What are the best practices for gathering user feedback on a SaaS product?

I've launched a SaaS product from ZERO this year, and the users are already paying. So, I focus my answer on the early stage: Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, famously said, "Do Things that Don't Scale." DON'T CHASE THE METRICS in the very early stage. Unless you have 50 monthly active users (I know it sounds small, but it's often very hard to get there when you start from zero.), the metrics won't generate statistically significant signals. You aim to manually recruit the first 10, 20 users and see if they completed the steps to get the value. If they don't, that's the first silent feedback! Get them on Zoom and listen to what they say. Fix EVERYTHING before recruiting the next batch. Repeat. Conversation > Metrics

For startups and businesses looking to innovate and grow, identifying the one metric that matters (OMTM) at any given stage is crucial, as it ensures that all efforts and resources are rallied towards addressing the most pressing concern or leveraging the most promising opportunity. Intriguingly, as a startup meanders through the sequential stages of Empathy, Stickiness, Virality, Revenue, and Scale, different KPIs and metrics indispensably rise to prominence, necessitating a flexible and adaptive analytical approach.

Goals: Enhance User Satisfaction Increase Product Adoption Reduce Churn Innovate Effectively Competitive Edge Metrics Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measure user satisfaction and loyalty. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Evaluate satisfaction with specific interactions. User Engagement Rate: Monitor active users and feature adoption. Churn Rate: Calculate the percentage of lost customers. Feature Adoption Rate: Track usage of new features. Bug Report Resolution Time: Ensure timely bug fixes. Feature Request Uptake: Measure adoption of user-requested features. Competitor Benchmarking: Compare NPS and CSAT scores with competitors.

Analytics give you real insights about how you software works in hands of your real customers. It's a good idea to define different metric and setup some tools in your softwares in order to report these metrics to you. For example you can use some scripts that run under hood for reporting metrics data. It's clear that you need you customer consents for permission for reporting. In other side inside your back end side you can use analytics tools like splunk or ELK for grouping and analysing and presenting your mertics data.

Surveys - Quick, scalable way to get broad user feedback through online forms. Interviews - Get in-depth insights from targeted users through 1-on-1 conversations. Usability tests - Observe how users interact with your product to identify pain points. Focus groups - Discuss product experience with a small group of users. Customer reviews - Gather candid feedback through app store ratings and reviews. Analytics - Analyze in-product behavior to understand usage patterns.

Analytics give you the numbers. They don't lie and when people stop using your product at a certain point than that's the reality. However, it's only half the truth because you will not find out the motivations of the users. That's why a combined approach of analytics and gathering feedback via surveys/interviews is a more balanced approach.

Here are some methods and tools you can use to effectively collect user feedback: Customer Surveys: Tools: Use online survey tools like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or Typeform to create surveys. Method: Send out regular surveys to your users to gather their opinions and preferences. Include both quantitative and qualitative questions to get a comprehensive view. In-App Feedback Forms: Tools: Integrate in-app feedback tools like UserVoice, Intercom, or Zendesk. Method: Allow users to provide feedback directly from within your SaaS application. This can capture feedback when it's most relevant. We can give some credits or rewards to excite users to provide feedback to increase the amount of feedback.

The best question you can ask is: Why have you chosen to buy our product. It tells you a lot on their motivation behind their decision. It's important to note it down and then make sure to be aware of the repeating motivations. Once you get to a lot of repetitive reasons, make sure to use that in advertising. It's going to help a lot with attracting new customers.

Use questions that allow the user to re-live an experience. Something like “Tell me about the last time you used the product”, “What did you use it for?”, etc. Pay attention to the answers and look for words that would denote satisfaction or frustration and focus on those to continue improving the product. Sometimes they will outright tell you, “I the this feature” but you want to know why, was it really as bad as they say? Did they still manage to complete the task they were trying to accomplish?

Usability and User Experience: How easy is it to navigate and use our CRM and ERP? Are there specific features or processes that you find challenging or confusing? What improvements can we make to enhance the overall user experience? Feature Satisfaction: Are there any features you rarely or never use? If so, why? What additional features or functionalities would be valuable to your workflow? Performance and Reliability: Have you experienced any performance issues, such as slow loading times or system outages? How would you rate the overall reliability and stability of the product? Integration Needs: Are there any third-party integrations that you wish our CRM and ERP supported? Feedback can also be based on emojis, it will be easier.

Organize feedback into categories like issues, themes, opportunities. Prioritize feedback based on importance, urgency, feasibility. Turn feedback into actionable steps - improve features, fix bugs, adjust pricing. Communicate feedback analysis and actions to users. Thank users for their input.

I am a big fan of recurring feedback loop. Best teams are always focusing on how they can provide as much value to customers and solve their problems. I recommend to start new functionalities as simple as possible -> deliver them to customers -> ask for feedback -> improve and iterate. This provides the best chance to build the RIGHT things and solve as much problems to our customers.