Product Feedback Tool

It’s becoming more difficult to stand out in the SaaS industry with each day. At the moment of writing, there are over 25,000 SaaS companies in the world and there’s a good chance that if you have a new idea, someone has already thought of it before.

There is some great news though. While battling your competitors based on features alone is getting tougher, there is one area where you can win over new business - customer experience. And the best place is to get started is by collecting and implementing customer feedback.

One of the ways you can do this is by introducing a product feedback tool such as FeedBear. Today, we’ll show you what a product feedback tool is, how it works and why FeedBear is the right choice for you.

What is a Product Feedback Tool

A product feedback tool is any kind of tool that lets your customers share what they think of your SaaS product. This could be anything from an email inbox, to an Excel sheet where your support reps add comments, all the way to a full-blown product feedback SaaS tool like FeedBear.

The aim of a feedback tool is to allow you to collect qualitative and quantitative feedback, categorize it and help your product team make better decisions. A good product feedback tool lets your customers leave their comments and thoughts in a way that is quick and easy for them and at the same time, convenient for your product team to manage and categorize the feedback that comes in.

In short, you need to give FeedBear a try. But before we get to that, let’s answer another important question.

What should you look for in a Product Feedback Tool

The most important thing to know is that your product feedback tool of choice will depend primarily on your needs. Before setting out to do your research, determine what you want to achieve first. Do you just want to just consolidate different feedback sources into one or do you want a full-cycle feedback tool that has roadmaps and a changelog?

Once you know this, you’ll be able to determine what features you need. However, there are some basics that every good feedback tool should have.

It lets you collect feedback in one place

Most business owners know that feedback doesn’t come from a single source. You’ll get it through emails, customer calls, social media comments and threads, in-app messages, reviews on G2 or Capterra… you name it.

A good feedback tool allows you to create a single repository for feedback, so it’s easier to categorize it and make better product decisions. In FeedBear, that place is called a feedback board, and it lets you create cards for each new feature request or bug report. Customers can create new requests or vote on existing ones.

It’s easy to use

We won’t name any names, but there are quite a few FeedBear competitors out there that have a pretty steep learning curve. If it takes you more than a day to figure out how to use a product feedback tool and incorporate it into your product management workflow, it may not be the right choice.

On the flip side, it’s even more important that your customers can use the tool without much hassle. They should be able to create new feature requests, vote on them, communicate with other customers (and your team), and do everything on their own without scratching their heads and asking for help.

It lets you collect quantitative and qualitative feedback

We’ve talked a bit about the two main feedback types in product management. Qualitative (descriptive) feedback is important because it lets customers explain what they need help with. Quantitative (measurable) feedback puts a number behind their thoughts.

Ideally, you need both to make good product decisions. Qualitative shows you what you need to work on, and the quantitative lets you measure which initiatives are worth your time.

It has a good price

For many people, probably the first item on the priority list. Bear in mind that your product feedback tool is just one element in your product management tool stack. If you choose something expensive, the rest of your tools will have to suffer.

What you can afford is completely up to you, but you should know that you can get started with FeedBear for as low as $49 per project per month. If you do some shopping around, you’ll see that there are no other feedback tools offering this value for that kind of price.

It allows you to customize

Design is not everything for a product but it’s pretty important. A good feedback tool gives you the opportunity to change your feedback boards, roadmaps, widgets and more so it blends in with your product design and user experience.

You can do this in FeedBear and either choose a template to start with or tinker around with the design so that your feedback boards and roadmap look like a part of your website and product.

To sum up, a great product feedback tool needs to tick a lot of boxes. The bigger your product team and the more developed your product is, the more requirements you’ll have. With FeedBear, you can tick all of those boxes.

Product Feedback Tool: How it Works in FeedBear

Now that you know how product feedback tools work and what you should look for, let’s see how FeedBear helps.

Creating a feedback board

This is the place where you collect and store all of your feedback, a central hub of customers’ opinions about your product, good or bad. As soon as you sign up for FeedBear, you can create a feedback board in minutes by using a template or building one from scratch.

A feedback board is a place where you should ideally store all your customers’ comments, bug reports, and feature requests. The best way to make this happen is to leave a link to the feedback board on your website and within your customer-facing emails, in-app messages, and more.

Letting your customers create feature requests, vote, and communicate with your team

Within the feedback board, every customer can create a new card with their feature request, bug report, or just general feedback. As soon as they start creating a new entry, FeedBear will give suggestions as they type, so they don’t repeat the same entry as someone else.

They can vote on existing entries in the feedback board by simply clicking on + or -, to show whether they also need a certain feature built or a bug fixed.

Within each card, they can leave comments and have discussions in the form of threads. Your own team members (from customer support, product, marketing, or some other team) can participate in the discussion. The customers will be able to see very clearly that there’s a company representative talking to them.

Creating a product roadmap

The very best feature requests deserve to be built. To show your customers that their request is making it to production, you should move it to a product roadmap, which is super easy to create in FeedBear. Just like the feedback board, creating a product roadmap takes mere minutes, as you can choose to start from a template.

By default, a product roadmap is split up into different categories so you can move cards around as they progress through your workflow. The great news is that each time a feature request moves on to the next stage of the product workflow, everyone who voted or left a comment on it gets a notification from FeedBear, which closes the feedback loop without you even lifting a finger.

Creating and maintaining a changelog

For diligent product teams, a changelog is one of the easiest ways to keep track of all the features they’ve finished and bugs they’ve fixed. Creating one from scratch takes plenty of maintenance and you’ll have to develop a separate page just for this cause.

In FeedBear, a changelog is created automatically as you complete your product roadmap items. This not only saves time for your product team but also makes it easier for customers to stay in the loop.

Wrapping up

As you can see, FeedBear has everything that a modern SaaS product needs to collect, organize and act on customer feedback.

No matter how big or small your product (and product team) is, FeedBear is an excellent way to become a customer-centric company and improve the relationship with your customers, all the while making product decisions based on hard evidence, rather than guesses.

Ready to give it a go? Sign up for a free trial today!