Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is input customers provide about their experience with a product or business, gathered through reviews, surveys, support conversations, or direct requests, that a business can use to identify problems or opportunities.

Feedback arrives in two broad forms: unsolicited, such as a review left without being asked or a comment made during a support conversation, and solicited, such as a post-purchase survey or a targeted request for input. Both are useful, but solicited feedback tends to be more structured and easier to compare over time, since every respondent answers the same question.

Feedback is closely tied to customer experience, since it is often the primary way a business learns which touchpoints are working well and which are causing friction, and patterns in recurring feedback can reveal gaps the same way unanswered questions reveal what belongs in a self-service resource.

Example

A store sends a short survey to customers two weeks after delivery and notices that “packaging felt flimsy” appears in roughly 1 out of every 10 responses. After switching to a sturdier box, damage-related return requests drop over the following quarter, and the same complaint stops appearing in new survey responses.

Key characteristics

• Solicited or unsolicited: Feedback can be actively requested through a survey or arrive unprompted through a review or support conversation.
• Quantitative or qualitative: A star rating gives a quick numeric signal, while written comments explain the reasoning behind it.
• Most valuable in patterns: A single comment carries limited weight, while the same issue appearing repeatedly points to something worth addressing.
• Closes the loop when acted on: Feedback delivers the most value when a business changes something in response and, ideally, communicates that change back to customers.

Related terms

• Customer experience – the cumulative impression a customer forms, which feedback is a primary way of measuring and improving.
• Social proof – the trust signal that public customer feedback, such as reviews, can create for other shoppers.
• Self-service – support resources that recurring feedback and support questions often reveal a need to build or expand.
• Customer segmentation – dividing customers into groups, sometimes used to compare how feedback differs across segments.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between solicited and unsolicited feedback?

Solicited feedback is actively requested, such as through a survey, while unsolicited feedback arrives unprompted, such as a review or a comment during support.

How much feedback is needed before acting on it?

There’s no fixed threshold, but a single comment carries little weight compared to the same issue showing up repeatedly across multiple customers.

Should a business respond to customer feedback?

Yes, especially public feedback like reviews, since a thoughtful response shows other customers that concerns are taken seriously, even when nothing can be changed immediately.

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