Customer Experience
Product Feedback: How to Collect and Manage Them
Article written by Kate Williams
Content Marketer at SurveySparrow
17 min read
21 May 2024
Customer Experience
Article written by Kate Williams
Content Marketer at SurveySparrow
17 min read
21 May 2024
Let’s start with some facts.
We hope you got the gist. If not, what we intend to do here is to let you know how competitive the market is growing to be for products. As a result, staying unique and meeting customer expectations is a necessity now.
And the best way towards it is through continuous improvement through product feedback.
In this blog, we will help you understand what product feedback is, its importance, how to collect it, and more.
So, let’s get going.
Customer opinions and concerns about a specific product are called product feedback.
The feedback can be positive, negative, or neutral and covers various aspects of the product. These are crucial for companies, especially SaaS, to improve their products, meet customer expectations, and enhance product experience.
Though product feedback and reviews sound the same, they serve different purposes. The following will give you a quick idea about the difference between the two.
| Product Feedback | Product Review | |
|---|---|---|
| Audience | Directly to the company | Public, for other consumers |
| Purpose | Product improvement and development | Informing potential buyers |
| Communication | Private | Public |
| Detail Level | Often more detailed and specific | Can vary, often includes general impressions |
| Collection Method | Surveys, focus groups, customer support, in-app | Online platforms, social media, blogs |
| Frequency | Ongoing, continuous process | Typically a one-time submission |
What is product feedback is already defined, so let’s look into its purpose. They are –
Some examples include,
Product reviews are public evaluations or critiques of a product by its users. You can find these reviews on review platforms like G2, social media, and so on.
The purpose of product reviews is –
Some examples of reviews are –
Product feedback surveys are focused feedback collection methods for gathering invaluable feedback from users.
If you are using tools like SurveySparrow, then a typical product feedback survey will look like the following. The template is free to use. So, feel free to try it out.
Product Feedback Survey Template
Use This TemplateThese surveys work best when they are done within the product. The importance of considering in-product feedback will be discussed in detail in the next section.
Any feedback collected from users directly from within the product falls under in-product feedback. The following are some reasons why you should consider in-product feedback.
The feedback can be collected in real-time, allowing you to capture customer reactions and thoughts. So, you don’t need for the survey campaign to end to get the results. You can prioritize and make the improvements as you go.
Users can leave feedback without leaving a webpage or website. Therefore, you can expect a higher rate of response from them. Also, users are likelier to share their thoughts when the feedback mechanism is accessible.
With the feedback forms readily available, users can make use of it to report bugs. Believe it or not, customers share their dissatisfaction with you first before going public. So, if you are able to fix these bugs quickly and efficiently, they are likelier to stay.
If you actively listen to user feedback and make changes, users will feel valued and more connected to your product. This engagement can further improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
By making changes based on customer feedback, you are essentially making your product more customer-centered. Not to mention the increased desirability of your product. All these could help improve the competitive advantage.
We have understood what product feedback is, and its importance, now let’s see how you can collect them. There are many ways to go about collecting feedback. We have already discussed one – in-product (or in-app) feedback forms.
Let’s have a look at the rest.
This is one of the best ways to collect product feedback. You can use survey tools like SurveySparrow to create and share survey across different channels incuding in-app.
The major plus point of choosing SurveySparrow like tools is that it allows you collect feedback from customer support and review platforms as well. Therefore, you can get a comprehensive picture of product feedback, leading better improvement.
Integrate surveys within your product to capture feedback directly from users while using it. The interesting thing is that you can make these surveys placed strategically at key customer touchpoints. This can lead to getting more focused feedback on areas that actually matter.
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These are reviews left by customers on app stores and review platforms. If your product has an app and is available on the Google Play Store or Apple Store, check the reviews there.
As for review platforms, there are many. You don’t necessarily need to go through them all. Focus only on those reliable ones like Gartner, G2, Capterra, etc.
Or you can use online reputation management tools to consolidate all the customer reviews on one platform. SurveySparrow provides one. You can use it to monitor, track, and even respond to customer reviews – all within one platform.
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Running a Net Promoter ScoreSM survey is another method to collect product feedback. The key thing here is you can understand how satisfied and loyal your customers are.
Don’t like to brag, but here also SurveySparrow can be helpful.
By running NPS® surveys, you can focus on detractors (customers who have liked your product the least). Either you can follow up within the survey to get qualitative feedback (through open-ended questions), or connect with them directly to get the reason for their score.
In most cases, they have experienced something very dissatisfying with your product. It can be a simple bug or a major feature malfunction. Find out what it is and resolve it ASAP. This way you can improve your product and possibly convert detractors to promoters.
Focus groups are rather time-consuming and lengthy processes to consider, though effective. You will have to start by onboarding people for the groups, then the person who will run this group, and so on.
The benefit here is, you can see in real-time how users (customers) react to certain aspects of your product. Not to mention the raw opinions and suggestions you can expect from them.
Best suited for beta testing a new product or a feature.
Majorly look into two things – tickets raised and support chat.
Use ticket management software to keep track of tickets raised by customers. By analyzing these tickets, you can identify the most common issues faced by customers or recurring themes, if any. Work on these to improve your product.
Secondly, the make use of the live chat tools. The conversations can provide immediate feedback on their experience and pain points.
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Now that you have collected product feedback, let’s see how to manage it. Fair warning: It’s a bit of work. With that being said, let’s have a look at how you can manage product feedback.
Before you start with feedback analysis, collect and centralize all feedback in one place. For this, you can use either feedback management platforms or tools like Jira or ClickUp.
Once you have centralized the feedback, categorize them into different sections. This can be anything from feature requests and bug reports to UX issues.
Explore SurveySparrow integrations with product management tools.
Go through the categorized feedback and evaluate each based on the following –
On top of this, consider the customer segment you got the feedback from. If the feedback comes from high-value customers, prioritize them first.
Now, the feedback you collected will have quantitative and qualitative feedback.
Quantitative feedback includes metrics like the NPS® score that help you understand where you stand with respect to your competitors. As for qualitative feedback, it includes customer interactions with the support team, customer reviews, etc. Therefore, make sure you have a robust tool like SurveySparrow.
Upon analysis, look for common issues, customer sentiment, and hidden trends. These can essentially provide actionable insights into improving your product.
With the insights in your hand, start implementing the changes. Delegate the tasks, assign them to relevant team members, and set a deadline for implementation.
Use agile methodologies for better efficiencies.
Now, communicate the same with the users. Be transparent about the changes, and let them know about the changes that are being done based on their feedback. This way, the users will feel valued, and it shows that you are striving for betterment.
The follow-up can be done through email, release notes, or in-app notifications.
Track the KPIs to understand the impact of the changes you have made. The KPIs can be customer satisfaction score, NPS® score, retention rate, and so on.
A spike in the NPS® score means the changes are working. At the same time, stagnancy or a drop in it means you need to carefully reevaluate the changes you have made.
Follow this process until you see great numbers for your KPIs.
It’s a good practice to collect feedback. However, to gather accurate and relevant feedback, you need to ask the right questions. So, for those who have doubts about the type of product feedback survey questions, refer to the following.
The above given are simply some examples of how to tailor survey questions. For the actual survey, the questions will depend on what you intend to achieve with it.
Are you tired of tailoring survey questions manually? Don’t worry. SurveySparrow has got you covered.
It offers an AI-powered feature to help you create surveys from scratch in an instant. Simply add the type of survey you have to run and its end goal, and SurveySparrow AI will do the rest.
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Throughout this blog, you might have read about the various use cases SurveySparrow can help you with. So, the fact that it is one of the best product feedback tools is kinda obvious now. But still, here are some other reasons why you should consider SurveySparrow for product feedback collection and analysis.
You can create surveys by leveraging SurveySparrow’s 1000+ pre-built templates or its AI feature. Either way, it will be easier.
For the distribution part, you will primarily need both in-app and website-embedded surveys. SurveySparrow provides both and several other channels, including QR code and WhatsApp.
Analyzing product feedback in bulk and identifying the right customer emotions can be daunting, but not with SurveySparrow.
Be it hundreds or thousands, you can analyze the feedback and understand the customer emotions behind each one.
Understand all the key drivers of our business from the product feedback. This includes those that are performing well and those that aren’t.
Define the topic you want to track within the feedback and see how much your users have discussed about it. Also, learn about the most used keywords by the users about your product.
Intrigued yet?
Use SurveySparrow’s free forever plan and the 14-day free trial to explore the tool in complete. You can use the following to sign up for free!
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Thousands of brands trust SurveySparrow to turn feedback into growth. Try it free today!
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