Passive Versus Active Online Feedback Forms
Online feedback forms come in many different shapes and sizes. To initiate these different types of feedback forms on a website or mobile app, two different methods are used: a passive approach and an active approach. So which of these methods is most suitable for your business?
Feedback Form Initiation
A passive feedback form is a user-initiated feedback form visible on websites and mobile apps in the form of a tab or icon. Alternatively, an active feedback form is a company-initiated feedback form that appears on the page. In other words, the feedback form is triggered based on business rules that a marketer defines. For an overview of these triggers, check out our previous blog post on event-driven feedback forms.
Benefits of Passive Feedback Forms
- You send the message that your company welcomes feedback: By providing a visible option to provide feedback, you send a clear message to your users, visitors and customers that you are open to their opinions. Visitors will find it comforting to know that you are actually interested in them. Of course, this can also be a risk if you do not continuously monitor your feedback and take action. In other words, don’t let it become a vanity tool.
- Keeps customers on a digital path: Having a feedback button readily available for your customers on your website can potentially divert them from providing their feedback via traditional channels, such as call centres. According to McKinsey, “replacing paper and manual processes with software allows business to automatically collect data that can be mined to better understand process performance, cost drivers and causes of risk”. In other words, keeping your processes digital will make it easier for you and your team to review feedback and take action accordingly, all across digital channels.
- Keeps negative feedback off social media portals: As we all know, social media can be great way of personally reaching out to your customers, but it can also do a lot of damage to your reputation. So wouldn’t it be better if you could capture more of this feedback on your website via a passive feedback form?
Benefits of Active Feedback Forms
- Visitor segmentation: Active feedback forms enable you to target certain types of visitors on your website. For example, using the aforementioned event-driven feedback forms, you can trigger feedback forms based on visitor behaviour. This could include a number of visitor actions, such as exit intent, click path, mouse movement, and so on. Based on these different behaviours, you can create tailor-made feedback forms with relevant question routing elements.
- Gives good overview of customer journey: With active feedback forms, your have control over which steps within your ordering funnels you want to request feedback. Of course you can implement passive feedback forms on all pages of your website but the active feedback form offers a more systematic approach. Namely, you can manipulate specific steps in your funnels to obtain valuable insight into the online customer journey.
Our advice?
Both passive and active feedback form methods are good options for collecting customer feedback. However, when it comes down to extracting crucial insights, targeting your online visitors with active feedback forms is highly recommended. There is a lot more room for things like “in the moment” feedback. For example, when your customer is about to leave your website or abandon their shopping cart. These are all key insights for improving the overall customer experience.