Customer feedback is essential for product managers, but it can also be overwhelming. How can you collect, prioritize, and act on customer feedback without losing focus or wasting time? Here are some tips to streamline the process and make the most of your customer insights.
Before you start gathering feedback, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with it. What are the main problems or opportunities you want to explore? What are the key metrics or outcomes you want to improve? How will you measure the impact of your feedback-driven changes? Having a feedback goal will help you narrow down your sources, methods, and tools for collecting feedback, and avoid getting distracted by irrelevant or conflicting data.
Having a goal while gathering feedback is as critical as having a goal while developing a product. It helps you to ask the right questions and keep you on track. However, we need to be careful that human bias does not set in and our questions are not biased to get a favourable answer for our feedback goal as data gathered from feedback can be used to prove the answer you want. Once we have a feedback goal, we can choose from various qualitative and quantitative feedback methods such as surveys, interviews, analytics and tickets. The most valuable feedback is from the actual users using the product and not from stakeholders representing the users.
As a part of your feedback goals, it's important to have clarity around the target member who you'd like to get feedback from. That way, you're learning about the needs of that member/persona that truly can solve their problem, rather than a different one that may have different needs and therefore different solutions to their problems. For example, if you're building an onboarding experience, you would likely focus on members who are top of funnel and haven't onboarded yet and/or members who dropped off during the onboarding funnel. It wouldn't be valuable to conduct UXR with someone who is a power user who onboarded successfully without issues.
Start by defining clear feedback goals. What specific aspects of your product are you focusing on? Prioritize feedback that aligns with these areas. Implement a structured system for collecting and analyzing feedback, using tools like customer surveys or feedback widgets. Categorize responses for efficient processing. Regular team meetings to review feedback help in quick decision-making and prioritization. Remember, the goal isn't just to collect feedback, but to convert it into actionable insights that drive product improvement.
'Keeping up' is the wrong way to think about it. You aren't casting a line into a stream and hoping for something good to bite. You elicit feedback in support of a specific learning outcome. You're doing evaluative research - either of a finished product, a prototype, or even an early concept or competitor product. Remember, you are never asking "do you like this?" but rather trying to determine if something is working, is good enough, is better than something else. You have a specific question, and you allocate time towards getting specific answers. Your research context is always reducing uncertainty. It isn't about keeping up, it is about de-risking.
If the team is failing to keep up with customer feedback, it's most likely that they are not able to divide the change into small pieces. Or they are just not focusing enough to fix the issue in the short term and focusing on major evolution of the product. These approaches generally cause customer dis-satisfaction. But if we break down feedback into small pieces and continuously deliver on them by effectively communicating with our customers, with every iteration you get closer to the desired satisfaction levels!
Not all feedback is created equal. Depending on your feedback goal, you may want to focus on different sources of feedback, such as surveys, interviews, reviews, analytics, support tickets, or social media. Each source has its own advantages and limitations, so you need to balance the quantity, quality, and diversity of your feedback. For example, surveys can give you a lot of quantitative data, but they may not capture the nuances or emotions of your customers. Interviews can give you deeper insights, but they may not be representative of your entire customer base.
Feeling your pain! Here are some quick tips to streamline the process: Centralize channels: One platform for all feedback (calls, emails, surveys, social media). Less chaos, more insights. Short surveys: Focus on key areas with concise forms. Customers are busy, make it easy to share. ? Automate thank yous & initial responses: Show immediate care & save time. Every interaction matters. Tag & categorize: Sort feedback by type (bugs, features, praise) & keywords. Find the needles in the haystack faster. Close the loop: Inform customers about the impact of their feedback & implemented changes. Transparency builds trust. Feedback loop culture: Share customer insights across departments. A customer-centric team wins every time.
Streamlining customer feedback starts with choosing the right sources. Focus on those most relevant to your product's stage and audience. Utilize platforms where your customers are most active, like social media, support tickets, or in-app feedback tools. Prioritize these channels to manage the influx efficiently. Implement a system to aggregate and analyze data from these sources, enabling your team to focus on actionable insights rather than getting overwhelmed by volume. This focused approach ensures you're gathering quality feedback that directly informs product improvements and strategy.
Be sure to gather feedback at appropriate moments in the customer journey. For example: don't show a feedback survey pop-up to a first-time website visitor. Instead, target more specifically. For example: target a simple feedback question towards logged-in users, that are in a sub-segment of the top 20% active users, and ask them for feedback just after finishing action X.
Make sure you follow these procedures: * Your customers have a mechanism to share their feedback: open support tickets, quarterly product advisory meetings, focus groups with surveys, etc. * You have tools to collect feedback, analyze, and work with data: work tracking and management tools like Jira or Asana; and analytical tools like Pendo or Google Analytics; direct marketing tools to conduct surveys, and so on. * You have product-centric teams that gather and fetch comprehensive feedback to you: customer support, professional services, sales, engineering, etc.
It's important to understand that every feedback is unique. To achieve your feedback objectives, take into account a variety of sources, such as social media, support tickets, analytics, reviews, interviews, surveys, and interviews. Each source provides distinct insights that strike a balance between quantity, quality, and diversity. Surveys provide quantitative facts but ignore nuances. Interviews provide depth but may not include all customers. Understanding these distinctions allows a thorough strategy to getting input that is suited to your individual objectives.
Once you have your feedback sources, you need a way to organize, analyze, and act on your feedback. A feedback management tool can help you streamline the process by automating the collection, categorization, and prioritization of feedback. You can use a feedback management tool to create feedback forms, integrate with different channels, filter and tag feedback, identify themes and trends, and assign tasks and follow-ups. A feedback management tool can also help you share and collaborate on feedback with your team and stakeholders, and track the progress and impact of your feedback-driven actions.
Tools like Zendesk or UserVoice allow you to consolidate feedback from various sources in one place, categorize it, and track responses. For instance, if your team is managing feedback for a SaaS product, these tools can help in gathering user suggestions from emails, support tickets, and social media into a single dashboard. This centralized approach enables you to easily identify common issues or trends, prioritize actions based on customer impact, and ensure no valuable feedback is overlooked, thereby enhancing your product's responsiveness to user needs.
Using a feedback management tool can streamline the process of handling customer feedback, especially for teams overwhelmed by the volume of responses. These tools act as centralized systems where all feedback, regardless of its source, is collected, organized, and analyzed. They automatically categorize feedback into themes or topics. Many tools also allow you to prioritize feedback based on its frequency or impact, helping you focus on the most critical areas first. Additionally, these tools often provide analytics and reporting features, giving you insights into trends over time and the effectiveness of your responses. By using a feedback management tool, your team can more efficiently handle customer feedback, leading to improvement.
Using a feedback management tool effectively involves organizing, analyzing, and acting upon customer feedback efficiently. Let's compare a few popular tools: 1 Qualtrics: Pros: Offers comprehensive survey capabilities and advanced analytics. Cons: More suited for large enterprises due to complexity and cost. Example: Use Qualtrics to conduct detailed user experience surveys, analyzing responses to improve website navigation. 2 Typeform: Pros: User-friendly interface for creating engaging surveys and forms. Cons: Limited compared to more comprehensive feedback management tools. Example: Create interactive onboarding feedback forms for new users of a software platform.
Invest in a robust feedback management tool. Tools like Zendesk or UserVoice centralize feedback, making it easier to track, analyze, and respond promptly. Share your experience with a tool that aligns with your team's needs.
After collecting input from multiple sources, it is critical to organize and analyze it efficiently. A feedback management platform can help to automate data gathering, categorization, and prioritization. This tool helps you create forms, integrate with channels, filter, tag, and find themes. It also makes it easier to assign tasks, collaborate with teams, and monitor the progress and impact of feedback-driven actions. Using a feedback management tool improves the effectiveness of handling feedback, resulting in a methodical and powerful response.
Not all feedback is equally important or urgent. You need to prioritize your feedback based on your feedback goal, your product strategy, and your available resources. A common way to prioritize feedback is to use a framework such as RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort), which helps you score and rank feedback based on how many customers it affects, how much it improves their experience, how confident you are in your estimates, and how much work it requires. By prioritizing your feedback, you can focus on the most valuable and feasible changes for your product.
Feedback varies from minor to major suggestions, emphasizing the need to prioritize as not all input is equally important. Every company has specific goals. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure the relevance of feedback. To achieve this, the following steps can be considered: - Categorize feedback based on urgency and impact. - Assign the right personnel to address the feedback. - Track the feedback process. - Regularly review the feedback. Prioritizing feedback through these measures, or any suggested ones, establishes a streamlined process for a more effective response to customers.
I'd add a prior classification of feedback even before prioritization frameworks like RICE. This can be done in bulk by using AI and a spreadsheet if there is no feedback management tool. By doing this I can cross-check the feedback with product roadmaps, for example. A brief example of classification that can be helpful: - What feeling can be identified in the feedback? - How intense is the feeling? - What product module is the feedback about?
I like to address customer personas to prioritize my feedback. I try to check if the client fits a certain persona, and if their critique/suggestion matches the customer journey we're testing right now.
To prioritize feedback, let's consider a real example of adding a chat feature to a tech product. Feature: Implementing a Live Chat Support Feature. Reach: If data shows that 30% of users seek instant support, the Reach could be high. Impact: If surveys indicate users are 50% more satisfied with immediate assistance, the Impact is significant. Confidence: if there’s a 70% confidence in the effectiveness of live chat support, Confidence is moderate. Effort: If it requires 200 man-hours to implement, the Effort is considerable. Pros: Provides a structured, quantitative approach to prioritize feedback Cons: Subjectivity in scoring can lead to biased outcomes Requires reliable data for accurate scoring
Some feedback is reactive and it can be identified based on what's going on with your product. For e.g If your product has faced a downtime recently, the no of support tickets shoot up. If you have increased prices of your services, then ratings might take a hit. Anticipating such reactive feedback and filtering it out will help your team focus and uncover other issues in the product and serve your customers better.
Before you implement any feedback-driven changes, you need to validate your feedback and assumptions. You need to make sure that your feedback is reliable, relevant, and representative of your customers' needs and expectations. You can validate your feedback by testing it with a small group of customers, using experiments such as A/B tests or prototypes, or measuring the results of your changes against your feedback goal. By validating your feedback, you can avoid wasting time and resources on changes that don't work or have negative consequences.
To validate feedback in product development, different tools and methods can be employed: 1 A/B Testing: Pros: Offers quantitative data on user behavior, helps in making data-driven decisions Cons: Can be resource-intensive, requires significant traffic for statistical significance Tools: Optimizely, Google Optimize 2 Prototype Testing: Pros: Gathers early feedback on a new feature or design, reducing risks of full-scale development Cons: May not reveal all issues, can be time-consuming Tools: InVision, Sketch, Adobe XD 3 Analytics and Metrics Analysis: Pros: Provides objective data on how changes impact user behavior. Cons: Requires careful interpretation, correlation does not always imply causation. Tools: Google Analytics, Mixpanel
To validate feedback, use A/B testing and Phased Launch. For example, Netflix often tests new features with a subset of users before a full rollout. This approach ensures changes align with customer preferences and behaviors, reducing the risk of negative impacts on the broader user base.
Ensure the authenticity and relevance of feedback. Validate by cross-referencing with other data points or reaching out directly to customers. Share insights from your experience in ensuring the credibility of feedback.
Validating feedback is crucial for effective product management. Before implementing changes, ensure feedback is reliable and relevant. Test with a small customer group using A/B tests or prototypes. Measure results against feedback goals to avoid wasting resources on ineffective changes. This approach ensures customer needs are accurately addressed, saving time and resources in the long run.
Finally, you need to communicate your feedback and actions to your customers and stakeholders. You need to show them that you appreciate their feedback, that you understand their problems and goals, and that you are working on solutions that benefit them. You can communicate your feedback by sending personalized messages, sharing updates and roadmaps, soliciting more feedback, or announcing new features or improvements. By communicating your feedback, you can build trust and loyalty with your customers, and get more feedback in the future.
In tech companies, effective communication of feedback can be done through: 1 Personalized Messages: Directly addressing specific feedback from customers. Pros: Shows attention to individual concerns, builds customer trust. Cons: Time-consuming, not scalable for large volumes of feedback. 2 Soliciting More Feedback: Inviting customers to share ongoing feedback through surveys or beta testing groups. Pros: Encourages continuous engagement, provides diverse insights. Cons: Can lead to feedback overload if not managed properly. 3 Announcements of New Features/Improvements: Using social media, press releases, or in-app notifications to announce updates made in response to feedback.
Communication is key when conveying your appreciation to stakeholders and consumers for their feedback. Demonstrate your understanding of their concerns and aspirations, actively working towards solutions. Send personalized messages, share plan updates, seek feedback, and announce new features. This communication not only fosters trust and loyalty but also encourages additional input in the future. Maintain an open and collaborative discourse to strengthen relationships with consumers and stakeholders.
A great and simple way to do this is simply announcing new features/bug fixes on app store app updates. The update shows for everyone even if they aren't currently engaging with your product. Hopefully, this will entice them back when they see their feedback is directly impacting how the product is being developed.
As a product manager, effective communication with customers and stakeholders is vital. Firstly, express gratitude for their feedback, showing that their input is valued. Clearly convey comprehension of their challenges and objectives. Share ongoing efforts, detailing how their feedback shapes product enhancements. Regularly update them through personalized messages or newsletters, highlighting progress and upcoming features on the roadmap. Encourage continuous engagement by soliciting more input, fostering a sense of collaboration. Announce new features with enthusiasm, linking them to addressing user needs. This transparent communication builds trust and loyalty, reinforcing the collaborative journey towards a better product.
Most often I see that feedback becomes just document and stored in a place. I think the feedback need to be revisited before we proceed with next milestone release, to see if we have met their expectations and have made improvements. We should make it has a practice to work on feedback and improve upon it.
Remember, when looking at user feedback - it isn't just the feedback happening right now, it's also very much the *trend*. The feedback around a certain issue might not be large enough (from an absolute value) to be concerning. But if you know the feedback around the issue was growing by 20% each week, then the trajectory should be concerning. Monitoring for these changes in trajectory, or trends, gives you an opportunity to identify and resolve small issues before they grow into big issues.
For instance, at tech company like Google, streamlining customer feedback processing can be achieved through: Centralized Feedback System: Implement a tool like Google Forms or UserVoice to collect and centralize feedback Automated Tagging and Categorization: Utilize machine learning algorithms to automatically tag and categorize feedback, aiding quicker sorting and prioritization. For instance, categorize feedback into 'UI', 'Bug Reports', etc Prioritization Framework: Use a framework like RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) to prioritize feedback based on potential impact and required resources Feedback Loop with Users: Communicate back to users on what actions are taken based on their feedback
Your strategy should center around the following key objectives: Understanding and Setting Expectations: The purpose of capturing feedback and outlining intended actions. This is essential for gaining team alignment and emphasizing the importance. Collection: Define channels where feedback is collected. Who owns the process, where it will be logged, and what tagging/classification to be used Refinement and Validation: Establish a process for refining and validating feedback. Assess how they shape the roadmap Actions Taken and Feedback Loop: Outline the specific actions that will be taken in response to customer feedback. Implement a feedback loop to communicate with customers and demonstrate your commitment to continuous improvement.
Customer feedback serves as a compass for product managers, helping to guide decisions and stimulate innovation. It reveals consumer demands, pinpoints opportunities for improvement, and emphasizes product advantages. Product managers develop loyalty by appreciating and responding to feedback, transforming consumers into active contributors to the product's success.