Collecting and using product feedback to influence decisions can lead to a better customer experience (CX).
This is particularly important because, according to the PWC Future of CX report, 75% of Americans decide to buy a product over others based on the CX alone.
To gather and analyze user feedback, follow the strategies compiled in this blog. We also include tips for closing the conversation in an effective product feedback loop. Plus, the basics of user feedback and why you need to start collecting it in your business.
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What is product feedback?
Product feedback, also known as user feedback, is the data you gather from your customers about their experience with your product or service.
This term refers to all the feedback collected and information your users leave on product surveys, customer support calls, user interviews, online reviews, or contact forms regarding your product/service.
This can be positive, neutral, or negative insights about how your users feel about your product across the customer journey.
Why should you collect product feedback?
In short, you should collect customer feedback to influence your decisions and build better solutions for your target customers.
Collecting feedback also helps you:
- Understand customer needs. By asking your users what they use your platform for and how you could improve the experience for them, you get to identify their needs. Use this information to drive product decisions.
- Influence the product development process. Your users are the ones who interact with your product every day. Make sure to listen to their ideas and add them to the product roadmap. For instance, prioritize features based on user requests and common answers on customer feedback surveys.
- Improve customer retention. Listening to your users and acting upon their suggestions shows that you care about them. This alone can help improve customer retention and brand loyalty. So, if you’re requesting solicited feedback, make a plan to incorporate the comments in your future product improvements.
How to collect product feedback
You’ve seen the importance of collecting customer feedback to boost user satisfaction and loyalty. Now, here are different ways to collect feedback both in-app and through other channels.
Send in-app surveys for immediate user feedback
Trigger in-app surveys to appear based on user interaction. This helps you gather immediate and fresh feedback, which makes the answers more reliable.
You can do this during the onboarding process after they contact customer support or when the user reaches certain milestones — e.g., after building their first automation.
For example, if you want to build a good onboarding survey, make sure to keep it concise and trigger it at the right time.
This is a very common feedback survey to rate customer support teams’ performance.
Enable users to submit feedback via passive feedback tabs
Allow users to share feedback whenever they feel like it. You can do this by adding a passive feedback tab on your app or a feature request form in your resource center.
When it comes to gathering user insights, you should support active or passive customer feedback. We recommend collecting active feedback on new features, onboarding processes, or ideas.
However, pay attention to passive feedback. As this is initiated by the user, it can be a very powerful tool to identify pressing issues or bugs.
This means that whatever they share through this channel moves them enough to search for the feedback tab and leave a comment to help you improve (or to congratulate you).
Since 26% of users change providers after a single bad experience, catching unsolicited product feedback fast could help you amend your mistakes and retain them.
Conduct interviews for qualitative feedback
Contrary to the previous method, this is a way of actively collecting product feedback.
The goal here is to host group or one-on-one meetings with users to ask them questions about your product. You should have a clear goal about what you’ll do with the gathered information to guide the conversation.
It’s crucial to avoid close-ended or leading questions as these limit you from uncovering insights.
User interviews work wonders when you need to understand how your product fits in a customer’s life and how you can make it easier for them to use. These also allow you to gain more information about who your users are and what they care about.
Monitor online reviews for unsolicited feedback
You’re probably already on top of your online reviews as part of your voice of the customer (VOC) analysis. If not, we recommend that you track this form of unsolicited feedback.
Go to websites like G2 for SaaS products, or Clutch.co for agencies, to see what users are saying about your product. Keep a record of the most repeated issues and wins.
This will help you ideate potential solutions and standardize outstanding experiences as best practices. For example, if a user praises someone in the customer support team because they followed up on an issue with a video, you may include this in your customer service playbook.
If possible, reach out to the users who had negative experiences and invite them to share more about their situation. Actively listen and turn their comments into actionable fixes.
Track customer behavior for indirect product feedback
Use a tool that lets you track user behavior to understand how they interact with your platform. Then, analyze user paths to identify when they drop off or what are common friction points. Make a plan to simplify product adoption by adding in-app tooltips or guides.
Try a tool like Userpilot to track customer behavior, add in-product prompts, and trigger contextual surveys to gather feedback throughout the customer lifecycle.
Look into support requests for collecting product feedback
Customer support teams are a vast source of user feedback, especially for identifying things that need to be fixed right away. Ask the customer service team to share biweekly or monthly reports of users’ most common problems.
Categorize the answers by importance, come up with solutions, and make requests to the product development team for them to include in future sprints.
How to analyze feedback for valuable insights
We’ve walked you through how to gather product feedback. Here’s how to analyze the information to drive insights that influence your product development (and improve your solution).
Categorize feedback data to understand customer satisfaction
Organize the answers by level of urgency and determine how satisfied your customers are depending on the comments.
For example, if you conduct a net promoter score (NPS) survey, organize the responses based on user rating. Follow up on NPS passives and detractors to discover why your users aren’t fully satisfied with your product.
However, if you’re reviewing qualitative product feedback, organize the information by themes or features. If you’re using Userpilot, you can check survey responses and filter them by tags. This helps you identify patterns and trends within your answers.
Leverage survey analytics tools for visualizing data
Tools like Userpilot, for example, come with a customer data portal for you to review survey analytics within the same app you used to build the form. This makes it easier for you to review your answer distribution, historical scores, and seasonal trends.
By looking at your data on one screen, you’ll be able to come up with insights and assumptions much faster than if you had to review them manually (or on a spreadsheet).
Use AI for bulk customer feedback analysis
Leverage AI to analyze your long-form answers in bulk. Instead of reading them one by one, get an AI tool to review all of the comments and come up with a sentiment analysis.
This allows you to gather insights fast from both qualitative and quantitative product feedback and get a much-simplified view of your users’ comments.
How to close the product feedback loop and improve customer loyalty
Customer feedback becomes valuable when you turn it into product improvements. However, it’ll only help to boost customer loyalty and retention if you communicate changes to users and close the feedback loop.
Here are ideas on how to do it.
Trigger tooltips to deliver contextual help
Many times, most customer feedback can be solved by adding contextual help.
For instance, let’s say you receive feedback about a feature being hard to use. Instead of redesigning the feature, testing wireframes, and iterating on the design, you can trigger an in-app tooltip that guides users as they interact with this functionality.
We recommend that you let them know that the tooltip is available, thanks to user feedback. And, if the feature is overly complicated, work on the redesign as part of a long-term solution. Notify the user about your future plans.
Leverage in-app messages to communicate changes
Communicate updates coming from product feedback by enabling in-app messaging. For example, trigger a message through the customer support chat to announce a new feature or product update based on users’ requests.
If you’re launching new functionality based on the comments on the feature requests tab, plan to write and send in-app messages as part of the feature rollout.
Doing so will standardize communication whenever you develop new solutions. But, this message also serves as publicity for your passive feedback and feature request forms.
Reward loyal customers for positive feedback
Customers that share good feedback are usually very satisfied with your product. And, as you may know, happy customers are the best publicity. They’ll likely recommend the product when given the opportunity or help others solve issues through public forums.
It’s in your best interest to reward your most loyal customers. Follow up on NPS promoters to understand how you can replicate the same experience for others, and learn how to build customer loyalty programs to keep them engaged and boost your reputation.
Build a resource center to offer constant support
With the rise of chatbots and the AI revolution, customers expect always-on support.
However, hiring customer service teams in different time zones can be too expensive — and chatbots often fall short of giving the right answer.
So, to efficiently serve users 24/7, you need a resource center. There, you can include different types of help materials for them to find the answers in this self-service portal. You must constantly update the help docs based on feedback.
Conclusion
Product feedback is the vehicle to discover what your customers love or dislike about your solution. But, this information is only useful if you manage to turn this data into actionable insights and solutions that fuel your product development strategy.
We recommend that you open multiple channels for users to share solicited and unsolicited product feedback. For example, through in-app customer surveys, passive feedback forms, or through customer interviews.
Then, get a tool to simplify the analysis and close the product feedback loop by sharing the solution with users.
One tool that allows you to gather feedback, analyze answers, and update your users is Userpilot. Want to see it for yourself? Get a demo.
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