations.

Sara Parcero, Spotahome’s Customer Knowledge Manager, was eager to implement budget-conscious user feedback analytics. Her goal was to better understand the context behind conversions and customer behavior.

💪 The action: surveys, coupled with session replays, proved an effective—and affordable—way for Spotahome to tap into large amounts of data that delivered results immediately.

Sara organized company-wide watch parties to review specific replays accompanied by feedback responses. This way, stakeholders could see the exact steps users took until they left feedback—what they did, where they got stuck, and what they ignored.

She compiled feedback responses and built reports to give the company visibility into overall website performance and user sentiment. These reports became a source of inspiration to other teams for new features, bug fixes, and general improvements.

🏆 The result: 

• With the engineering and product teams involved, Sara had the right people bringing their expertise to the table and keeping tabs on user behavior, improving their overall understanding of user needs

• Pairing surveys with replays let developers see real users interact with the product, and get context behind the feedback. This unfiltered line of communication from end users made getting buy-in for optimizations and features a straightforward, data-informed process.

• These tools also provided visibility into bugs or flaws that could be quickly and responsively resolved

The company now relies on user feedback for regular pulse checks, making direct improvements based on customers’ comments and keeping the team on a path of constant improvement and competitive analysis.

🔥 If you’re using Contentsquare

Use Contentsquare’s Session Replay to host your own watch parties where your whole team can view user behavior firsthand. Here’s how:

1. 🔎 Choose one or two topics to be the focus of your watch party 

2. 📹 Organize your session replays by relevance for the most useful insights

3. 📝 Create a guest list of different teams and disciplines for a variety of perspectives

4. 🍿 Grab some snacks, share your screen, and get the party started!

4. How Ryanair spotted trends in user satisfaction

🤔 The situation: Ryanair, an Irish discount airline that sees an average of almost 2 million visitors to their site every day, is committed to providing as seamless a user experience as possible. 

With so many people passing through their site, Rui Pereira, Head of Research and Usability, and Anna Zajac, UX Researcher, knew they needed to provide a stellar experience.

The broad range of customers interacting with their product meant there was huge potential to collect impressions of their website.

💪 The action: Rui and Anna studied the flow of their typical customer’s journey onsite, from searching for flights to booking hotel rooms. Their goal? To understand what brought visitors to their site, and how they interacted with the platform.

They asked open-ended questions with surveys to get to the root of their customer pain points and spot potential areas for optimizations.

An example of a Ryanair NPS® survey to measure customer satisfaction

After gathering responses for several months, the team built a database of feedback, providing a full spectrum of insights into their user experience.

💡 Pro tip: asking open-ended questions is an excellent way to let customers take the lead in telling you their website impressions or product feedback. 

While close-ended questions only permit one answer (“Did you enjoy using our website?”), open-ended questions allow for more variety in responses (“How could our website be improved?”) so your customer can share their unique perspective

N26 uses a combination of open- and closed-ended questions in this survey

🏆 The result: by integrating surveys with Excel, Rui and Anna got a clear picture of their customers’ sentiments. These insights revealed pain points, wins, and opportunity areas in one cohesive database.

Once they were aware of the most common issues their users experienced, they crafted targeted survey questions directly addressing these website problems.

Customers could then quickly and easily select the issue applying to their situation rather than type out complex responses, streamlining the team’s feedback categorization and making analysis much easier.

The data revealed trends in customer satisfaction and sentiment over time, which was presented to major stakeholders to get buy-in for specific optimizations and share knowledge about the website’s overall health. 

These metrics led to data-driven, customer-centric decisions, and increased awareness of their UX and opportunity areas across the company.

🔥 If you’re using Contentsquare

Contentsquare’s sentiment analysis automatically tags survey text answers as positive, neutral, or negative, and gathers all analysis in one place, so you clearly see trends in happiness or frustration levels.

Contentsquare goes beyond surveys 

As you’ll probably have noticed from the four case studies above, feedback is most powerful when paired with other tools like replays and heatmaps:

• Use Contentsquare Surveys with Heatmaps to see the successes and opportunity areas of your website, and tap into your customers’ loves and pain points

• Combine Surveys with Session Replay to watch first-hand how your users interact with your site, what makes them tick, and how you can improve your product

Use Contentsquare’s Session Replay to watch users navigate your product

Drive improvements with user feedback

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what industry your business is in, how old your company is, or what your business goals are. 

User feedback connects you to your customers, gives you deeper empathy for the user experience, and helps you spot important opportunity areas across your website or product.

Don’t walk—run to your user feedback tools now and start exploring the true potential of your product optimizations.

FAQs about user feedback examples

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