The Importance of Collecting Product Feedback
Customer feedback is the fuel that drives your product decisions. Unfortunately, it can be maddening to have to balance feedback from all of your customers and stakeholders on your own.
Don’t fret. There are ways to harness and use feedback to improve your product. We’ve mapped out the importance of customer feedback along with a plan to routinely collect, analyze and use feedback to perfect your product.
How important is collecting and using product feedback?
As a product manager or product leader, it can feel like you’re drowning in feedback from customers and the stakeholders around you. But if you can effectively gather customer feedback and incorporate it into your product, it’s as good as gold. One Salesforce study found 74% of businesses and 63% of consumers will pay extra to get a great user experience.
There are two winning tricks to organizing and using feedback:
1. Create a customer feedback loop.
To get the most out of customer feedback, you’ll want to build customer feedback loops. That means setting up processes to give customers ample chance to submit feedback, taking time to listen, incorporate feedback and follow up to see how your team’s actions are affecting the customer. This process doesn’t just lead to a better customer experience, but it also shows users that you value their experience.
2. Use customer feedback productively.
If you want to squeeze the most out of customer feedback, it’s critical to use it to create your product road map. Feedback is a massive asset for your product road map because it can back decisions, help direct your priorities and reveal the fastest route to higher product adoption.
How do you collect customer feedback?
The first step in building a product customer feedback machine is gathering input. Here are a few tips for collecting feedback that you can use:
Use multiple channels.
If you restrict your customer feedback to a single source, you’ll risk missing important customers or leaving voices out of the conversation. That’s why it’s essential to spread feedback opportunities across segments and use multiple channels to pull in responses.
Plan out feedback to fit your user’s journey.
With a little planning, you can focus your feedback by timing it to coincide with your user’s journey. For instance, you can use path or funnel analysis to identify critical moments in your user’s journey and trigger in-app surveys to hit those moments head-on. Maybe you plan out feedback surveys at the beginning, middle and end of a user’s experience. Perhaps you use in-app surveys to gather feedback after a new feature launch. In all cases, by strategically placing feedback engagements at key points in your user’s journey, you can pull in feedback that powers your product’s progress.
Use surveys to grab well-rounded input.
As you plan out your feedback collection process, you can get a truer taste of the full user experience by tailoring surveys to specific user segments. For example, you can craft in-depth surveys to dive into the experience of admins or power users. Or you may want to drop in short, hard-hitting surveys for regular users who want to get in and out of the feedback process quickly. By strategically crafting surveys, you can keep your finger on the pulse of a wider group of users.
How can you analyze product feedback more efficiently?
Once product feedback is streaming in, you’ll have the materials to improve your product, reduce churn and increase revenue … as long as you know how to analyze it effectively.
And even moderate adjustments can spark major returns. One Qualtrics XM Institute report found moderate customer experience improvements could lift the average $1 billion company’s revenue by an average of $775 million in three years. Here are some secrets to analyzing feedback and using it to perfect your product:
Use sentiment analysis.
Sentiment analysis digs into the responses of customers and measures their overall sentiment. For instance, some programs will provide text analysis that pores over your surveys and identifies each sentence as positive, negative or suggestive. What’s more, advanced analytics platforms will gather sentiment data from surveys, meeting notes and employee feedback, and package it in dashboards that you can use to gauge sentiment. By examining how your customers and stakeholders feel, you can adjust your product to drive higher satisfaction.
Put sentiment to work.
Once you’re accruing sentiment data, you can stack it up against adoption data to nail down your priorities. By seeing where positive sentiment and adoption intersect, you’ll have the baseline priorities to drive your product road map.
Dig in deeper with advanced technology.
With the right technology, you can dive even deeper into customer feedback analysis. For instance, Gainsight PX helps you create customer feedback loops and examine feedback within a broader context. Because you can monitor the user’s path through your product alongside deep feedback insights, you can see the story behind what’s inspiring your users’ feelings about your product’s features. With that data in hand, it’s easier to map out a better user experience and a more effective product.
Learn How to Enhance your Users’ Experience and Propel Growth
Customer-centric product roadmaps are essential towards improving your users’ experience and achieving growth. The most effective customer-centric roadmaps are fueled by product feedback and user data. Download our guide and learn how to build the perfect customer-centric product roadmap today.
