Collect Feedback

Sometimes you need a flexible survey that captures feedback about your product, service, or experience without the constraints of a specific metric like NPS, CSAT, or CES. A general feedback survey covers broader ground: what users like, what frustrates them, what they wish existed, and how they feel about the overall experience.

This template works as a starting point for any feedback collection effort. Customize it based on your goals, audience, and the decisions the data needs to inform.

When to deploy a general feedback survey

Quarterly product check-ins. Send a comprehensive feedback survey to your active user base every quarter. This captures overall sentiment and surfaces issues that targeted surveys might miss.

After major releases. When you ship a significant update, collect general feedback to understand how the release affected the overall experience, not just the new feature.

As a baseline measurement. Before starting a new initiative (redesign, pricing change, expansion), collect general feedback to establish a baseline you can compare against later.

When you do not know what to ask. If you sense something is off but cannot pinpoint it, a general feedback survey can surface unexpected issues.

General feedback survey questions

1. Overall, how satisfied are you with [product]? | 1-5 scale (Very unsatisfied to Very satisfied) | Required
2. What do you like most about [product]? | Open text | Required
3. What frustrates you most about [product]? | Open text | Required
4. If you could change one thing about [product], what would it be? | Open text | Required
5. How well does [product] meet your needs? | 1-5 scale (Not at all to Completely) | Optional
6. How likely are you to continue using [product]? | 1-5 scale (Very unlikely to Very likely) | Optional
7. Is there anything else you would like us to know? | Open text | Optional

Questions two and three surface strengths and weaknesses in the user's own language. Question four forces prioritization. Instead of a wish list, you get the single most important change for each respondent. That is powerful product signal.

Structuring feedback for analysis

General feedback surveys produce a mix of quantitative scores and qualitative text. Here is how to structure both for analysis.

Quantitative metrics. Questions one, five, and six produce scores you can track over time. Monitor the trend line quarterly. Correlate changes with product releases, pricing changes, and market shifts.

Qualitative coding. For open-text responses, develop a consistent coding taxonomy. Common categories: UX/design, performance/speed, missing features, pricing/value, support quality, documentation, integrations, reliability. Tag each response with the relevant categories and track category frequency over time.

Priority ranking. Question four ("change one thing") is your stack-ranked feature priority list. Count the frequency of each theme. The most frequently cited change is the one that matters most to your users as a whole.

Segment analysis. Cut the data by plan type, tenure, role, company size, or any other attribute. Satisfaction patterns often vary dramatically across segments. A product with an overall 4.0 satisfaction score might be 4.5 among developers and 3.2 among non-technical users.

Making feedback actionable

Share with the right teams. Product feedback goes to product. UX feedback goes to design. Performance feedback goes to engineering. Do not let feedback sit in a single database that nobody checks.

Create a feedback digest. A weekly or monthly summary of top feedback themes, shared with the broader team, keeps feedback visible and prevents it from becoming one person's responsibility.

Connect feedback to roadmap. When planning sprints or quarters, pull up the most frequent feedback themes and compare them against your proposed priorities. If your roadmap does not address the top user frustrations, either the roadmap or the feedback is wrong.

Report back to users. When you ship something that was frequently requested, tell users. "You asked for X, we built it" closes the feedback loop and demonstrates that you listen.

Common mistakes

Asking too many questions. Seven questions is the upper limit for a general feedback survey. Anything beyond that sees steep drop-off. If you need more depth, consider follow-up surveys targeted at specific topics.

Running the survey only once. General feedback surveys should be recurring. A single snapshot tells you where you are. Quarterly snapshots tell you which direction you are heading.

Over-indexing on satisfaction scores. The satisfaction score (question one) is the headline, but the open-text questions (two, three, four) are the story. Do not skip the qualitative analysis.

Not segmenting. Aggregate feedback hides segment-specific problems. Always cut the data by user type at minimum.

Set up this survey in Formbricks

Formbricks lets you deploy a general feedback survey as an in-app survey, email survey, or link survey. For quarterly check-ins, an email or link survey gives users time to respond thoughtfully. For in-product feedback, an in-app survey triggered by usage milestones reaches users in context.

The template includes configurable satisfaction scales, open-text questions, and conditional logic. Responses are automatically linked to user attributes, so segmentation is built in from the start.

Set up recurring deployments on a quarterly cadence to build a longitudinal feedback dataset that reveals trends over time.