Customer feedback is one of the toughest things to manage. Customer feedback can come in a dozen different formats, and also across a dozen channels, from a dozen different people.
And forget sifting through all of it, even trying to give importance to one piece over the other and turning it into actionable insights is also a difficult task.
However, as impossible as it looks, dealing with this customer feedback in a sound and smoothed-out manner is really quite possibly of the main thing you can accomplish for your organization.
Poor management of customer feedback can lead to unhappy customers, high churn, and low productivity and business decision-making.
Fortunately, we have invested a ton of energy working with product and customer teams from SaaS companies from all over the world to put together a comprehensive guide on best practices for customer feedback management.
And therefore, we have explained here everything about customer feedback – what is it? How it works? And why it is important for your company’s success.
What is Customer Feedback?
Customer surveys are about connecting with people who use your product and find out what they think about it. With customer feedback (Gathered with a customer feedback app), you can answer questions like:
Whether they are enjoying it or not
Is there anything they think must be changed?
What are the features they would like to add?
What do they find the most difficult thing to use?
Generally, the main aim of the customer feedback process is to identify the pain points – the things that particularly frustrate and annoy the customer. Although, this can be a difficult process because you never know how much negative criticism you may attract.
But without a proper customer feedback process, you are likely to miss out on important comments and opinions. The actual user experience is what product managers can use to decide which parts of the product need to be improved or even discarded altogether.
Why Customer Feedback Management is Important?
Customer feedback is not just simply a damage control technique. It’s a valuable resource that helps you align your improvement efforts and user experience to achieve the desired results. However, feedback isn’t necessarily self-explanatory. You need to include clear actions in your customer feedback to promote success.
Customer feedback management is the process by which you can collect, process, and act on the feedback you receive. Having a customer feedback system (basically customer feedback software) is important if you are surveying many customers on a regular basis.
Keeping your customers engaged with customer feedback on what you’re working on is the key to making them happy with your product, and the best way to do that is to listen to their feedback and add to with your product.
How Customer Feedback Management Can Help You?
Improve Your Product
Individuals who realize your item best are those who use it in their day-to-day life, they are your customers. As much as they use your product, they will have the best ideas on how the product can be improved because they are the ones who are going to benefit from it when it gets improved.
By giving importance to what your customers are requesting in your product, you’re creating something that customers are going to get value out of as you are improving your product.
Build a Proper Product Roadmap
One of the toughest things while building a product roadmap is deciding on which items to give importance to. How are you expected to know what’s going to have the highest business impact or what is going to benefit your customers the most?
Managing customer feedback effectively can help you strengthen your existing ideas and map your roadmap by identifying what interests your customers the most. Understanding what your clients need can help you create a product roadmap and decide what to build next for a successful customer journey.
Have a Clear Understanding of Your Customer’s Likes and Dislikes
One of the top benefits of customer feedback management is being able to get a clear and better idea about what your customers are happy with and what they are not.
No one has tested your product other than your customers, and thus they are the ones who can provide honest and fair product feedback about what’s working and what isn’t.
Assuming the overall agreement is that most clients are happy with your product, then you would be able to add additional functionality that will enhance the customer experience. However, if you find out that more customers are unhappy with your product, then it may be time for you to take a look into what’s wrong with your product that is letting customers not purchase it.
Decrease Customers Churn
If customers feel that their feedback is being ignored, they will leave the community to find a product that they think fits their needs and wants.
Therefore, you need to communicate with your customers and incorporate their feedback. If they fit into your roadmap, it would be a great way to ensure that they will stay longer. The key to achieving this is having the right strategy for handling all customer feedback.
Important Steps for Customer Feedback Management Process
The feedback management process can be divided into four steps: Collect, Facilitate, prioritize, and communicate. Many companies these days stop the collection process and leave useless details in their excel sheets.
However, following these four stages will assist with overcoming any issues between the customer and product teams and bring everyone together to meet the needs of your employees. Let’s review the process.
Collect
The initial step in dealing with the client feedback process is to collect customer feedback including both proactive and reactive feedback. Feedback collection can come in myriad ways, from unsolicited feature requests to NPS surveys to user interviews.
Different kinds of feedback have their own merits, therefore it’s important to collect a wide variety of customer metrics.
If you simply focus on NPS survey responses, you are not going to have in-depth information to off of, and if you only focus on conducting user interviews, you will not get an adequate number of information directed rapidly enough toward simply deciding.
Therefore, it’s important for you to have an equilibrium of feedback collection strategies to have a balanced pool of information to pull from.
Validate
Support is a very important step that is often overlooked and is the root of many problems we encounter in business. Quite possibly of the greatest test in managing feedback is the sheer amount of volume members receive on a daily basis.
Customer development and support teams are flooded with bug reports and feature requests they can’t solve, product teams receive anecdotal requests and ad hoc suggestions that don’t help them decide what to build. This is why having the right content management tool is very important.
It is recommended to group feedback into smaller buckets and organize it into a manageable system. This will help each team comprehend what is generally essential to their clients and what will have the greatest business influence.
Both proactive and responsive feedback can be thought of as a “piece of input” which can be further divided into five different categories: Request, Insight, Friction, Praise, and Bug.
These scripts will help your team organize and validate the impact different types of feedback will have on your business. Once you define each definition, you can group similar words into different definition buckets.
Prioritize
Now that you have collected all your feedback (using a customer feedback tool), and have organized it into distinct categories. You can see now which users care about which items. The subsequent stage is choose which of these themes or needs to pursue next.
What’s the topmost pressing issue? What can bring the highest business impact? Etc.
Depending on your business and your product, your priorities will be different depending on the question you have to answer first. If your product depends entirely on a few VIP users, you’ll want to prioritize solving the problems that affect them the most.
Regardless, if you have an enormous number of users with similar characteristics, you can focus on the element that affects the largest percentage of users.
Communicate
The final stage in the feedback management process is arguably the most important. If you’re doing all the work behind the scenes to get feedback from your customers and they don’t know what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it, then there’s no point.
Communicating with your customers during this process is key to what we like to call, an empathetic approach to feedback management.
Conclusion
Product reviews are almost always coming into the industry. Managing and organizing these details effectively is key to creating a system of records that your team can use to support your product efforts.
By listening to what your users are saying, you can begin improving your product and come up with strategies that will have the greatest impact on your business.
