The channel you choose to collect customer feedback through is as crucial to your Voice of the Customer (VoC) program as any decision, for the way you choose to survey customers can have important implications for your VoC program.
In a previous post, we showed you how to craft the perfect survey invitation to get customers interested and raise your response rate. But choosing a customer feedback channel is about more than just response rates (although it is important), it’s also about how a channel affects the quality of your feedback.
In this article we take you through some of the main channels in use today, and what they mean for customer feedback.
Quick Answer: What Is the Best Channel to Collect Customer Feedback?
For most B2B companies, email is the best primary channel for collecting customer feedback. It offers the best balance of response quality, cost, deliverability, and flexibility for survey design. SMS can achieve higher raw response rates but is harder to obtain contact data for and feels intrusive in many B2B contexts. Web pop-ups are useful for transactional feedback but should not be used for relationship NPS.
The most important decision is not which channel to use, but whether your survey is measuring a transaction or a relationship:
- Transactional surveys: Measure a specific interaction (a support call, a delivery, a purchase). Best delivered close to the event via web or email.
- Relationship surveys: Measure the overall health of the customer relationship. Best delivered via email on a regular cadence, not triggered by a single event.
Using a transactional channel for a relationship survey, or vice versa, is the most common mistake in VoC programs. The channel shapes the response, and a mismatched channel will produce unreliable data.
SMS
SMS has a lot of advantages. Receiving an SMS is something we all open, and we open them fast - typically within minutes of receipt, making it one of the fastest-response channels available.
With our innate tendency to open any text message we receive (said to be at 99%), compared with email, you can be sure to conquer the first hurdle and have people reading your survey invite. As such, it is understandable why so many studies claim SMS to have a response rate anywhere from a 25% - 50%.
SMS might seem like the golden egg with little need to use anything else, but some factors do limit it. Firstly, SMS is more expensive than other options.
More of a concern is that not all customers will give you their phone number. While email we all give out without a thought, people are often more reserved about handing over their phone number.
Depending on your industry, customers also might not be as receptive to SMS as you think. Contact through a phone number feels personal for many, something that is for friends and family, and maybe updates from your phone company.
Survey links sent via email are the most common way for companies to gather feedback. Many claim that it is not as high as SMS, around 10%, although our surveys via email regularly receive 25% - 30% and up.
Whether email has a lower response rate than SMS is up for debate. However, email is inexpensive, addresses are easier to acquire than phone numbers, and you are not restricted to a small invitation text; with an email, you have the ability to design and tweak your invitation to maximize your response rate.
One new design feature that is improving response rates and highlights the rigidity of other channels is an email invite with embedded questions. This means embedding the first question of your survey in the body of the email, and as customers click their response, the survey opens in a new screen with the first question prefilled.
This method is particularly useful for metrics such as the Net Promoter System (NPS) or Customer Effort Score (CES), which begin with a Likert scale question. Likert scale questions are simple to answer and require little mental energy, as they do not require respondents to make a comparative judgment like multiple choice questions.
Web
Surveying through websites offers differing ways to conduct a survey, can reach a wide audience and can meet a lot of needs, but it is a channel that should be used carefully.
Typically collecting feedback through this channel involves a small pop-up asking the customer just one or two questions, as such NPS and CES tend to be employed. A simple pop-up like this means companies can measure a wide variety of experiences.
Some use it to evaluate their customer support with customers that chat to support agents or those using help pages. It is also effective for e-commerce at the end of a transaction, while others employ the pop-up survey in software applications.
Pop-up surveys, in the digital landscape, are effective at raising response rates because it grabs the customer's attention during the touchpoint. However, while response rates may rise, you need to be aware that you are surveying a specific touchpoint/transaction and not the relationship. For NPS, which encompasses both relationship and transactional surveys, conducting a relationship survey through a web-based channel could create poor data as the respondent's answer is influenced by their current experience.
A further limitation is that, in certain cases, you won’t know anything about your customer - not even a name or demographic details. Customer support often requires no registration or submission of details, while pop-up surveys for website visitors have no way of knowing who the respondents are.
Lastly, pop-up surveys are designed to measure the customer’s experience during a touchpoint, and this means surveying the customer at the end of the touchpoint not half-way through. For example, in an e-commerce purchase, a finalized payment and post-transaction screen, may not be the end of the transaction? The purchased product is still yet to arrive, and it may be better then to survey customers via email after the product has been received.
Phone
Phone surveys consist of two types: person-to-person interviews and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) surveys meaning automated surveys.
Person-to-person interviews are the dinosaur of customer surveys. While they can provide in-depth insights, they are fading out of use as they are slow, expensive and are experiencing dwindling response rates.
IVR surveys are most commonly employed in customer support, surveying the customer after they have spoken to an agent. This type of interviewing offers a quick response time, essentially immediate, but response rates sit in the single digits and lack quality as it is hard to collect verbatim feedback.
Customer Feedback Channels at a Glance
Channel | Typical Response Rate | Cost | Best Survey Type | B2B Suitability | Key Limitation |
25-35%* | Low | Relationship NPS, CES | High | Inbox competition; needs strong subject line | |
SMS | 25-50% | Medium | Transactional NPS, CSAT | Medium | Phone numbers harder to obtain; can feel intrusive |
Web (pop-up) | Varies | Low | Transactional only | Low-Medium | Anonymous respondents; not suitable for relationship surveys |
Phone (IVR) | Single digits | High | Post-support CSAT | Low | Low response rate; limited verbatim feedback |
Phone (person) | High (when reached) | Very high | Deep-dive interviews | High (selected) | Not scalable; slow |
*Email response rates of 25-35% reflect optimized B2B programs with embedded questions and strong sender reputation. General benchmarks are lower.
Are you mobile friendly?
Except for phone-based surveys, make sure your survey can open on mobile devices. Whether it is a small in-app pop-up survey or a link in an SMS, it needs to be optimized for mobile. Increasingly people are living by their phones, and although computers still dominate, a survey invite is often something a customer might leave for the bus ride home.
The bottom line
There are many more ways to administer a customer feedback survey, for example, many in retail ask the customer to complete a survey in the store via a tablet.
What is important, though, is understanding what is right for you, and the effect that different channels have on customer feedback.
- Pay attention, especially, to whether the channel elicits a transactional or relationship based response.
- Sending a relationship survey through a transactional channel or vice-a-versa, will create feedback that does not accurately reflect the purpose of the survey.
- If it is response rates you are chasing, then SMS or email are your strongest options, as they also provide the most reliable data.
- And while research differs over whether email or SMS receives higher response rates, simply test both and see which one works best for your industry or marketplace.
How CustomerGauge Handles Multi-Channel B2B Feedback
CustomerGauge is built for B2B companies that need to run NPS programs across large, complex account bases. The platform supports email-based survey delivery at the account level, with the ability to survey multiple stakeholders per account and aggregate responses into a single account health score. This is the approach that connects customer feedback to revenue — because you can see which accounts are at risk, not just which contacts are unhappy.
For B2B companies running mature NPS programs, the channel question is closely tied to the platform question: the channel only produces useful data if the platform behind it can link responses to accounts, and accounts to revenue.
Choosing the Right Channel for B2B Feedback Programs
For B2B companies, channel selection involves an additional layer of complexity. You are not surveying individual consumers — you are surveying stakeholders within accounts, often multiple people within a single organization. The channel choice affects not just response rate, but how well you capture the health of the account overall.
Key considerations for B2B channel selection:
- Email remains the gold standard for B2B relationship NPS. Business contacts are more responsive to well-crafted email invitations than to SMS, particularly for vendors they have an ongoing relationship with.
- SMS can work for transactional touchpoints in B2B, particularly in field service or delivery scenarios, but requires careful permission management.
- Web surveys are limited in B2B contexts because you often cannot link anonymous web responses back to an account, which undermines account-level reporting.
- For B2B companies running NPS programs, the most important design decision is whether to survey at the account level (capturing feedback from multiple stakeholders per account) or at the contact level. Account-level surveying produces more reliable data for account health scoring and is the approach CustomerGauge is built around.
Running a B2B NPS Program? Channel Is Only Part of the Answer.
The channel you choose determines who responds. The platform you use determines what you can do with those responses. For B2B companies, the goal isn't just collecting feedback. It's connecting feedback to account health and revenue outcomes, then acting on it before relationships deteriorate.
CustomerGauge is built for exactly that. See how it works. Request a demo.
FAQs
What is the best channel to collect NPS surveys?
Email is the most widely used and generally most effective channel for NPS surveys, particularly for B2B companies. It allows for embedded NPS questions (where the rating scale appears in the email body, and clicking a score opens the survey), which consistently produces higher response rates than links alone. SMS can achieve high response rates for transactional NPS but requires phone number data and works better in B2C contexts.
Is email or SMS better for customer feedback surveys?
Email and SMS each have strengths depending on the context. SMS typically produces faster responses and higher raw open rates, but phone numbers are harder to collect than email addresses, and SMS can feel intrusive in business relationships. Email offers more design flexibility, is lower cost, and is generally better suited for relationship surveys. For B2B programs, email is the more practical and scalable choice.
What is the difference between a transactional and a relationship survey?
A transactional survey measures a specific customer interaction, such as a support call, a delivery, or a purchase. It is triggered by an event and should be sent close to that event. A relationship survey measures the overall health of the customer relationship and is typically sent on a regular cadence (quarterly or annually), not tied to a specific interaction. Sending a relationship survey through a transactional trigger (such as a web pop-up after checkout) will produce biased data, because the respondent is in the mindset of a specific interaction rather than reflecting on the relationship as a whole.
Can you collect customer feedback through web pop-ups for NPS?
Web pop-ups are effective for transactional NPS, such as measuring satisfaction after a support interaction or a product purchase. They are not well-suited for relationship NPS, because the respondent's answer is influenced by their immediate experience rather than their overall relationship with the company. For B2B companies, web pop-ups are also limited by the fact that responses are often anonymous and cannot be linked back to a specific account.
What response rate should I expect from a customer feedback survey?
Response rates vary significantly by channel and program quality. IVR phone surveys typically see single-digit response rates. General email benchmarks are often cited around 10%, but well-designed B2B NPS programs with embedded questions and strong sender relationships regularly achieve 25-35%. SMS programs in the right context can see 25-50%. The most important driver of response rate is not the channel itself, but the quality of the relationship with the customer and the relevance of the survey timing.
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