Customer Feedback Portal

Capturing customer feedback is essential to guide the future development of your product. Becoming customer-centric leads to a better line of communication with the people who use your product and guides your team in developing better features. This increases your product adoption rate, and in general, makes your customers happy and satisfied, all while increasing revenue.

One of the best ways to get that job done is with a customer feedback portal, such as FeedBear. Here is how that works.

Step 1: Collecting feedback

A customer feedback portal acts as a single go-to place for your customers to provide feedback as opposed to having a multitude of feedback sources. To point out a few traditional examples, we have

• Emails
• Social media inboxes
• Live chat
• In-product chat apps
• Customer support and sales calls
• And many others

These channels for feedback collection are slowly becoming outdated and inefficient, as you have to then pool all the feedback in a single place later on. Things become even trickier as feedback through multiple channels can come in a variety of formats. And in the long run, maintaining a feedback process with unnecessary complexities is not the best use of your time.

Compare the traditional process we just described to a feedback portal; a dedicated page on your website where customers can log in (or not) - mention their identity (or stay anonymous) and leave their thoughts and opinions. This saves you as a business owner from running around and collecting insights from countless platforms. 

This is exactly what FeedBear does - our feedback boards can be run within your website, allowing customers to leave feedback in the form of new ideas. Each new idea gets its own name and your customers and team members can leave comments and interact with each other.

Moreover, they can vote. This brings us to the second important point.

Step 2: Getting a quantitative aspect with voting

Ever tried to tally up feedback from customer service emails? It’s kind of difficult and the best that you’ll do is round up similar emails in one place. In the end, you won’t know with certainty if your customers want a certain feature to be built or not.

A dedicated feedback portal allows customers to add qualitative feedback (insights about a product) with a quantitative element, a vote.

In the case of FeedBear, your customers can leave votes on each entry in your feedback portal. With a simple + sign, they can show whether they agree with a bug report or a feature request or not.

This approach to feedback lets you collect valuable insights but at the same time, votes show you the volume of customers needing a certain feature or wanting something fixed. Instead of gut feelings, you can rely on actual numbers to make quick and guided decisions on important product matters.

Step 3: Getting the team involved

One of the best ways to achieve customer centricity is to show your customers that you care. And the way to do that is by interacting with them. If all they do is leave feedback and get no replies in return, it will soon start feeling like a one-way street.

With a proper feedback portal such as FeedBear, your team can talk to the customers. Within feedback boards in FeedBear, your product, customer support, sales, and marketing teams can communicate with customers inside individual feedback ideas (as comments).

This not only foster engagement but makes your customers feel as if their voices are being heard. You can make good use of this feature in FeedBear with threaded communication. Moreover, each team member has a tag next to their name, so customers know they’re speaking to someone from your company.

Perhaps the most important point is that with a feedback portal, you shorten the distance between the product team and the customers. Your entire team can be more immediately involved with customers' issues - reach out to them, investigate and provide help.

In short, feedback no longer comes only from sales and support teams. Your entire company can see the feedback, allowing you to move more quickly and create a feedback-centric company culture.

Step 4: Turn the feedback into actionable roadmap items

Your feedback process does not end with a feedback portal. While incredibly important, it’s merely the starting point of an optimal customer feedback loop.

Once you collect requests and feedback in a central location, you can tally up the cards with the most number of votes, prioritize and address them accordingly. However, the process simply doesn't end here.

Each card in the feedback portal can be turned into an entry on your product roadmap, which is the second essential feature FeedBear provides. With a single click, you can go from a feedback portal to a kanban-styled roadmap with different phases. Once feedback is addressed, it moves to the finished phase, and you can even push it to a public changelog.

If that sounds good, the next part is even better. Every customer that made a comment or upvoted the original feedback entry gets notified about the changes in every stage. 

Wrapping up 

If you need just one place where all your customers can leave feedback easily, and vote on ideas and posts to give you a quantitative and data-driven understanding of requirements rather than blind guessing - give FeedBear a try! Sign up today for your free trial!