Customer Feedback Loops: The Tools You Need

The secret to being a good Growth Product Manager is building great customer feedback loops into your product. They help you to understand where you might be losing customers, and how to fix their pain points.

Customer feedback loops help you find out how well your product solves your user’s problem, how easy it is for them to use, and whether they’re willing to continue paying for it.

So yes, they’re pretty important!

You might have heard the phrase ‘closing the customer feedback loop.’ This is what you’re aiming to do. It means acting on the feedback you’ve been given to improve your product.

You might also be interested in: Delight Customers in Margin-Enhancing Ways

What is a Customer Feedback Loop?

A customer feedback loop is a process which allows your customers to keep you updated on their experience. This could be built within your app, be a feature on your website, or even be in-person.

For example…

• Apple’s Genius bars provide tech support and give customers a place to take their complaints/problems.
• Twitter has dedicated accounts for communicating with customers about tech issues (@TwitterSupport) and safety concerns (@TwitterSafety).

There are several methods for gathering customer feedback data. Many of which are fairly inexpensive, so they’re available even to the bootstrap entrepreneur!

Social media is one such option, and a great example of how marketing benefits Product Managers. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are excellent ways of reaching your customers in a way they’re familiar and comfortable with. They’re more likely to tell you what they really think, not what they think you want to hear.

You can also use proactive outreach by identifying which users have low usage, or did not complete the on-boarding process, and reaching out to offer help or training.

There’s also the option of following up with ex-customers. Many companies with subscription based models ask for a reason of cancellation before letting customers proceed, with the option to leave comments with more feedback. This will help you get a better understanding of your churn rate.

Another, scalable way, to introduce feedback loops to your digital product is to build them into it.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

If you’ve been around the internet for more than a minute, you’ll surely have come across one of these at some point:

*Graphic from Rentently.com

A Customer Satisfaction Score, or CSAT, tells you how happy your customers are with your product overall. This question can be implemented as a pop-up or on a landing page customers are led to after completing an action. Or if you want more in-depth information, it can be sent out as part of a fuller survey.

You might also be interested in: Dual-Track Agile and Customer Feedback Loop

Customer Effort Scores (CES)

A Customer Effort Score is a feature often included in various user on-boarding tools. It helps you identify how easy customers find it to navigate your app/website. It’s a little different from a CSAT score, as it focuses on the ease of use as opposed to overall satisfaction.

These are particularly useful to implement at potential pain points, to identify whether the issue comes from your product or from an external source.

For example, if you have an eCommerce, and you find that many users add items to their basket but don’t complete the transaction, asking them how easy the checkout page is to navigate will tell you if that’s a contributing factor.

If the checkout process is incredibly easy, then you can focus your efforts elsewhere. If it turns out to be very difficult, you have your next problem to fix!

CES Example from Retently.com

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys

NPS Score surveys are one of the most common ways to gather information on how customer’s feel while on your website/within your app.

It helps you get a general feel for how users receive your product in real time. It allows you to segment them into 3 categories. Detractors, Passives, and Promotors.

*NPS Survey graphic from SurveyMonkey

For a full explanation of NPS and how it works, check out our handy guide: NPS for Product Managers.

The Customer Feedback Loop Process

It’s all very well and good building great feedback loops into your product. But the effort is wasted if you don’t get the steps right!

1. Gathering: All good learning starts with data!
2. Learn: There’s no point in gathering data if you don’t learn from it. Going through your new data set and use it to answer a specific set of questions.
3. Apply: Take what you’ve learned and create a set of action points. Did you learn that your checkout page is too complicated? Simplify it!

Following this process will allow you to close the customer feedback loop, and turn insights into action. Rather than gathering data for the sake of it, closing the customer feedback loop will allow you to improve your product and your customer retention.

Best Practices

• When you fix a problem, tell the world! It might be tempting to just fix it quietly and hope no one notices the problem in the first place, but you’re much better off getting back to the customers who reported the bug.
• Don’t say yes to everything. Sometimes the customer doesn’t know best. It’s OK to say no, so long as you can back it up with a good reason why.
• Feedback loops are long-term. They’re not just useful for a newly launched product. Throughout the lifecycle of your product, you should have feedback loops in place. 
• Be transparent. You don’t have to air all of your dirty laundry for your customers, but you should keep them updated. Tell them what you’re working on, what features they can expect soon, why a new launch has been delayed, etc. It helps to build trust.

What tools do you use for customer feedback loops? Share them in the comments!