What is User Feedback?

User feedback is a way for companies to know what customers think of their product or service. It can be collected through surveys, polls, or reviews, but also via any form of customer communication. Customer feedback allows companies to make changes to their products based on customer suggestions. It also helps companies understand what features customers like and don't like about their products.  Actively collecting and listening to customer feedback ensures that the voice of the customer is being heard.

Why is user feedback important?

User feedback is a critical component of any business. Satisfied customers are the lifeblood of any company, and knowing how to deliver the best possible user experience is a skill that every founder and product manager should master.

When properly utilized, user feedback will help you improve your product and deliver an excellent user experience.  This improves user retention and reduces churn.  Gathering user feedback helps you identify and fix problems with your product. Additionally, listening to customers and addressing their concerns helps you identify which features are most important to customers and how well your product is meeting their needs. This information is essential for product and customer success teams who want to ensure that customers are getting the most value from your product.  In addition, taking steps to ensure customer success can encourage customers to become advocates for your brand, resulting in increased conversion rates.

By monitoring feedback channels, businesses can get real-time insights into customer sentiment and identify areas where they need to make changes. Overall, user feedback is a valuable tool for businesses that want to ensure customer satisfaction and boost their bottom line.

User Feedback for Customer Success Teams

Customer success teams need feedback to gauge the effectiveness of their work, and measure the feedback that users provide. We've covered a comprehensive list of quantitative feedback metrics that help to do this. Here is a quick overview of some of them:

One of the most popular ways to get feedback is through Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. NPS is a metric that measures customer loyalty and gauges how likely customers are to recommend a company’s product or service to others.  This gives a good overall sense of how your product and company are doing. CSAT (customer satisfaction score) and CES (customer effort score) are metrics that can provide feedback on specific interactions within your product, or with you support experience.

Another way to measure customer satisfaction is through customer support tickets. By tracking the number of tickets opened, closed, and in progress, customer success teams can get a sense of how well they are resolving issues. Additionally, they can look at the average response time and resolution time for tickets to get an idea of how efficiently they are addressing customer concerns. Support tickets offer a great source of feedback because users express issues in their own words. This allows businesses to see the issue from the customer's perspective and understand the root of the problem.

User Feedback for Product Owners

Qualitative user feedback is essential for product managers to gain insights into users' problems and generate appropriate solutions. However, it's often difficult to get accurate and actionable feedback from users. For this reason, it's important to listen to your users as much as possible, through channels that allow for open ended feedback.  

Feedback helps you identify a wide variety of opportunities for improvement:

• New Features: 
• Improving existing features
• Identify usability and design issues
• Bug Reports
• Identify weak documentation
• Identify workflows that are confusing or too complicated
• Identify performance issues

Product owners will also benefit from tracking them same customer success metrics mentioned in the previous section.

User Feedback for Marketers

When creating copy for your website or generating content for ads, it's important to understand what benefits your product offers. However, it's sometimes difficult to determine which benefits are the most important to customers. By using user feedback, you can identify which value propositions are the most important and use that information to create more effective marketing materials.

Paying attention to customer feedback helps you understand why people buy your product and what they see as its key benefits. When you know what is important to your customers, you can focus your marketing efforts on those points. You can also create copy that emphasizes the benefits that are most important to potential buyers.

Qualitative vs Quantitative feedback

First, a note on two different types of feedback. Qualitative feedback is feedback that is given in words, while quantitative feedback is feedback that is given in numbers. Qualitative feedback is often considered to be more subjective, while quantitative feedback is often considered to be more objective.

Qualitative feedback can help you understand the reasons behind people's opinions and behavior. This can be helpful in figuring out how to improve your product or service. Additionally, qualitative feedback allow you gather rich data about people's experiences.

Quantitative feedback can help you measure how successful your product or service is. Additionally, quantitative feedback allows you track changes over time. This can be helpful in identifying trends and improving your product or service.  

Sources of User Feedback

There are many different ways to collect user feedback. We've assembled a master list of ways to get feedback; below are also some of the most popular ones.

Surveys

Surveys are a set of questions that you can send to a large number of users. This is a great method for quickly collecting a data from many users. Use-cases for surveys include: general sentiment about your product, finding out about usability issues, or collecting supplementary or demographic information.

You could also integrate surveys at a specific point in the flow of their customer journey. For example, during the onboarding process, or when they have requested to cancel (also known as an exit survey or a churn survey).

When creating surveys, make sure to include some questions that are open-ended, so that you can get some feedback in the user's own words. They may say something that you hadn't considered!

There are a few customer satisfaction surveys that are commonly used in the customer success field, including Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). 

Live Chat

Live chat has become more popular in recent years, as it can offer immediate assistance to a user. Businesses can engage with the user while they are using the app, which helps to collect data and resolve any issues.  In-app chat is more convenient for users, as they can stay on the same page while they are chatting. This can improve customer satisfaction and encourage users to return to your app. Live chat is also a great way to engage with users and build relationships with them.

With live chat, you can interact in real time with users and ask them questions, enabling you to go beyond their initial statements and extract additional insights from them. This helps to dig deeper into their thoughts, problems, and opinions. This can help you get a better understanding of their feedback and determine what needs to be done to improve the product.

Live chat can also be used to solicit feedback from users. This can be done by setting up an automation that asks users for feedback as they are using the app. This can be a way of interacting with a user who would not have connected with you on their own.

Support Tickets

You're probably already answering customer support emails. This is one of the best ways to get customer feedback, because  it is likely already built into your workflow.

Pay attention to what customers have to say in their support emails - they are providing feedback, even if that's not their intent! For example, a question about how to find a certain part of the app, is actually comment that it's hard to find what they are looking for.

User Interviews

User interviews are pretty simple: talk to your customers!

Interviews allow product managers to probe deeper into users' thoughts and feelings about a product. Additionally, they provide an opportunity to understand the user's context and get a sense of how they use the product. This information can help product managers generate better solutions that address user needs.

The key to getting useful feedback from users is to ask the right questions. During interviews, it's important to ask open-ended questions that allow users to share their thoughts and feelings candidly. By understanding what users like and don't like about a product, product managers can make necessary changes that improve the user experience.

In app user feedback collection

A feedback button allows website or app users to provide feedback directly on your website or app. Using a feedback button is a good way to collect feedback quickly and easily. It allows users to provide feedback without having to leave the app. This can help to ensure that all feedback is captured quickly and easily. This feedback can then be used to improve the user experience.

If you have an experienced development team and have the bandwidth, you can build this functionality into your app yourself. Otherwise, there are several tools available that you can use to install this functionality on your website.

Tips, Feedback Tools, and Best Practices for Managing User Feedback 

When it comes to collecting user feedback, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. What works for one company might not work for another. However, there are a few best practices that all businesses can follow to refine their process and make the most of customer feedback.

Segment your users

Segmenting your users means separating them into different groups, based on what you know about them. You could divide your users into different groups, like free versus paid users, or by what tier they are subscribed to. You can also divide your users into groups based on how they use your app and what features they use. This makes it easier to understand their needs and preferences, target specific user segments, and to find trends in the feedback.

Ask the right questions

One key practice is to make sure you're asking the right questions. When soliciting feedback, avoid leading or closed-ended questions that can produce unreliable results. Instead, ask open-ended questions that allow users to share their thoughts and opinions in detail.

Cover the customer journey

Another best practice is to collect feedback at multiple points in the customer journey. This allows you to get a better understanding of how users interact with your product or service and what they like and don't like about it. You can also track changes in user sentiment over time to see if your product is improving or declining in quality.

Collecting feedback at specific stages of the customer journey can help to pinpoint exactly what pain points exist at that stage. Some examples include:

• During the onboarding process or after signing up: ask users to provide ratings after they have signed up and performed certain actions, such as creating an account or making a purchase. This gives you and understanding of how well users are able to complete the desired tasks and what needs improvement. 
• After cancelling an account, or letting a free trial expire: Asking for free form feedback here can provide valuable user insights into what drove them away (aka, churned) and could help to prevent other users from doing the same.

Collect feedback continuously

You should aim to collect feedback as often as possible, so that you can continuously improve your product. It's important to make it easy for users to provide feedback. Allow them to use the avenue that is most comfortable to them, whether that's through a survey, a feedback tool, or by providing feedback directly on your website or app.

If you're not careful, feedback can quickly become a bottleneck in your workflow. To avoid this, it's important to set up a system for collecting and processing feedback. This system should automate as much as possible, so that you can focus on getting the feedback itself rather than on administrative tasks. 

How to take action on user feedback

User feedback is an essential part of product development, but it can be difficult to know what to do with it. As a product owner, you need to understand the product lifecycle and how user feedback fits into your business strategy. You also need to be able to prioritize and manage feature requests. 

Ultimately, you will want to engage in a continuous product feedback loop to improve your product, but here are some quick tips for taking action on user feedback:

Organize your feedback

Have a system in place to easily access insights and keep track of what feedback, feature requests, problems and bugs occur most frequently. This will also ensure that you don't let feedback fall through the cracks.  Not all feedback will be actionable, but it's important to identify the trends in user feedback in order to identify what feedback is coming up most frequently and how it can improve to the product. 

You can use a spreadsheet or database to track feedback, but using a dedicated feedback management tool is the most efficient way to both collect and track it. A good feedback management tool will allow you to collect and aggregates user feedback from multiple sources. It will also help you track the progress of your product development cycle and make sure that you're addressing the needs of your users.

Check out our list of the best feedback management tools to consider.

Analyze and prioritize feedback

Once user feedback is collected, it's important to analyze it and determine what changes need to be made. 

The first step is to organize feedback into groups or themes. Within the theme, make sure your system is able to link back to the source feedback so that you can access the original context.  From there, prioritize themes and ideas based on the impact on users and the business. Improvements that addresses key objectives or user pain points should be given higher priority than minor issues or suggestions. 

Understand and consider the product lifecycle as well. Every product goes through different stages as it evolves. Understanding these stages will help you prioritize and manage feature requests.

You also need to consider the cost of implementing requested changes.

Beware of feature requests

One of the most important aspects of collecting user feedback is understanding that not all feedback is created equal. Not all feedback will be useful, and some feedback may even be harmful. It is therefore important to carefully analyze and filter through all the data in order to extract the most useful insights.

Users will frequently make feature requests. Avoid the trap of thinking that you have to build exactly what the user is requesting without fully understanding the problem they are trying to solve. Too often, a user will request something that may not solve the problem in the most efficient way, or it turns out that they can achieve their goal a completely different way. 

Take the time to understand the problem. This means thinking through the steps required to solve it and then describing the issue in detail. Only after doing this should you consider how to implement a solution in your product.

Create a product roadmap

After identifying which features are most important to users and the business, you are ready develop a roadmap for your product. This will help you structure the future work on your product, and help communicate a clear vision of the product to the product's stakeholders.

The roadmap helps to communicate and align the team around the evolution of your product, and highlights what your team will build, including new features and improvements. This will help ensure that improvements are implemented in a timely manner and that there is sufficient time for testing and debugging.

Best User Feedback Tools

We have discussed many different forms of feedback. The best tool for you will depend on what you are looking for. For example, for general purpose surveys, SurveyMonkey provides a comprehensive solution.

If you're looking for a good all-around feedback management and product planning tool, Embarkable is an excellent choice. It provides tools for collecting user feedback, organizing feedback and extracting user insights, and roadmapping capabilities. 

Building a culture of continuous user feedback

In order to build a culture of user feedback, an organization must start by recognizing that user feedback is important. From there, everyone on the team must be constantly thinking about how they can get feedback from users, and more importantly, how they can act on that feedback.

This starts with having a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve with your product. What are your goals? What are the problems you’re trying to solve?

In the same vein, it is important that feedback is constantly streaming in from users, which can be a challenge. You need to find a way to encourage users to provide feedback and make it easy for them to do so.  You can do this by adding a feedback button or link to your product or website. This makes it easy for users to provide feedback without having to search. Another way to encourage user feedback is by providing incentives. You can offer rewards, such as discounts or free products, for users who provide feedback.

Additionally, it is important to respond to user feedback promptly and effectively. This ensures that users feel heard and that their feedback is actually being taken into account.

Finally, keep track of user feedback over time in order to see how it has changed or evolved. By doing all of these things, an organization can create a culture of user feedback that will help them improve their products and services.

Conclusion

Leveraging customer feedback is among the most effective methods for building a better product, nurturing customer satisfaction, and growing a company's user base.  If you have a system to capture, store and analyze feedback then it becomes easier to identify trends, common themes and areas that require attention. Therefore it is worthwhile to invest in a system to manage feedback so that you can efficiently translate user insights into actionable changes to your product.