Unlike traditional software, where purchases are one-time transactions, SaaS businesses rely on ongoing customer satisfaction to drive retention and growth. Every interaction, complaint, and suggestion from users is an opportunity to improve your product, reduce churn, and stay ahead of the competition.
But not all feedback is the same. Some insights come from direct conversations, while others emerge from user behaviour. Some feedback is given freely, while other times, you need to proactively ask the right questions. Knowing when to gather which type of feedback is crucial for making data-driven decisions that truly impact your product and customer experience.
In this blog post, we’ll break down the different types of customer feedback, when to use them, and how to turn raw insights into meaningful action. Whether you’re refining features, reducing churn, or strengthening customer loyalty, mastering user feedback can be the key to long-term SaaS success.
In case you're looking for a comprehensive guide that covers all aspects of customer feedback collection, check out our latest Complete Guide to Customer Feedback Strategy for SaaS companies. In addition to gathering feedback, it also focuses on how to effectively analyse collected insights and turn them into product improvements.
The Value of Customer Feedback in SaaS
For SaaS companies, customer feedback is particularly critical due to the subscription-based business model. Your customers vote with their wallets every month or year, making continuous improvement and customer satisfaction essential for reducing churn and driving growth.
Customer feedback provides invaluable insights into what features users actually value. It highlights which aspects of your product drive engagement and retention. In customer surveys users also communicate pain points in the user experience, helping you identify what causes churn. Additionally, feedback can point you to a direction for product expansion by surfacing unmet needs or feature requests. Most importantly, customer feedback serves as a direct measure of overall satisfaction and loyalty, helping you gauge how well your SaaS product meets user expectations.
Types of Customer Feedback in SaaS
Let's dive deeper into the different types of customer feedback. We will look into examples and best practices for each type of feedback and how they can benefit your SaaS business.
Solicited vs. Unsolicited Customer Feedback in SaaS
Solicited Feedback
When you actively ask customers for their opinions, you're gathering solicited feedback. This approach allows you to control the timing, format, and focus of the feedback you receive. It is also one of the most common types of customer feedback.
Examples of Solicited Feedback in SaaS
SaaS companies often collect solicited feedback to understand customer needs, measure customer satisfaction, and refine their product.
- Feature Prioritisation Survey: a project management SaaS sends a quarterly survey asking users to rank potential new features (dark mode, AI-generated task suggestions). This helps the product team prioritise development based on user demand.
- NPS (Net Promoter Score) Survey: a CRM software triggers an NPS survey after three months of use, asking, "How likely are you to recommend our product?" Users who score low receive a follow-up email.
- Beta Testing Feedback: a SaaS company launching a new automation feature invites power users to test it and provide structured feedback through a Google Form. Responses help refine the version of the tool before a public release.
- Churn Exit Survey: a cloud storage SaaS asks users when they cancel their subscription to select a reason (e.g., price, missing features, switching to a competitor) and offers a free consultation to retain them.
Best Practices for Gathering Solicited Feedback:
Keep customer surveys brief and focused to encourage higher completion rates. Asking open-ended questions allows you to collect more detailed and nuanced responses from participants. It is also important to time your feedback requests strategically within the customer journey to maximise relevance and response quality. For longer customer feedback surveys or user interviews, consider providing incentives to motivate participation and compensate customers for their additional time commitment.
Unsolicited Feedback
Feedback is considered unsolicited when customers provide it without being prompted. And what's great about this type of feedback is that it often contains the most authentic and unfiltered opinions. For example, it can reveal issues you might not have thought to ask about, offering additional perspectives on potential improvements.
Examples of Unsolicited Feedback in SaaS
SaaS companies can find this type of customer feedback in app store reviews, social media mentions, forum discussions and support tickets. For example, a spike in feature requests on community forums might indicate demand for a new functionality that wasn’t on the roadmap.
- Social Media Mentions: a design SaaS discovers users praising its new AI-powered layout feature on Reddit. This allows for some creative marketing decisions, such as marketing team featuring user-generated content in their ads campaign.
- Customer Support Tickets: a productivity SaaS notices multiple users requesting integration with a popular email tool. Though this was not on the roadmap, repeated requests signal a clear market need.
- Online Reviews: a cybersecurity SaaS sees customer reviews on G2 mentioning that their UI feels outdated. They take this as a sign to prioritise a redesign.
- Community Forum Discussions: in a user forum, multiple customers discuss workarounds for an automation limitation in an analytics SaaS. The company realises they can simplify workflows with a minor update.
Challenges of Relying on Unsolicited Feedback
Although unprompted feedback can open a whole new perspective of unexpected insights from users, it also comes with certain challenges. For example, it often tends to skew negative, as unfortunately, dissatisfied customers are more likely to leave a review or a comment to address their concerns than satisfied ones.
Additionally, this kind of feedback is normally scattered across different channels - social media, review sites, support tickets, and others. This makes it quite challenging to track and consolidate all user feedback. Because it is unstructured, it may not always be representative of your entire user base. Essentially, you cannot make conclusions on the usability of your product or effectiveness of your customer support team solely based on what people say on the internet. This will lead to a distorted view of overall customer sentiment, and might even seriously demotivate you as a business owner.
Even if you faced a problem of negative unsolicited feedback, don't get too upset - there are ways to fix it by turning complaints into opportunities:
- Respond quickly and empathetically to negative feedback
- Document patterns in complaints to identify systemic issues
- Follow up with customers after resolving their issues
- Share how their feedback has influenced product decisions
Direct vs. Indirect Customer Feedback
Direct Feedback
Direct feedback comes through explicit communication channels between customers and your company. It includes responses from surveys, customer support interactions, and customer interviews where users express their thoughts, concerns, and suggestions. This feedback type is valuable because it is intentional, specific, and often structured. Direct feedback is the best kind of customer feedback for structured analysis and actionable insights.
Examples of Direct Feedback in SaaS
- Customer Support Interactions: a user contacts the support team via live chat to report a recurring issue with an integration feature. This feedback helps the product team identify and prioritise bug fixes.
- Cancellation Surveys: when a user cancels their subscription, they are asked to complete a brief survey explaining why. If multiple users mention a similar reason, this signals a potential gap in the product roadmap and an improvement opportunity.
- Sales Conversations: prospects often ask about missing functionality during demos. If many leads express interest in a particular integration, it can highlight a feature worth developing.
- Feature Requests: users submit requests for new functionalities through in-app forms or dedicated feedback portals. This helps the product team understand demand for potential updates.
- Quarterly Business Reviews : account managers meet with (enterprise) customers to discuss their experience, pain points, and customer expectations. This allows to to gather insights on long-term satisfaction and retention.
Best practices for Collecting Direct Feedback
Collecting direct feedback in SaaS works best when done at key moments like onboarding, upgrades, or cancellations. Keep surveys short, contextual, and use a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended questions. Reach users through in-app pop-ups, emails, or live chat, and consider small incentives to boost participation. Always close the loop by acknowledging feedback and sharing product updates. Tracking trends with NPS, CSAT, and qualitative insights helps refine the product and improve user experience.
Indirect Feedback
Indirect feedback is observed rather than explicitly stated. By studying customer behaviour on your platform rather than asking for their opinions outright, it reveals what customers actually do, which may differ from what they say in surveys or support requests. Indirect feedback includes product analytics, feature usage patterns, heatmaps, and session recordings. For a well-rounded view of user needs and challenges, combine both direct and indirect kinds of feedback.
Examples of Indirect Feedback in SaaS:
- Product Analytics: if data shows that only 20% of users activate a particular feature, it could indicate that the feature is hard to find, difficult to use, or simply not valuable.
- Drop-off Rates: if a significant percentage of users abandon the onboarding process before completing setup, this signals that your onboarding requires simplification or better guidance.
- Heatmaps & Session Recordings: by analysing where users click, scroll, or spend the most time on a page, product teams can identify usability issues, such as unclear navigation or underutilised CTAs.
- Customer Journey Analytics: tracking how users move through different stages of the platform helps identify where they struggle, what keeps them engaged, and which actions correlate with retention.
- Feature Adoption Metrics: if a new feature rollout sees low engagement, this suggests that users either don’t find it valuable, don’t understand its purpose, or perhaps aren’t even aware it exists.
- Support Ticket Volume: a sudden increase in tickets related to a specific functionality could indicate a usability problem, a bug, or a change that confused users.
Making the Most of Indirect Feedback:
To make the most of indirect feedback, start by establishing clear metrics that align with user success. Set up dashboards to spot unusual patterns and identify potential issues or opportunities. To gain deeper insights, combine analytics with direct feedback to understand the "why" behind the numbers. Additionally, use cohort analysis to track how behavior changes over time or varies between different user segments, helping you refine your approach and make data-driven decisions.
Quantitative vs. Qualitative Customer Feedback
Quantitative Feedback
Quantitative feedback consists of numerical data that helps measure trends, performance, and customer satisfaction at scale. For example, customer satisfaction surveys provide objective insights that allow SaaS companies to track changes over time and benchmark their success. Although the first thing that comes to mind when we think about quantitative feedback is surveys, in fact it can be both unsolicited and indirect. For example, when a customer gives a rating on a product review site, or when user behaviour is being tracked on a website or app through analytics tools.
Examples of Quantitative Feedback in SaaS:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): a quick and efficient way to collect customer feedback. If a SaaS platform's NPS score drops from 65 to 45, it suggests that customer satisfaction and loyalty have declined, prompting further investigation.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): after a customer support interaction, users rate their experience on a scale (e.g., 1–5). A consistently low CSAT score signals issues in response time, support quality, or resolution effectiveness.
- Customer Effort Score (CES): this type of survey tracks how easy or difficult users find certain processes, for example, such as completing a workflow or setting up an account. A high CES score may indicate frustration that could lead to churn.
- Feature Adoption Rates: if only 10% of users engage with a newly launched feature, it suggests a lack of awareness, poor onboarding, or a mismatch between expectations and execution.
- Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate: if only 5% of trial users convert to paying customers, it may indicate that the free trial doesn’t demonstrate enough value or that pricing is a barrier.
- Time-to-Value Metrics: measuring how long it takes users to achieve a key milestone (e.g., setting up their first automated workflow) can highlight onboarding inefficiencies or complex user flows.
Best Practices for Collecting Feedback Quantitatively:
Consistently tracking metrics over time helps identify trends and shifts in user behavior. Segmenting data by user types, plans, or other relevant categories provides deeper insights into different audience groups. Establishing benchmarks based on industry standards and historical data allows you to measure performance effectively. Additionally, looking for correlations between different metrics can reveal hidden patterns and relationships that drive meaningful improvements.
Qualitative Feedback
Qualitative feedback provides deeper insights into the reasons behind customer behavior - how customers perceive your brand, what frustrates them them, and what expectations they have from your SaaS product. Unlike quantitative data, which tells you what is happening, qualitative feedback, collected through open-ended responses, interviews, or focus groups, helps uncover why users take certain actions.
Examples of Qualitative Feedback in SaaS:
- Open-ended survey responses: customers answering open-ended questions in surveys provide detailed insights into their experiences. For example, SaaS companies can ask the following open-ended questions in their customer surveys: "If you could change one thing about our platform, what would it be and why?" or "Is there anything missing from our product that you wish we offered?"
- Customer support tickets: support requests often reveal recurring issues that users face. If several users report difficulty integrating a tool with their CRM, it may indicate gaps in the documentation or the need for a simpler integration process.
- Customer interviews: speaking directly with customers is one of the best approaches to truly understand their needs and opinions, as no survey can replace a genuine conversation. User interviews help with mapping out feature requests, understanding how your product compares to the one of your competitors and digging deeper into the challenges your customers face with your product.
- Social media comments: users often share unfiltered opinions about SaaS products on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Reddit. A comment such as “This update made the UI less intuitive; I preferred the old layout” can nudge a company to design changes that negatively affect usability.
- Live chat transcripts: conversations with users via in-app chat or customer support chatbots offer real-time feedback. If users frequently ask where to find a particular feature, it may suggest poor discoverability or a need for better UI design.
Extracting maximum value from qualitative feedback:
The most annoying part in working with qualitative data is structuring your insights. During user interviews people mentions dozens of different feature requests, complaints or positive things - how do you extract something from such data?
To get the most out of qualitative feedback, start by identifying recurring themes and sentiment patterns to understand common pain points and opportunities. Use a tagging system to categorise and quantify insights, making analysis more structured and actionable. Creating customer verbatims, such as real user quotes that capture key feedback, can help teams stay aligned with user needs. Incorporating these direct quotes into product planning discussions ensures that customer perspectives directly influence development and marketing strategies.
Balancing qualitative and quantitative feedback:
- Use quantitative data to identify issues and measure improvement
- Apply qualitative insights to understand root causes and develop solutions
- Track quantitative metrics before and after implementing changes based on qualitative feedback
- Develop a system for prioritising feedback based on both frequency (quantitative) and impact (qualitative)
Reactive vs. Proactive Customer Feedback
Reactive Feedback
Reactive feedback as you might have guessed comes in response to issues or situations that have already occurred. In the context of SaaS, reactive feedback is invaluable because it gives insight into issues that customers are actively experiencing, allowing businesses to address pain points, improve the product and enhance customer satisfaction.
Examples of Reactive Feedback in SaaS:
- Bug Reports: provide easy-to-access channels for customers to report bugs, such as in-app feedback buttons or helpdesk tools. This helps you identify and resolve technical problems quickly, improving the user experience.
- Feature Requests: allow users to submit feature suggestions directly through the platform. Tools like Canny or Productboard help organise these requests and allow customers to vote on them.
- Complaints and Dissatisfaction: use customer support systems or in-app surveys (like Zendesk or Intercom) to capture customer complaints. You can also monitor reviews on platforms like G2 or Trustpilot.
- Support Inquiries: use support ticket systems or live chat tools to handle and track customer questions, which provide insight into how users interact with the product. Based on this, you can identify areas where the documentation or user experience can be improved.
Best practices for Handling Reactive Feedback
- Acknowledge feedback quickly to show customers they're heard
- Set clear expectations about if/when issues will be addressed
- Document feedback thoroughly for product planning
- Follow up with customers after resolving issues
- Look for patterns that might indicate systemic problems
Proactive Feedback
Proactive feedback involves systematically seeking feedback before issues arise and lead to customer churn. This proactive method allows SaaS businesses to foster stronger relationships with customers, and most importantly to address concerns early. For example, reach out to users to show that their input is valued.
Examples of Proactive Feedback in SaaS:
- Regular pulse surveys: these brief frequent check-ins provide ongoing feedback that helps businesses stay updated on user sentiment and quickly address any concerns.
- Quarterly business reviews: periodically scheduled meetings with high-value customers to discuss product performance, pain points and future needs.
- User testing sessions: observing users as they navigate new features or workflows to check for usability issues before a full (feature) rollout.
- Customer advisory boards: form a select group of engaged customers that are ready to provide ongoing feedback on roadmap priorities, feature ideas, and overall product direction.
- Proactive Outreach to At-Risk Segments: this proactive feedback approach is highly important, as it helps to prevent churn! Identify users with declining engagement and reach out via email or in-app prompts to ask for feedback in order to understand their concerns.
Choosing the Right Type of Feedback for Different SaaS Needs
Not all feedback is created equal, and knowing which type to use in different scenarios is crucial for making informed decisions. Depending on your goals, certain types of feedback will be more effective than others.
For example, if you're refining features, open-ended user testing feedback and beta tester insights can provide valuable input. To improve customer experience, consider CSAT, NPS, and sentiment analysis. To reduce customer churn, exit surveys and engagement analytics are key. Let's now dive deeper into these use cases and find the best type of feedback for each of them.
1. Feature Development: Use a Mix of Direct and Proactive Feedback
When planning new features or improving existing ones, direct and proactive feedback methods provide the best insights. User interviews, beta testing programs, and advisory boards help discover what customers truly need. This way, your roadmap will align with actual demand instead of your gut feeling.
Example: your SaaS platform launches a new dashboard customisation feature, but adoption is low. To understand why, you can:
- Conduct user interviews to identify missing functionalities.
- Gather beta tester feedback to refine usability before full rollout.
- Use in-app feedback tools to collect suggestions from active users.
2. Reducing Churn: Use Indirect and Reactive Feedback
Understanding why customers leave requires analysing both stated reasons (reactive feedback) and behavioural patterns (indirect feedback). Design exit surveys, analyse support tickets, and monitor product engagement analytics. Combined, they will point you to the root causes of churn.
Example: Your churn rate spikes among small business users. To investigate, you can:
- Send cancellation surveys to understand why they’re leaving.
- Analyse support tickets to check for recurring pain points.
- Review product analytics to identify friction in the onboarding process.
3. Improving Customer Experience: Use Indirect and Qualitative Feedback
To refine the user journey and remove friction, observing actual user behaviour can be more insightful than relying on direct responses. Heatmaps, session recordings, and qualitative survey responses reveal usability issues and areas of confusion.
Example: Users abandon the checkout process at a high rate. To fix it, you can:
- Use session recordings to see where users struggle.
- Deploy a CSAT survey at the checkout page to gather frustration points.
- Review heatmaps to detect which elements are ignored or misused.
4. Strengthening Customer Loyalty: Use Proactive and Unsolicited Feedback
Building long-term relationships with customers requires engaging them beyond problem resolution. Net Promoter Score (NPS), community engagement, and unsolicited reviews help gauge brand loyalty and inform customer advocacy strategies.
Example: You want to turn satisfied customers into advocates. You:
- Measure NPS to identify enthusiastic users.
- Encourage happy customers to leave positive reviews on G2, Capterra and other customer reviews platforms.
- Invite your most active users to join a customer advisory board for future input.
Measuring the Impact of Customer Feedback
A truly effective feedback system should lead to measurable improvements in key areas of your SaaS business. Simply collecting feedback isn’t enough - the goal is to translate customer responses and observed insights into actions. By tracking the following key performance indicators (KPIs) , you can assess whether your feedback-driven improvements are making a difference.
Reduction in churn rate
Customers are staying longer after implementing feedback-based changes? Congrats, your improvements are addressing their needs and frustrations!
Increase in expansion revenue
When feedback-driven features lead to upsells, cross-sells, or higher-tier plan upgrades, it’s a sign that customers see your enhancements as valuable enough to invest more in your product.
Growth in NPS/CSAT scores
If your NPS or CSAT scores are rising, this shows that overall user sentiment is improving, reflecting better customer experience and stronger brand loyalty.
Feature adoption rates
Noticed that customers are using the features they requested? It confirms that you're prioritising actually meaningful updates! Lower adoption rates, on the other hand, may indicate a need for better onboarding, education, or refinement.
Reduction in support volume
If users stopped requesting support for the same problem again and again, this means that you’re successfully addressing common pain points and made your product more
Feedback participation rates
It's always hard to get people share their feedback. So if you see increased engagement with surveys, interviews and feedback channels, you've done a good job in convincing customers they get value from sharing input and that their voices are heard!
Customer Feedback Tools
There are various tools that can help you with gathering feedback from your customers. Depending on what you solution you're looking for - a customer satisfaction survey, an in-app poll or a heat map, you might need to use different tool. Here's a short overview of platforms that facilitate feedback collection of all kinds:
- Surveys and Polls: SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, Weavely
- In-App Feedback: Hotjar, Qualaroo, Usbailla
- Customer Support Feedback: Zendesk, Freshdesk
- Social Media Listening: Hootsuite, Brandwatch
- Customer Interviews and User Testing: UserTesting, Lookback
And if you are also struggling with phrasing survey questions when building forms and surveys, we prepared this comprehensive guide on how ChatGPT can assist you with this matter.
Conclusion
For SaaS companies, customer feedback isn't just a nice-to-have—it's essential for survival and growth. By understanding the different types of customer feedback and implementing a comprehensive system to collect, analyze, and act on that feedback, you can create a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.
The most successful SaaS businesses combine solicited and unsolicited, direct and indirect, qualitative and quantitative as well as reactive and proactive feedback to form a complete picture of the customer experience. Using this holistic view, you can make informed decisions that drive product development, improve customer satisfaction levels, reduce churn, help receive more positive feedback and customer reviews, and ultimately fuel business growth.
Remember: the goal isn't just to collect feedback, it's to create a customer-centric SaaS that systematically translates customer insights into real improvements.
