Tips for creating customer engagement forms that work

Customer engagement forms are one of the most powerful tools for understanding how people truly experience your brand. When done well, engagement forms help you understand how customers feel about your brand, what’s working, what’s frustrating, where you can improve, and help customers stay connected to your brand. When not done properly, they tend to feel like noise, customers ignore them and you miss out on insights that matter.

This guide breaks down what a customer engagement form is and best practices for creating customer engagement form that encourage people to respond.

What is a customer engagement form?

A customer engagement form measures how customers interact with, feel about, and stay connected to your brand across different points of contact. Unlike transactional forms that focus on a single interaction, engagement forms aim to capture the overall relationship, trust, loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy.

Below you’ll find some examples of customer engagement forms:

Onboarding forms

Onboarding forms can help you find friction early on in the customer journey. Send an onboarding feedback form a few weeks after signup. You can ask questions like:

How easy was it to get started?
What was confusing or frustrating?
What nearly stopped you from continuing?

Product engagement forms

Send out product engagement forms after a product/feature launches or send it out quarterly to measure how customers use and value your product. Questions in the form can include:

What features/products do you use most often?
Which features/products do you find least valuable?
What would make this product a must have?

User-generated content form (UCG)

Send out a form to collect customer created content to enhance marketing efforts. Reach out to customers post purchase to gather the following:

Photos of customers using your product
Videos of customers reviewing your product
Video testimonials

Product recommendation quiz

Product recommendation quizzes are an interactive tool that boosts customer interaction by guiding customers through personalized questions and then recommending them a product based on their answers.

Learn how to use AI to create a product recommendation quiz with Typeform.

Best practices for creating effective customer engagement forms

Start with a clear objective

Before you start writing questions for your form, think about what you’re trying to learn about your customers and what is the goal of this form. This will help you determine what type of form you want to create.

Do you want to improve retention?
Do you want to identify product adoption issues?
Do you want to measure brand loyalty?
Do you want social proof?
Do you want customers to stay connected with your brand?

Keep it short and to the point

People are busy and if a form takes more than a few minutes, they are likely to not complete it. Best practices for keeping the form short:

Only ask questions you plan to act on
Avoid redundant questions
Group related questions with question groups
Use time to complete as an indicator of how long the form will take

Make it easy for customers to send you their responses

Design a mobile friendly form as customers will most likely respond via mobile device.

If your form is asking for a video, use a video answer in your form to let customers record directly in the form instead of recording a video separately and then uploading it.

Talk like a human

If your form sounds like it was written by a robot, customers will likely not complete the form. Keep things simple and conversational, avoid using stiff, corporate language.

Instead of:
How satisfied are you with our seamless shopping experience?

Try:
How happy are you with your overall experience?

Instead of:
Select your skin type

Try:
How does your skin usually feel by mid-day?

Use a mix of question types

Closed-ended questions are great for spotting trends and open-ended questions can tell you the why behind the trends. Check out the different question types offered with Typeform.

If you’re wanting to gather more detailed information from open-ended questions, try using clarify with AI to automatically generate up to two follow-up questions based on the customer’s initial answer.

Segment your customers

Not all customers experience your brand the same way. Segmenting forms by customer type, lifecycle state, or behavior allows for more relevant questions and insights. Consider segmenting by:

New vs. existing customers
Heavy users vs. casual users
Free vs. paid customers
Customer role or industry

Close the feedback loop

If customers take the time to complete the form, show them it mattered. You can share with customers what you learned, explain what you’re changing based on responses, and thank them for their input. Closing the loop builds trust and makes people more likely to respond next time.

When customers see their feedback leading to real improvements, engagement becomes a two way conversation and not just a checkbox exercise.