What is user feedback?<\/h2>
User feedback is the information, insights, and opinions collected from your users about their experience with your product.<\/p>
For example, they can tell you how satisfied they are or offer comments on the product\u2019s quality, functionality, or usability<\/a>.<\/p> The purpose? This is to help you make informed decisions, for example, about future product roadmap<\/a>. You can augment your quantitative data with qualitative data.<\/span><\/p> Gathering user feedback allows you to understand user needs and pain points<\/a>.<\/p> Armed with such insights, you can eliminate guesswork from the decision-making process and promote initiatives that enhance customer experience<\/a> and improve the quality of your product. It also helps you prioritize projects with the highest ROI.<\/p> The result?<\/p> A more competitive product that better serves its user base.<\/p> This leads to improved customer satisfaction<\/a>. If your product satisfies user needs and offers a good experience, they’re less likely to complain or churn.<\/p> Also, acting on user feedback signals that their opinions are valued, which further increases loyalty and retention<\/a>. Such customers are more likely to recommend your product via word-of-mouth, which makes acquiring new customers even easier.<\/p> SaaS teams use two main types of feedback: active and passive feedback.<\/p> Active feedback comes from interactions you initiated.<\/p> For example, you can collect active feedback through usability testing sessions or by contextually triggering in-app surveys<\/a> when a user completes a task.<\/p> Companies collect active user feedback with a specific goal in mind, such as tracking user satisfaction<\/a> or exploring specific issues that arise via other research methods.<\/p> Passive feedback<\/a> is unsolicited. Users provide it spontaneously, without being asked, when they feel the need to. For example, via a feedback widget, by leaving an online review, or by posting on their social media.<\/p> Such voluntary feedback is often more honest and helps you identify issues that may not have occurred to you.<\/p> Here are six customer feedback collection methods frequently used by SaaS teams.<\/span><\/p> When you hear SaaS user feedback, surveys are probably the first method that comes to mind.<\/p> Their main strength is that you can use them to collect quantitative and qualitative data at scale. They also allow you to target particular user segments.<\/p> You can deliver them by email or in-app. Each method has its pros:<\/p> Common surveys used in SaaS include:<\/p> It’s good practice to use a combination of closed-ended user feedback survey questions (likert-scale, rating, multiple choice, agree\/disagree, etc.) and open-ended ones<\/a>.<\/p> Feedback widgets are small, interactive elements used to collect passive feedback and feature requests<\/a>.<\/p> They’re often placed in a visible area of the user interface or the resource center <\/a>so that users can easily access them whenever they want to submit feedback.<\/p> They’re also less disruptive than regular pop-up surveys, which reduces friction in the user experience, and allows you to capture real-time insights<\/a>.<\/p> Feedback widget in a resource center.<\/p> User interviews can help you gather qualitative insights<\/a> you might not be able to get via surveys because you can easily follow up on ideas the user mentions.<\/p> The flexibility comes at a cost: interviews are the most time-consuming and expensive feedback collection method. Even if you’re conducting them online, finding time, finding willing participants, and scheduling a time that suits everyone may still be a challenge.<\/p> Interviews can be individual or in the form of focus groups.<\/p> The latter technique involves multiple participants from different backgrounds who offer their diverse opinions and feelings about the product.<\/p> In addition to being resource-intensive, interviews and focus groups have another downside: they require skilled facilitators to guide the participants. These facilitators often use a template to ensure the interview remains on track and on purpose.<\/p> Customer behavior data is a kind of implicit feedback – users don’t need to do a thing to provide the data.<\/p> As a SaaS product manager<\/a>, you can track how users interact with your product throughout their journey, and it offers you a wealth of insights.<\/p> For example, you can easily track user engagement with specific features or map out user paths within the product to identify friction points <\/a>or the most optimal routes to conversion.<\/p> The main advantage of using behavior data? It’s objective. It doesn’t rely on the users’ ability to recall or reflect on their interactions or describe them accurately.<\/p> The onus is on you, though: you need to analyze and interpret the data.<\/p> User testing<\/a> involves observing real users as they interact with the app or website, either during live sessions or by watching recordings.<\/p> The goal?<\/p> To understand how easy it is to complete tasks, identify usability issues, and find ways to improve the user experience<\/a>.<\/p> In moderated user tests, a facilitator guides the users through their tasks and asks questions. Just like interviews, these tests are time-consuming.<\/p> In unmoderated ones, you leave them to their own devices and extract all the insights <\/a>from their actions. This kind of test is less resource-intensive.<\/p> Satisfied users are happy to share their positive feedback with others online, for example, on review sites, while dissatisfied <\/a>ones often use them to vent their frustrations.<\/p> Analyzing reviews, social media posts, and forum comments can offer valuable insights into what works and what you need to improve about your product<\/a>. Moreover, what users say online about your competitors can help you understand their strengths and weaknesses and uncover unmet user needs.<\/p> How can you find such feedback?<\/p> Constantly monitoring reviews on G2 and Capterra and your social media platforms is a start. For comprehensive insights, you will need a social listening tool like Brand24 or Mention.<\/p> Now that you know how to collect user feedback, let’s see how you can use it to improve different aspects of your product performance<\/a>.<\/p> Analyzing user feedback can help you decide which features to prioritize<\/a> and which you can send to the bottom of the backlog. This way, you can allocate your resources to the most valuable motions.<\/p> For example, when Zoezi<\/a>\u00a0implemented our analytics tools, they gained access to product usage data that revealed which pages and features were (or weren\u2019t) used.<\/p> This allowed them to stop focusing on underutilized areas and shift resources to parts of the product that had higher user engagement<\/a>.<\/p> Poor usability causes friction in the user experience that negatively affects customer satisfaction.<\/p> Apart from conducting user testing, how else can you identify usability issues?<\/p> Give users a way to report issues on demand.<\/p> Here’s an example:<\/p> Dealfront <\/a>is a B2B platform that gives marketing and sales teams access to data they can use for customer prospecting. Its value depends on the data accuracy.<\/p> To improve it, the team enabled a feedback widget that allowed users to flag inaccurate data so that they could respond quickly and rectify it.<\/p> Personalizing customer onboarding <\/a>allows you to introduce only the relevant features that users need for their use cases. This reduces their fatigue and time to value<\/a>.<\/p> First, however, you need to know who your users are: their roles, organizational contexts, and jobs to be done<\/a>.<\/p> How do you do it?<\/p> ClearCalcs<\/a>, an engineering calculation platform, segments its users based on their responses to a welcome survey.<\/p> They also use product analytics to understand the activation patterns for each segment. This allows them to tailor the flows <\/a>for different users.<\/p> User feedback helps teams optimize the customer experience for greater customer satisfaction and better overall performance.<\/p> For instance, CYBERBIZ<\/a>, a Taiwanese e-commerce company, used in-app surveys to collect user feedback about its newly redesigned admin panel.<\/p> After the redesign, we fired this survey to our users to see if they were happy with the new design. We asked them a very quick and easy question, like how satisfied they are with the new design and if there are any improvements they want to implement.<\/em> How did they act on the feedback? They followed up on all negative responses to better understand the issues their customers faced.<\/p> This turned out to be pretty successful as the number of their support tickets decreased.<\/a><\/p> CYBERBIZ also uses surveys to collect feedback from their beta testers <\/a>(and to recruit them as well).<\/p> User feedback can also help you reduce customer churn<\/a>.<\/p>Why is collecting user feedback important?<\/h2>
Two types of user feedback to monitor<\/h2>
Active feedback<\/h3>
![\"Active](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/active-user-feedback_bf722856566b4a18533686769d645737_800.png)
<\/picture>Passive feedback<\/h3>
![\"Passive](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/userpilot-feedback-loop-user-feedback_0d97e49b9c548d1464b10a19b8452892.gif)
<\/picture>How to collect user feedback? Six methods for the most actionable insights<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>
1. Surveys<\/h3>
![\"In-app](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/survey-user-feedback_f97d2dc962b1524ae7aef8276a13aea2_800.png)
<\/picture>2. Feedback widgets<\/h3>
![\"Feedback](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/widget-user-feedback_026af0d96f6c9be6dec73a99808d6175_800.png)
<\/picture><\/figure>3. User interviews<\/h3>
![\"Interview](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/interview-user-feedback_0d423b751aa7e13cf9b822ae3ae2955c_800.png)
<\/picture>4. Customer behavior data<\/h3>
![\"Path](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/paths-user-feedback_9816f5bc74f26b58da0d8bde228339fd_800.png)
<\/picture>5. User testing<\/h3>
![\"Remote](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/user-testing-user-feedback_a6f08d0e4d0be3c0b0fa982cac121896_800.png)
<\/picture>6. Social media platforms and online review sites<\/h3>
![\"Userpilot](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/review-user-feedback_93552c243030c41d2d8ff18acaf7487c_800.png)
<\/picture>How to leverage user feedback insights?<\/h2>
Prioritize feature development<\/h3>
![\"Isa](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/zoezi-user-feedback_287d5efaa35ef201834e980c3f642337_800.png)
<\/picture>Improve product usability<\/h3>
![\"Dealfront](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/dealfront-user-feedback_f28709ace4587675b08f38934868e396_800.png)
<\/picture>Personalize customer onboarding<\/h3>
![\"ClearCalcs](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/clearcalcs-user-feedback_ef4acaf95c34228839b1015f2b33c02b_800.png)
<\/picture>Optimize customer experiences<\/h3>
\u2013 Wei-Di Huang, Senior Product Manager at CYBERBIZ<\/p><\/blockquote>![\"Cyberbiz](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/cyberbiz-user-feedback_6a3b8f6f34a1f6eff23250ec31654b54_800.png)
<\/picture>Reduce customer churn<\/h3>
![\"Userpilot](\"https:\/\/blog-static.userpilot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/nps-user-feedback_457dae119cd38797504fea2533f31230_800.png)
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