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5 inspiring examples of user feedback's impact on real businesses
There are many reasons to collect customer feedback and keep track of your user sentiment—it’s something we encourage every business looking for a deeper understanding of their customers to do.
But perhaps you already know about the various types of user feedback, and understand the steps needed to collect and analyze it. Now, you’re curious to see real-life proof of its effectiveness from businesses like yours.
Want to discover the user feedback tactics a popular ecommerce business employed to gain a 400% return on investment (ROI)? Or learn how an online real estate company used customer feedback to spot and resolve bugs that could have hurt conversions?
Keep reading to discover how five companies tapped into deeper customer insights with user feedback.
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How user feedback insights impacted 5 businesses
From retailers to airlines, start-ups to 10,000-employee-strong corporations—everyone benefits from collecting user feedback and having more customer touchpoints.
We’ve compiled five inspiring case studies from companies that leveraged this crucial qualitative data to improve user experience (UX) and increase conversions.
1. Matalan gained a deeper understanding of their customers
🤔 The situation: the UX team at Matalan, one of the UK’s leading fashion and homeware retailers, wanted to increase conversion rates and improve their ecommerce website’s UX.
Karl Rowlands and Lucy Walton from Matalan’s UX team had a limited budget for gathering customer insights, mainly relying on guesswork guided by quantitative data. While they had no problems assessing performance and tracking numbers, they were missing the why behind the data.
Ultimately, they needed a deeper understanding of their user base to make smarter, more impactful decisions.
💪 The action: Matalan was transitioning its ecommerce website from adaptive to fully responsive, and wanted to collect as many user insights as possible during the process. To make it happen, they turned to Hotjar.
We knew that we needed a tool that would help us understand what our customers think and understand the why behind everything we do.
Along with other tools in the suite, Hotjar’s user feedback tools, Feedback and Surveys, proved invaluable in understanding their website’s UX and inspiring new A/B testing strategies.
Karl and Lucy integrated Hotjar Feedback with Looker Studio (previously Google Data Studio) to create a dashboard of centralized user responses so they could easily review results and break them down into actionable data.
With their creative solution in place, the team could assess user behavior throughout the transitional period, gradually gathering impressions and gaining visibility into what their users were experiencing.
🏆 The result:
User feedback helped Karl and Lucy’s team spot bugs in the checkout process and resolve them before they became a major blocker to customers, resulting in a 1.23% increase in conversion rates
Feedback also revealed what customers liked or disliked about the company, and what they needed. This gave the team more ideas to trial with A/B testing, earning a 17% boost in successful tests.
Overall, Matalan saw a whopping 400% ROI in just nine months of investing in Hotjar’s user feedback tools
Hotjar really empowers you to see exactly what your users are doing, how they’re feeling, and ultimately their reactions to the changes you make. Without Hotjar, we would still be making decisions based on gut instinct instead of qualitative user feedback.
🔥 If you’re using Hotjar
Want to replicate Matalan’s success? Hotjar’s Feedback widget lets you hear genuine opinions from your customers so you can spot bugs and make data-driven optimizations that put their needs first.
Customizable to your site and adaptable to a range of different content, Feedback can be tailored to your business goals—so you get the customer insights you need, straight from the source.
2. TechSmith improved their website’s UX
🤔 The situation: to make intelligent, customer-centric product developments and reduce assumptions, the team at software company TechSmith needed input from the real people they were designing for.
The further you go without concrete data, the more leaps you’re making. That’s why we come back to the data very regularly…we're making fewer assumptions, which also means we’re making fewer mistakes in the end.
💪 The action: TechSmith’s goal was to gather tangible insights into how customers navigated the site to make data-driven decisions. The team wanted a user feedback tool that could be easily integrated with other software. This way, the entire company could have access to—and benefit from—their learnings.
They paired Google Analytics with Hotjar to analyze both traditional, quantitative data and complementary behavior analytics insights:
Hotjar Surveys triggered a survey after a user undertook a certain series of actions so they could target open-ended questions and gather feedback from specific customers and experiences
Hotjar Heatmaps revealed where users spent the most time on each website page
🏆 The result: combining Heatmaps with Surveys—seeing what users said and did—provided a strong case for redesigning parts of TechSmith’s website. By making more areas of their landing pages clickable, the team vastly improved their UX.
Perhaps there was no monetary impact to making the whole area clickable, but it definitely provided a better experience to each of our potential customers.
TechSmith also integrated Hotjar Surveys with other tools, building a database of responses categorized by topic, theme, and user location by exporting the results to Google Sheets.
Now, they had user insights translated into a concrete strategy for the business.
🔥 If you’re using Hotjar
Integrate Hotjar Feedback across various platforms for even better customer awareness.
Keep teams and partners in the loop for maximum responsiveness by linking Feedback with Slack, Gmail, Miro, Asana, and more.
Gather all your insights in one place, filter by the most relevant insights, and export your results into a centralized location for easy analysis.
3. Spotahome used feedback to make educated improvements
🤔 The situation: Spotahome, an online platform for sourcing rentals in various cities, wanted to learn more about their users, reduce the guesswork involved in their website developments, and make educated site optimizations.
Sara Parcero, Spotahome’s Customer Knowledge Manager, was eager to implement budget-conscious user feedback analytics. Her goal was to better understand the context behind conversions and customer behavior, and she chose Hotjar to help her do it.
Before Hotjar, we spent a lot of time guessing what the user thinks before coming up with a solution. Now we don’t guess; we use Hotjar. It’s helped us become a user-centric company.
💪 The action: Hotjar Feedback and Surveys, coupled with Recordings, proved an effective—and affordable—way for Spotahome to tap into large amounts of data that delivered results immediately.
Sara organized company-wide Hotjar Watch Parties to review specific session recordings that were accompanied by feedback responses. This way, stakeholders could see the exact steps users took up until the point of leaving feedback—what they did, where they got stuck, and what they ignored.
Organize your own Hotjar Watch Party!
Get your whole team or company involved in watching your user behavior first-hand in four simple steps:
🔎 Choose one or two topics to be the focus of your Watch Party
📹 Organize your recordings by relevance for the most useful insights
📝 Create a guest list of different teams and disciplines for a variety of perspectives
🍿 Grab some snacks, share your screen, and get the party started!
The Spotahome team during a recordings watch party
Sara compiled responses gathered using the Hotjar Feedback widget, and built reports to give the company visibility into overall website performance and user sentiment. These reports became a source of inspiration to other teams for new features, bug fixes, and general improvements.
🏆 The result:
With the Engineering and Product teams involved, Sara had the right people bringing their expertise to the table and keeping tabs on user behavior, improving their overall understanding of user needs
Using Feedback with Recordings allowed developers to see real users interact with the product, and get context behind the feedback. This unfiltered line of communication from end users made getting buy-in for optimizations and features a straightforward, data-informed process.
These tools also provided visibility into bugs or flaws that could be quickly and responsively resolved
The company now relies on user feedback for regular pulse checks, making direct improvements based on customers’ comments and keeping the team on a path of constant improvement and competitive analysis.
I know that once you see Hotjar, you’ll see the value. I didn’t need to convince people that Hotjar was great. I just needed to show them.
4. Ryanair spotted trends in user satisfaction
🤔 The situation: Ryanair, an Irish discount airline that sees an average of almost 2 million visitors to their site every day, is committed to providing as seamless a user experience as possible.
With so many people passing through their site, Rui Pereira, Head of Research and Usability, and Anna Zajac, UX Researcher, knew they needed to provide a stellar experience.
The broad range of customers interacting with their product meant there was huge potential to collect impressions of their website, and Hotjar was the ideal platform to help them do it.
💪 The action: Rui and Anna studied the flow of their typical customer’s journey onsite, from searching for flights to booking hotel rooms. Their goal? To understand what brought visitors to their site, and how they interacted with the platform.
They asked open-ended questions with surveys to get to the root of their customer pain points and spot potential areas for optimizations.
After gathering responses for several months, the team built a database of feedback, providing a full spectrum of insights into their user experience.
The value of Hotjar, for us, is that we can observe trends. We can compare one month with another, and we find this useful.
💡 Pro tip: asking open-ended questions is an excellent way to let customers take the lead in telling you their website impressions or product feedback.
While close-ended questions only permit one answer (“Did you enjoy using our website?”), open-ended questions allow for more variety in responses (“How could our website be improved?”) so your customer can share their unique perspective
N26 uses a combination of open- and closed-ended questions in this survey
🏆 The result: by integrating Hotjar Surveys with Excel, Rui and Anna got a clear picture of their customers’ sentiments. These insights revealed pain points, wins, and opportunity areas in one cohesive database.
Once they were aware of the most common issues their users experienced, they crafted targeted survey questions directly addressing these website problems.
Customers could then quickly and easily select the issue applying to their situation rather than type out complex responses, streamlining the team’s feedback categorization and making analysis much easier.
The data revealed trends in customer satisfaction and sentiment over time, which was presented to major stakeholders to get buy-in for specific optimizations and share knowledge about the website’s overall health.
These metrics led to data-driven, customer-centric decisions, and increased awareness of their UX and opportunity areas across the company.
The main stakeholders in our business want to keep track of product performance. We use Hotjar Surveys to see how satisfied our customers are with our products, and we report the larger trends.
🔥 If you’re using Hotjar
Hotjar Feedback gathers all your user sentiments in one place so you clearly see trends in happiness or frustration levels, centralized on your dashboard.
Take your customer feedback and turn it into intuitive, easy-to-understand visuals that transform qualitative data into actionable insights.
5. Hotjar used its own tools to streamline its entire user experience and build empathy with customers
🤔 The situation: Hi, we’re Hotjar! 👋 You’re probably not surprised to hear that we’re constantly searching for ways to understand our customers better and improve our product.
The Hotjar team used Hotjar to investigate Hotjar’s UX (phew!) and uncover any user pain points or elements not meeting customers’ needs.
Our goal was to develop a deeper understanding of how users interacted with our product and optimize accordingly. We also wanted a clearer view of the whys behind user behavior, and deeper context into our customer’s journey through the product.
💪 The action: by applying Hotjar’s user feedback tools, we gathered insights from various channels and sources.
Feedback continually gathered in-the-moment impressions from users across a variety of pages on the website
Net Promoter Score® (NPS) surveys assessed sentiment over longer periods and allowed customers to provide more context
We asked a mix of open- and close-ended questions, and regularly got together to review results and break them down into simple, actionable data points.
🏆 The result: unbeknownst to the team, a small but significant bug at the tracking code installation stage prevented users from setting up Hotjar. Our user feedback tools revealed this very bug, so we could dive in and fix it before it hurt conversion rates.
Having people from multiple disciplines across the company involved in user feedback analysis made solving problems and strategizing new product features a united effort. It also meant staying on track to creating a best-in-class user experience—and maintaining Hotjar’s reputation as a leader in digital experience insights.
Hotjar Feedback is just one side of the coin
As you’ll probably have noticed from the five case studies above, Hotjar Feedback is most powerful when paired with Surveys, Recordings, and Heatmaps for a truly holistic overview of your customers’ needs.
Use Feedback with Surveys to gain a deeper understanding of your user sentiment and gather greater insights into your user experience
Try it with Heatmaps to see the successes and opportunity areas of your website, and tap into your customers’ loves and pain points
Combine it with Recordings to watch first-hand how your users interact with your site, what makes them tick, and how you can improve your product
A Feedback response and its accompanying recording
Drive improvements with user feedback
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what industry your business is in, how old your company is, or what your business goals are.
User feedback connects you to your customers, gives you deeper empathy for the user experience, and helps you spot important opportunity areas across your website or product.
Don’t walk, run to your user feedback tools now and start exploring the true potential of your product optimizations.
Get deeper insights into your user experience
Try Hotjar Feedback to fully understand your customers' needs and wants.
