December 18, 2023
The Ultimate Guide to Customer Feedback for SaaS Product Managers
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There are countless ways to grow a SaaS product. Adding new features, providing a better product-market fit, refining your customer service, and more. However, you have to know where to start, which is often the hardest part.
You can shoot blindly in the dark or do something better - listen to your customers’ feedback. Collecting feedback should be one of the key responsibilities of a product manager. Today, we’ll show you why this is an important activity, as well as what you can do to make your feedback process flow more smoothly.
Who should collect customer feedback?
In a SaaS product company, there are plenty of people, roles, and departments that can and should collect feedback. Here are a few to get you started:
Customer service/customer support - on the frontlines and always in the know when it comes to something breaking in your product. They hear all the good and bad feedback and they should collect and organize it methodically.
Sales team - they hear the many objections that potential customers have before purchasing and they know the friction points better than anyone else. Give them a platform for collecting feedback after each sales call or interaction with a customer.
Product manager - this is a role that encompasses many duties and one of them is looking at competitors’ products. This can be a goldmine of feedback as customers often drop a line or two about a competitor they are switching from - which could be your product.
Practically, every interaction with your customers is a chance to collect feedback. The one thing that is common for all methods is that you need a central hub for collecting and organizing your feedback. Why not try out FeedBear and enjoy our feedback boards, where both your customers and your team can add their feedback, communicate, vote on ideas, and build products that matter and relationships that last longer.
Customer Feedback Takeaways for SaaS Product Managers
If you’re a product manager for a SaaS business, feedback should be one of the main tasks that you should focus on daily. However, if this is something completely new to you - you might be wondering where to get started. Here are some best practices.
Centralize customer feedback
One of the biggest struggles that happen with customer feedback in SaaS product teams is managing it. Feedback can come from different sides, in all shapes and forms.
From short messages in your chat to interviews that can go up to an hour in length.
The key to managing and utilizing customer feedback successfully is to collect & organize it in one place. For this purpose, FeedBear uses a feedback board where you can neatly organize feedback in cards and later on move the best items to your product roadmap.
Communicate with your customers
Feedback goes both ways. If a customer sends you a new feature request, complaint, bug report, or praise, don’t give them the silent treatment. Let them know that you received their input and if you have a resolution for them - inform them on time. If not, give them a promise on how and when you’re going to resolve it. Keeping your customers in the dark backfires and rising churn rates can become a headache.
Ask for feedback when customers churn
It’s never a good thing to have customers leaving you. The only thing good about it is to find out why. A simple exit survey is a great way to ask your customers about their reasons for switching to a competitor.
Prioritize the right customer feedback for better management
Not all feedback is equal. A few lines from an enterprise account with 100 seats is worth more than an essay of feedback from a single-seat freelancer who can easily churn in a few months. Each piece of feedback should be weighed based on who it’s coming from, context, and value.
Collect in-app feedback
Wondering what's the best place to collect product feedback? Proactively and directly in the product. Your customers are there interacting with it and if something is going the wrong (or right) way, they can voice their opinion immediately instead of navigating to a contact-us page and forgetting about it halfway.
Analyze feedback and metrics
Whether qualitative or quantitative, any feedback you collect should be analyzed. Who left it, how urgent it is, what action needs to be taken, and when. FeedBear can help you with this as each entry on the feedback board has its comments and votes and you can quickly determine what you need to do and how urgent that particular feedback is.
How to Collect Customer Feedback for SaaS Products
As we’ve emphasized before, there are many different ways to collect customer feedback. SaaS products are somewhat unique. But the good news is, that you’ll have many opportunities to collect feedback at each step of the customer journey.
Within the app
Tools like FeedBear allow you to collect customer feedback directly from your product. Whether they’re using your mobile app or the website version of your product, customers can show you how they feel with just a few clicks or taps of a button.
On your website
Before going to your app, your customers will go through several pages - pricing, blog, comparison pages, features pages, and others. These are prime opportunities to find out what they think of these different aspects of your product without even logging into the product.
Through email
Email marketing is one of the most profitable channels for acquiring new customers, across different industries. It’s also a great way to collect feedback - it’s all about setting up the right workflows. For example, ask your customers to submit a review once they upgrade from a free trial to a paid account.
Observation
The easiest and most cost-effective thing that you can do is just observe what customers do with your product. If you collect in-app data, you can quickly see what your customers are doing, where they run into roadblocks, and where you need to step your game up.
How to Manage Customer Feedback
One of the biggest hurdles that product managers face is difficulty collecting feedback and managing it properly. Whether you’re intentional about it or not, feedback will eventually pour in from reviews, sales calls, customer service tickets, and more. The problem arises when you have 10 different sources of feedback and no central location to manage it all.
With FeedBear, you can manage all of your feedback in one place - your feedback board. No matter the source of feedback, you can add all of your tickets here to have an easy overview and track how many times a certain bug has been reported or a feature has been requested.
Measuring Customer Feedback
What gets measured can get improved. Easier said than done, though, because there are only certain types of feedback that you can measure.
Qualitative feedback is the type of customer feedback where they describe what they liked and disliked about your SaaS product and it’s immensely valuable for product managers and the overall team.
The only problem is, you cannot put “I really loved your Zapier integration and your in-product messaging” into numbers. Qualitative feedback is amazing on all accounts except one - measuring it.
This is where quantitative feedback shines. If you ask customers to rate their satisfaction with your product on a scale from 0 to 10 (with a CSAT survey), you can quickly put a number to your customer satisfaction. The same goes for many other types of feedback collection, such as NPS surveys, CES surveys, and others.
You can have the best of both worlds with FeedBear. When you start a feedback board, your customers can add new items and then vote on them. That way, you can quickly determine if something has the popular vote, based on customers’ votes on a certain card.
That way, even qualitative feedback can have a number behind it and you can make sure that you’re making decisions based on merit rather than your gut feeling.
What Does a Good Feedback System Look Like?
It depends on many factors and will not be the same for different SaaS products. However, there are a few common elements of each great product feedback system.
1. An easy way for customers to provide feedback
No lengthy forms, tables, or interview processes. If a customer wants to voice their opinion, give them an easy way to say what they want. With FeedBear, they can provide feedback using our feedback board within minutes.
2. Let customers interact with your team
If your customers can talk to your product, customer service, and support teams, they’ll know someone is listening. Within FeedBear, your team can communicate with customers and let them know that you’re listening and paying attention.
3. Customers can vote
If a customer wants to voice their opinion and someone already submitted a similar feature request or a piece of feedback, they should be able to vote. This way, you eliminate repeat submissions and let customers provide feedback in an even quicker fashion.
4. Close the feedback loop
Once you make an update about your customer’s feedback, make sure to let that customer know that you’ve listened to them and implemented their suggestions. This is a superb way to close the feedback loop. With FeedBear, you can do this automatically using a public changelog and everyone involved in a feedback ticket gets notified about any changes.
Final Thoughts
Running a SaaS product without collecting feedback is like driving to an unknown location without a map. Sure, you might get there eventually, but you’ll waste precious time and money and make quite a few mistakes until you get it right.
You don’t have to do it that way. Try out FeedBear today and use our system to collect, organize and act upon product feedback - in a way that is intuitive and easy. Sign up for your free trial today!
