Website Feedback Widget: Definition, Examples, and Tools
Knowing what your customers think about you is important.
Imagine developing a reputation for listening to your customers when so many companies don’t. You collect feedback, analyze it, and make changes to deliver an even better experience.
Think about the benefits of getting honest feedback from someone who had a poor experience, who might otherwise have told 9 to 15 people about it.
Now, envision no longer struggling to develop new features or products because your customers readily provide suggestions and ideas.
All of this is possible with a thoughtfully-placed website feedback widget that encourages your customers to share their thoughts.
Here’s everything you need to know about what a feedback widget is, why you should use one, and what your options are for implementing them on your site.
What is a website feedback widget?
A widget is an element inserted onto a website to help quickly display information in specific ways. Typically, it’s a small piece of code with a simple set of functions – kind of like a miniature piece of software.
What is a widget? Widgets are small snippets of code that add functionality to websites.
Widgets are extremely common. If you’ve ever browsed a site and been greeted by a popup inviting you to sign up for the newsletter or perused a list of the site’s most popular blog posts in the sidebar, then you’ve interacted with a widget.
Most websites string together many widgets to create deeper functionality for the end-user—you. They help enrich the overall user experience by making sure that users have everything they need to interact with the brand right at their fingertips.
Many widgets also serve to collect information on user interest or the quality of the user experience. A website feedback widget is one example. You can solicit feedback from your users in the form of:
Polls or surveys on experiences with the site, your products, or your services
Ratings for products, ideas, the customer support team, or more
Testimonials from repeat customers
Quizzes on customer interests or demographics
Sentiment ratings with a quick click of an emoji facial expression to show how users and customers feel about your website or application
There’s a lot you can do with them depending on what you’re trying to learn.
What can you learn with a website feedback widget?
Knowledge is power. It’s also the key to keeping your customers happy.
The more you know about them, the better you can anticipate their needs and deliver the experience they expect. That’s why 80 percent of growth companies solicit customer feedback (compared to just 58 percent of non-growth companies).
A website feedback widget is invaluable in this instance. With it, you can gather voice of the customer data to help identify gaps between your customers’ expectations and their actual experiences with you. That includes things like:
Where customers are in their journey when they find you
The most common pain points your customers are facing
What customers or clients think about the most recent interaction with you
Whether customers were dissatisfied but neglected to tell you about it directly
Why your customers need you
Who your customers even are
Bugs and quality issues on your website, mobile app, or web-based app
Whether or not users were able to satisfy their use case or complete their desired action on your site or app
How likely customers are to refer you to a friend or colleague
Your website feedback widget should flow seamlessly with the overall user experience. Otherwise, you may present a cluttered brand presence, or worse: annoy the customer.
Website feedback widget best practices
Soliciting customer feedback is important because it can help you improve retention rates and spot the early warning signs of a brand crisis. It can also help you identify market opportunities and improve your products or services further.
However, there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Before you put a website feedback widget on your site, make sure that you:
1. Keep it short and sweet
There’s a fine line between easy and distracting. If you’ve ever gotten annoyed at a feedback request that seemed easy at first before it yanked you down a rabbit hole, you know what we’re talking about.
Research by Forrester also shows that overly long feedback forms have damaged customer willingness to participate. They’ve found that customers are likely to assume the worst when they see you asking for feedback.
Bottom line: Ask for what you need (a rating, testimonial, etc.) and let your users get back to browsing your products.
2. Don’t annoy your users
Widgets are a great way to add more functionality to your site, but it’s easy to overdo it. Your website feedback widget should flow seamlessly with the overall user experience. Otherwise, you may present a cluttered brand presence, or worse: annoy the customer. We recommend that you:
Include the widget on certain, high-traffic pages or in a non-intrusive location where it won’t disrupt your users’ flow.
Give each user the chance to opt-out and stop the widget from displaying for that user.
Hunt for bugs, confusion, broken links, or other problems to make sure you aren’t creating a frustrating experience.
3. Keep things sorted & prioritized
Collecting feedback is great, but knowing what to do with it is even better. As you decide what feedback tool to use, consider how the tool lets you organize information on your end. This will prove especially valuable when you run multiple website feedback widgets, surveys, or collections on social media.
The best website feedback widgets for your site
There are so many website feedback widgets out there, which can make choosing one a chore!
We’ve done the heavy lifting and taken away the guesswork for you. Here are the five best website feedback widgets for your site:
1. Frill
Best fit for: SaaS companies
Frill is a great choice because it’s a simple, intuitive way to collect product feedback, communicate with your customers, and announce ideas while maintaining a seamless customer experience on your site. With a sleek design, a lightning-quick interface, and a way to quickly organize feedback under Topics, you’ll spend less time managing responses and more time drawing insights.
Pricing: Pay $25 per month for the Startup plan and track up to 50, or get unlimited ideas and advanced features on the Business plan for just $49 per month.
2. Emojics
Best fit for: Small ecommerce businesses
Emojics is a multi-purpose reaction button tool that lets people share their feelings about your content. We love it because you can customize the widget with your own text, a CTA, and over 300 emojis. After reacting, you can even prompt users to leave their name and address or ask additional questions. Finally, you can even use it in emails.
Pricing: You can have up to 5K page views per month on the free plan, or get up to 1M page views per month on the Business plan, which costs $49 per month.
3. Hotjar
Best fit for: Large ecommerce companies
If you want an on-the-ground view of what your users are actually doing _with _your website, you need Hotjar. As a behavior analytics and website feedback widget, you’ll glean data on user behavior with heatmaps, surveys, and session recordings.
Pricing: With the free plan, you can track up to 1,050 monthly sessions, or pay $39 per month for the Plus plan and track up to 3,000 monthly sessions. Additional bulk pricing is available.
4. Informizely
Best fit for: Enterprise software companies
Informizely takes a more traditional approach to user feedback by empowering website owners with a number of survey widgets. Choose between slide-in and popup website feedback widgets that include surveys, ratings, multiple-choice questions, or more. Informizely also has powerful targeting features to ensure you get feedback from the right customers.
Pricing: The Lite plan costs $79 per month and gives you up to 250 monthly responses, while the Standard plan costs $159 per month and offers up to 2,500 monthly responses.
5. InMoment
Best fit for: Enterprise software companies
InMoment also provides customer feedback forms, but with a twist. Choose between a website feedback widget, a mobile app, or a survey sent via email. Each survey is fully customizable to reflect your site’s branding. It also provides numerous types of surveys to help you get the most valuable feedback for your marketing efforts.
Pricing: InMoment only offers custom enterprise plans, so get in touch with them for a quote.
6. UserVitals
Best fit for: Small online businesses with less than 300 web users
UserVitals simplifies feedback management by being an all-in-one tool for feedback collection, analysis, and organization. The platform provides a dedicated, embeddable feedback widget that you can install on your website. Users can click on the widget to complain or suggest features without leaving your page.
You can customize the widget to match your website and place it anywhere you prefer on a webpage. You can also integrate the widget with other platforms to ease your workflow.
Pricing: The $50 per month Essentials plan is all you need to access the UserVitals feedback widget. However, the Essentials plan only supports 300 tracked users. You can add more tracked users by paying $15 per 100 tracked users or opting for a pricier plan.
7. Saber Feedback
Best fit for: Online businesses with web portals, apps, or online courses
Discover what’s wrong with your website and fix it quickly with the embeddable Saber Feedback button. Your website users can click on the embedded widget to report bugs and other issues interfering with their user experience. The widget also comes with a screenshot function for users to take snapshots of website issues and give you a clear picture of their complaints.
You can customize the widget and feedback forms to meet your unique needs. Saber Feedback also provides a Net Promoter Score (NPS) and emoji rating for gaining insights into your website performance.
Pricing: The $ 49-a-month plan will give you access to three feedback forms and unlimited pageviews and feedback. You can choose the $99 or $249 per month plan if you want more feedback forms.
8. Feedbackify
Best fit for: Businesses on a budget
With Feedbackify, you can get real-time customer feedback from your website visitors. Visitors can provide feedback via the Feedbackify widget, which will appear on the right side of your web pages. Customizing feedback forms is easy, thanks to the drag-and-drop form builder. Besides the widget, you can collect feedback via a text link embedded on your website or in emails.
Pricing: Feedbackify costs only $19 per month.
9. Usabilla
Best fit for: Businesses that want qualitative and quantitative user feedback
Usabilla in-page widgets can go right in the middle of your website content, allowing visitors to provide specific element- or content-related feedback without hassle. You can customize widgets by choosing the name, color, and shape of the widget button. You can also select the feedback form that will appear after a user clicks the widget.
Pricing: Every Usabilla customer gets a custom quote, but according to reviews, the starting price is around $49 per month.
10. Survicate
Best fit for: Marketing, product, and customer success teams managing web or app products
Survicate offers an embeddable user feedback button to add to your Android or iOS app or website. The button simplifies capturing more user feedback quickly, and you can customize the button and feedback form to be as engaging as possible. Installing the widget is easy, and since it’s multilingual, you can interact with customers from different demographics.
Pricing: The most affordable Survicate plan costs $89 per month.
11. Delighted
Best fit for: Enterprises and mobile app developers that want to collect ratings
With Delighted, you can manage all sorts of customer surveys and ratings: NPS, CSAT, PMF, eNPS, CES, 5-star surveys, smileys surveys, thumbs/down surveys, and open-ended responses. You can then deploy these surveys via email, website widgets, links, tablet kiosk, and in your mobile app using their iOS SDK.
Pricing: The free plan offers one type of delivery and one survey for up to 1,000 users. With the Premium plan ($224 per month when billed annually), you'll get all delivery platforms and up to 5 survey types for 10,000 monthly users.
12. Appzi
Best fit for: Small and mid-sized businesses seeking product or website feedback
Appzi provides several feedback widget options. You can pair your selected widget with a customized button and survey to get the specific user insights you need. Also, you can customize the widget button color, size, and location to match your website.
Pricing: Appzi has a free plan that supports unlimited surveys and over ten survey languages. However, if you have more than one team member, you will need the $29 per-month plan or another paid plan.
13. Usersnap
Best fit for: Startups and large-scale enterprises
Usersnap offers a comprehensive and easy-to-use customer feedback tool. You can embed its feedback collection widget into your website and web or mobile app to collect quantitative feedback through NPS or emoji faces.
Alternatively, get user feedback through screenshots and screen recordings provided by your web and mobile users. The Usersnap feedback widget is fully customizable to ensure that it does not look out of place on your website or clash with your branding.
Pricing: You can pay as little as €69 per month or €129 or €249 per month if you have more than ten team members.
14. UserEcho
Best fit for: Startups looking to grow their customer base
UserEcho provides businesses with feedback widgets for improving customer communication and engagement. Customers can use a widget to share insights, report errors, recommend upgrades, and give other forms of feedback a business can take advantage of to boost user satisfaction.
Besides user feedback widgets, UserEcho offers a forum where users can upvote and comment on the feedback of other users. You can prioritize acting on the feedback and suggestions with the most upvotes.
Pricing: UserEcho costs $19 per month if you choose an annual plan. If you choose a monthly plan, it will cost $25 per month.
15. Ask Nicely
Best fit for: Large corporations with a big budget
Ask Nicely provides widgets that allow your website and app users to give feedback via NPS surveys. Besides the widget, you can send users NPS surveys via email. Alongside feedback collection, Ask Nicely offers feedback analytics tools. Insights from feedback analysis will enable you to take the best actions to improve customer experience on your website or app.
Pricing: Ask Nicely does not have a price list, but you can contact customer support to get a custom quote.
Understand the Customer Experience You’re Actually Creating With Website Feedback Widgets
A thoughtfully placed website feedback widget is a powerful tool to uncover the actual experience your customers have with your brand. We’ve covered what they are, how best to implement them, and provided the very best website feedback tools for your consideration.
With its affordable plans, Frill is a great option for startups or companies seeking a quick, elegant, lightweight solution. You’ll get unlimited storage and team members, plus full access to all of our features that make collecting and prioritizing customer feedback easy.
Go forth and discover what your customers really think. Frill can help.
Sign up now for a free trial of Frill and start putting user feedback into action.