Your team might think you know what customers want, but if you aren’t gathering feedback directly from them, you’re probably missing something. And blind spots like this can be costly for your business and your ability to satisfy customers.

Here are a few ways you can gather important feedback from your customers to improve your processes and/or enhance the quality of your products and services:

1. Website Surveys

If there’s any group of customers you should be targeting for feedback, it’s website visitors. They’re already on your page and are showing a willingness to interact with your brand. Why not leverage that by making a small ask in the form of a website survey?

With a website survey tool, you can optimize your site for feedback and even control who receives surveys, how the survey is structured, and what sort of information you ask for.

Want to survey all site visitors, just returning ones, or only people who are currently subscribed to your email list? You can choose how and when to survey. Simply drop some HTML code into your site and manage everything through the backend of the software.

2. Email Surveys

Surveys can also be sent out via email. (In fact, this is probably the most common method for both small and large brands.)

With email, you can send out a survey directly after a purchase, after delivery, or even as a reminder when a customer hasn’t had a touchpoint with your brand in a while.

Email can also be a powerful medium for collecting feedback in the form of reviews. Then you can filter through to find the best ones and post them on all of your top PR channels, including Facebook and Google.

3. Directly Reaching Out

Sometimes customers just like to be treated like individuals. And while email surveys can work, there’s something powerful about reaching out to a customer in a one-on-one manner and asking them to supply you with feedback on their recent experiences with your brand.

This is a strategy that seven-figure ecommerce entrepreneur Ryan Moran used early on when building his businesses. He would pick random customers, pull up their phone numbers from past purchases, and place a phone call. Surprisingly, most people were very receptive to the call, and let him know what they thought of the product. This allowed him to iterate at a much faster rate.

4. Usability Tests

There are other ways to gather feedback than just using surveys or one-on-one conversations. And sometimes, it’s the less direct methods that actually yield the most genuine information. Usability tests are a great example here.

A usability test is a test that you run on your website, app, or tool to study how people are interacting with your product. Depending on the usability testing software you’re using, it might look at things like which parts of the page people interact with, when and where they click, which logos and colors they respond best to, etc. And based on this information, you can slowly improve until you have the best version to take to market.

5. Analytics

Another backdoor way to gather feedback is by studying basic website analytics. Some of the most telling metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) include value per visit, total site traffic, traffic sources, conversion rate, lead generation cost, bounce rate, average session duration, interactions per visit, top pages, and exit pages.

The key with analytics like these is to zoom out and study the trends. If you get too focused on what happens over one period (like a day, week, or month), it’s easy for outlier data to throw off your results, Track the same metrics over a long period of time and follow the trends and averages.

See Ya, Focus Groups!

While focus groups still have value in certain scenarios, they’re no longer the powerful resource they once were. Yes, they can generate results, but they’re expensive, time-consuming, and cumbersome. Today, even the smallest companies can gather feedback directly from customers using an array of digital tools and resources.

From website and email surveys to usability testing, analytics, and everything in between, there’s never been more accessibility and reach in history. It’s up to you to properly leverage these opportunities to understand your customers and improve your business.