Improving the Customer Journey: how to collect and use feedback

Analysis Goals

1. Identify weak points — understand at which stages customers face difficulties (e.g., complex website navigation or slow order processing).
2. Improve user experience — make each customer step convenient and pleasant, which increases satisfaction.
3. Increase loyalty and sales — satisfied customers return more often and recommend the brand to others.

Who is this relevant for?

• For marketers — to optimize advertising channels and communications.
• For business owners — to increase conversions and reduce customer churn.
• For UX researchers — to improve interfaces and processes.

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Research Preparation

Goal Setting

Before creating a survey, clearly define what exactly you want to learn. Examples of specific goals:

• "Why do customers abandon their carts?" — helps identify issues in the checkout process.
• "How can we improve support service?" — reveals weak points in customer service.
• "What influences purchase decisions?" — identifies key factors in choosing your product.

Tip: 

In QForm, you can set up automatic response segmentation for different goals. For example, separately analyze feedback about delivery and product quality.

Touchpoint Map

A touchpoint is any moment of contact between a customer and your brand. Key touchpoints include:

1. Website or mobile app where customers search for products and place orders.
2. Social media and advertising channels through which customers first learn about the brand.
3. Support service where customers seek problem resolution.
4. Delivery process and post-sale service, including order receipt and warranty support.

With QForm, you can easily link surveys to each of these stages. For example, automatically send a questionnaire right after a purchase or collect feedback after a customer contacts support. This allows gathering feedback precisely when the impressions of interacting with the brand are still fresh in the customer's memory.

Audience Selection

Choosing the right survey audience is a fundamental step that directly impacts the quality and relevance of collected data. When segmenting respondents, it's important to consider various stages of their interaction with the brand, as each group can provide unique and valuable information.

1. For new customers, understanding their first impression of the company is especially important. This data helps evaluate the effectiveness of marketing acquisition channels and identify possible discrepancies between expectations and actual interaction experiences. First impressions often determine the future relationship between the customer and the brand, making their analysis particularly valuable.
2. Repeat customers represent special value for research. Their feedback helps understand which aspects of the product or service create loyalty and motivate repeat purchases. Analyzing this group allows identifying the company's competitive advantages and strengths worth developing and highlighting in communication.
3. Special attention should be paid to customers who stopped using the company's services. Studying the reasons for their departure can reveal systemic problems in the product, service, or support processes. This information often proves most valuable for fundamental business model improvements.

For the most accurate results, it's important to use precise respondent selection criteria. For example, you can focus on customers who made a purchase in the last month to assess the current state of service. Or conversely — on those who haven't returned in a while to understand reasons for declining engagement. This approach ensures collecting relevant data and avoids wasting time processing non-target responses.

Proper audience segmentation before conducting a survey not only improves data quality but also makes subsequent analysis more structured and actionable. This is an important step toward creating personalized customer experiences and building long-term consumer relationships.

Survey Structure for Customer Journey Evaluation: Key Blocks and Questions

Awareness

At this stage, it's important to understand how customers first learn about your brand. Include questions:

• "How did you hear about our brand?" (options: social media, search engine, recommendation)
• "What product information was most useful to you?"
• "How easy was it for you to find needed product details?"

QForm allows enriching these questions with multimedia elements — for example, you can add an image of an ad banner and ask: "How accurately does this ad reflect our product?"

Consideration

The consideration stage is a crucial moment in the purchase decision process. This is where the customer weighs all pros and cons, comparing your offer with market alternatives. To understand consumer choice logic, it's important to ask the right questions.

• The question "Which product characteristics were decisive for you?" helps identify key benefits customers truly value. Perhaps they care more about different features than those emphasized in your advertising.
• Equally important is the question about doubts: "What made you hesitate before purchasing?" Answers may reveal hidden barriers — perhaps customers are put off by price, missing features, or negative reviews.
• Particularly valuable is the question about competitive environment: "What other companies/brands did you compare us with?" This data helps understand your real competitive landscape — sometimes it differs from what you imagine.

For deeper analysis, you can use comparison matrices where customers evaluate your product and alternatives by key parameters. This helps visually see where you win and where you lose to competitors.

Purchase

The purchase process is the culmination of the entire customer journey, where any technical or logical problem can lead to losing a customer. That's why it's important to thoroughly analyze every aspect of this stage.

• The main question "Rate the convenience of the checkout process on a scale from 1 to 10" gives a general idea of process perception. However, behind a dry rating number often lie specific problems that can be identified through follow-up questions. For example, a low score could mean either interface difficulties or unclear delivery terms.
• The question about technical payment issues "Did you encounter any difficulties during payment?" helps identify bottlenecks in the payment system. Tracking such problems is especially important as they directly impact conversion. Customers rarely report them voluntarily but willingly answer in surveys.
• The most valuable question — "What could make the purchase process more convenient?" — gives customers an opportunity to share their ideas and suggestions. Often, innovative solutions that truly improve user experience emerge from such answers.

To get the most accurate data, it's important to collect feedback immediately after purchase or at cart abandonment. Modern systems like QForm automate this process by sending surveys based on triggers — for example, when detecting an abandoned cart. This approach ensures data relevance as customer impressions are still fresh.

Analysis of this stage should be an ongoing process, as even small changes in interface or purchase terms can significantly impact customer behavior. Regular feedback collection and analysis allow promptly identifying and resolving issues, creating a truly convenient and pleasant checkout process.

Special attention should be paid to data segmentation — perhaps problems only occur for certain customer groups (e.g., when using a specific browser or device type). Such detailed analysis helps find and resolve even hidden problems not obvious in superficial examination.

Product Usage

Evaluating product satisfaction:

• "Does the product meet your expectations?"
• "Which features turned out to be inconvenient?"
• "Do you need additional usage instructions?"

We recommend adding an NPS scale (0 to 10) — "How likely are you to recommend our product?" QForm automatically calculates the final loyalty index.

Retention

Studying customer loyalty:

• "Do you plan to make a repeat purchase with us?"
• "What influenced your decision to return/not return?"
• "What could improve your experience?"

QForm not only collects answers but also automatically analyzes NPS trends, identifying positive and negative shifts in brand perception.

Survey Design and Distribution

Optimal Length and Question Types

When creating a survey, it's important to balance data completeness with respondent convenience. The ideal duration is 5-7 minutes, corresponding to 15-20 questions. This format doesn't fatigue participants but collects sufficient information.

Diversify question types: use closed-ended for quick analysis, open-ended for detailed opinions, and rating scales to measure satisfaction levels. QForm simplifies this with ready professional templates and logic branching that automatically selects follow-up questions based on previous answers.

Distribution Channels

Choosing optimal survey distribution channels requires careful analysis of your target audience's characteristics and their brand interaction specifics. Each communication channel has unique features and suits different research tasks.

Email remains one of the most effective tools for working with existing customer bases. Personalized emails achieve high open and engagement rates, especially when sent at times relevant to recent customer-company interactions. For example, satisfaction surveys can be sent a few days after purchase or service receipt.

Messengers and chatbots offer a fundamentally different format — more interactive and immediate. Telegram, WhatsApp and other popular platforms are ideal for getting instant feedback thanks to familiar interfaces and high response speeds. Chatbots are especially effective for short pulse surveys in real time.

Embedded website or mobile app widgets enable contextual data collection while user impressions are fresh. Such tools are particularly useful for intercept research, identifying problems during interaction with company digital channels. Modern technology can intelligently determine optimal moments to show surveys without disrupting user experience.

For offline interactions, QR codes serve as a universal bridge between physical and digital worlds. Placed on receipts, displays or promotional materials, they give customers an easy way to share feedback without special apps. This method is especially effective in retail and services.

It's important to understand there's no universal "best" channel — effective strategy combines them. For example, start with broad email outreach, then target non-responders via messengers. Modern research platforms can synchronize data from different sources, creating a holistic customer experience picture.

Incentives and Personalization

To increase participant engagement, offer something valuable in return for their time. This could be small discounts on future purchases, access to exclusive materials or prize draw entries. It's important rewards match your audience profile.

Modern survey platforms automate this: systems instantly send promo codes after survey completion, personalize outreach using customer data, and integrate with loyalty programs. Such capabilities significantly increase completion rates and improve collected data quality.

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Data Analysis and Customer Journey Refinement

Segmentation and Visualization

After data collection comes interpretation. QForm provides intuitive dashboards with filtering by key parameters: gender, age, geography, and specific Customer Journey stages. This reveals behavioral patterns across customer groups. For example, you can compare how men and women rate the purchase process, or what difficulties younger customers frequently encounter.

Conclusions and Actions

Research data is just a starting point for real changes. The key is not just identifying problem areas but developing concrete improvement plans with measurable KPIs. Take the example of 40% of customers experiencing payment difficulties: this requires not just acknowledgment but deep structural analysis. What exactly are the issues? Too many mandatory form fields, non-intuitive payment method selection, or technical transaction processing errors? Each requires different solutions — from UX optimization to new payment system integrations.

It's crucial to set clear success metrics: for example, reducing customers reporting payment difficulties from 40% to 15% within a quarter. This turns abstract "payment complaints" into concrete project tasks with measurable outcomes. Regular monitoring evaluates implemented changes' effectiveness and allows timely course correction if needed.

Special attention should go to responsibility distribution across departments. Technical issues go to IT, non-intuitive interfaces to UX designers, and insufficient payment method information to content managers. This ensures systemic problem-solving rather than superficial fixes.

Retesting

Test improvements. 2-4 weeks after implementation, launch a follow-up survey to assess effectiveness. QForm enables comparing new data with previous results, tracking key metric trends. This cyclical approach (research → improvements → verification) gradually optimizes each Customer Journey stage, making brand interactions increasingly comfortable and pleasant.

This continuous improvement process is key to long-term success in competitive markets where customer experience quality becomes a decisive advantage.

Summary

Key Takeaway

Customer Journey research through surveys is the foundation for data-driven business decisions. This approach moves from guesswork to precise data, understanding real customer needs and pain points.

Practical Advice

We recommend starting with ready solutions — QForm platform offers extensive capabilities and survey templates for customer journey analysis. This significantly accelerates valuable data collection. New users get a free 14-day demo to quickly evaluate system capabilities.

Most importantly — don't delay. First results appear within days of launching research. This is your chance to make customer interactions truly effective and elevate your business.