Sources Of Product Feedback

Product feedback is crucial for running a great SaaS business, whether you’re Slack or a solopreneur with an app built in Airtable. It’s one of the best ways to get inspired, fix what’s not working, and create something amazing that actually solves customers’ pain points.

Capturing product feedback from your users is actually much easier than you may think. Today, we’ll show you why product feedback is important, as well as some practical tips for collecting it.

What is Product Feedback?

Product feedback is any type of feedback that customers leave for you about your product or service. This could relate to any aspect of the product, including but not limited to:

• Features
• Integrations
• User experience
• Design
• Onboarding
• Pricing
• Your roadmap

Types of Product Feedback

In general, there are two types of feedback. The main difference is in the way that you collect it for your product. In other words, whether the customer provides the feedback on their own or if you requested it yourself.

Source

Solicited feedback is when you use a certain channel to require feedback from your customers. This could be a survey on your website, a chat box in your mobile app, or a post-signup email. In most cases, you’ll have to collect solicited feedback because customers won’t be too eager to provide feedback on their own.

Unsolicited feedback is when customers come to you and provide feedback on their own without you having to request it. This is the less common situation and for the most part, customers with negative feedback are the more eager ones to send it your way.

You should aim to collect both types, but as you are the one who can influence solicited feedback, we suggest starting a few initiatives to collect it, such as emails and in-app messages.

Methods to Collect Product Feedback

Depending on the type of feedback you want to collect (qualitative or quantitative, long form or short form, etc.), you’ll use a different method. There are now plenty of different channels and apps that you can use to collect feedback about your product so you can choose the one that suits your needs and budget.

Surveys

Probably the most common way to collect feedback, surveys have come a long way from paper forms. You can now embed surveys in your web or mobile app using a tool such as Survicate. It offers different types of surveys such as NPS, CSAT, CES, product feedback surveys, exit surveys, and many others.

Emails

Transactional emails may sound dull but they can be one of the easiest ways to collect product feedback, especially if they’re automated. For example, you can set up an email to ask for feedback once the customer reaches their “aha” moment with your product - for example when someone pays their first invoice.

Interviews

This is one of the best ways to collect detailed qualitative feedback and the information you can uncover about your product can be priceless. Bear in mind that to do interviews properly, you need to do some preparations first and have a detailed interview process. Also, this product feedback collection method is quite a time-intensive one.

Focus Groups

Once you have a group of customers that you know are your ideal target audience, you can create a focus group to get detailed feedback about your product. Much like interviews, this is a goldmine of qualitative feedback but requires extensive preparation and analysis.

Customer Support Conversations

Your customer support is at the forefront when something goes wrong. They usually hear the worst experiences your customers have and they can relay them to your product and development teams without any filters.

Sales Calls

Selling is hard when your potential customers have researched not just you but your competitor's products as well. For this reason, sales calls can be a superb way to collect product feedback before someone even commits to a purchase.

Source

Sources of Product Feedback

There are countless different types of product feedback that you can collect but one major distinction we have to make is the source. And while the customer is always right, each of the sources listed below has a great effect on your overall product feedback.

From Users/Customers

The best and most important source of product feedback. Your customers are the ones using the product daily and interacting with it from different aspects. This is your first point to go to when collecting feedback about your product.

From Your Sales Team

Your sales team hears all the objections that potential customers have before purchasing. Whether it’s a lack of integrations, a broken UX, steep pricing, or something else, sales will have information from those who are ready to purchase.

From Your Support Team

When something doesn’t work, these are the first people to know. The support team will have the information you need about what you need to fix on your product to make your customers happier and prevent churn. This type of internal feedback is invaluable for growth.

From Your Development Team

Your developers will know which features are prone to break, what was built well, and where they need more time and attention. If you’re keen to find out how your product can be better from the technical side, grab a cup of coffee with the developers now and then.

Product Analytics

It’s a great idea to measure what happens within your product and how customers interact with it. Sometimes, you may get surprised to find out that many customers are not using a feature that is the star of the product because of UX or some other issues.

Benefits of Product Feedback

You probably know that listening to customers’ feedback is a great idea. Here are some practical reasons to start collecting and analyzing product feedback today.

Helps to Improve The Product

The best way to move forward and create something that solves your customers’ pain points is by listening to them. Good or bad, feedback is the ultimate way to improve your product.

Enhance Features

Most of the time, product managers and developers make assumptions about what features customers would love and how they would use them. Product feedback helps you adapt your features in a way that they’re adopted instead of ignored.

Create New Features

If you’re having a tough time deciding what feature to build next, just ask your customers with a tool like FeedBear. Customers will know which features they need to like and use your product even more.

Remove Features

Not everything you make will be flawless, especially if you didn’t initially build it on feedback but intuition. If a feature needs to be removed to avoid feature bloat, just ask your customers for product feedback.

Enhance Customer Experience

Your customers have a problem to solve, but why not make them feel great while at it? Sometimes, small UX and UI tweaks based on product feedback can make a massive impact on adoption and churn.

Boost Loyalty

Customers love when you ask them for their opinion. It’s the quickest way to show them what they think matters. Gathering product feedback will make sure that your customers stay with you for a long while.

Improve Customer Engagement

There’s nothing like sparking up a conversation, regardless of how satisfied your customers are with your product. To truly foster engagement, make sure to collect feedback regularly and communicate about it with your users.

How to Collect Product Feedback?

This sounds phenomenal to you at this point and you’re wondering what to do to get started. If you’re feeling lost, here are some of the steps that you can take today.

Set a Goal

What is your aim with feedback collection? Whether it is to increase signups, decrease churn, lower your CAC or increase your LTV, set a goal first before making any moves towards product feedback collection.

Run Beta Testing

Before testing out your method of collecting product feedback on your entire user base, try doing a beta test first with a smaller audience. You’ll see what works and what needs changing.

Listen to the Answers and Get As Many Details as Possible

Many companies collect product feedback but few listen to what customers have to say. Listen to your customers and jot down the objections (and praises) that come up frequently. If something needs addressing, capture as many details as you can.

Conduct Research

Once you decide to act on customer feedback, do some research to find the best course of action. Before launching that new feature or addressing an issue with a partner integration, research what it’s going to cost you in time and money and whether it’s going to make an impact on all customers.

Use The Right Tool

As mentioned before, there are countless tools for product feedback. You want something that can be used for qualitative and quantitative feedback and that aggregates all your feedback in one place. FeedBear is a great tool to get started as it has all of these features in one tool!

Summary

Product feedback can sound like something nice to have and you may feel like you don’t have time for it. However, collecting, analyzing, and acting upon product feedback is one of the best things you can do for your product, revenue, and ultimately, customers.

Get started with collecting customer feedback today - sign up for a free trial of FeedBear! We’re built for SaaS teams and you can use our tool to easily collect feedback and communicate about it with your customers.

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