Importance of Collecting Feedback as a Product Manager
It's crucial for a product manager to gather feedback because it allows identifying areas for improvement, understanding user requests and preferences, and making sure the product meets expectations.
New opportunities can be found and you can be informed about the product plan. Additionally, using customer input in the creation process can increase customer happiness and loyalty.
Collecting feedback can help ensure that the product is aligned with customer needs, which can foster success and growth.
The role of feedback in product development and success
Feedback can be utilized to pinpoint problem areas and shape the product roadmap during the development process. This may result in the development of more appealing, usable products. Feedback can also be used to find new opportunities and guide the creation of new features or products.
Feedback received after a product has been introduced can be used to gauge its effectiveness and pinpoint areas for development. This can make it more likely that the product will meet customers' wants and preferences moving forward. Additionally, it aids in locating faults, usability problems, and places that require adjustment to increase consumer happiness.
What is User Feedback?
“Feedback is the breakfast of champions” is what successful product-led companies recognize.
User feedback is what your users think and feel about your product. What satisfies or frustrates them usually comes from their level of satisfaction with your product.
User feedback can be a review of your product that says it is fantastic, a complaint about their experience, or a feature request explaining how you can make your product more beneficial for them. Any feedback you get from users is critical since their satisfaction is essential in making your business successful.
Why is Collecting User Feedback Critical?
The more engaged the customer, the faster product companies grow. Despite the best efforts of sales or marketing, they won’t be sufficient without user feedback. Let’s not forget that:
- highly engaged customers buy 90% more often.
- You need to spend 5x to 25x more to acquire a new customer than keep existing ones happy.
Most product companies, however, undervalue or do not prioritize collecting user feedback.
Special thanks to Carlos, CEO & Founder of Product School, for contributing to our blog with his highlight on the impact of user feedback:
“User acquisition can be hacked but user retention can’t.
New products or features need to leverage user feedback to achieve product-market fit as quickly as possible.
Products that have product-market fit already need to leverage user feedback to increase satisfaction.
Satisfaction leads to higher retention. Retention leads to higher lifetime value of existing users and lower cost of acquisition of new users.”
Let’s see how to gather user feedback and make it effective.
The 5 Most Effective Ways to Collect Feedback
1) Customer Feedback Surveys (NPS)
You may be surprised by just how challenging it can be to create a proper customer survey. There are numerous questions that you could ask your users to gather feedback on. Most people fall into this trap when sending surveys to users. Some tips to remember while sending surveys:
- Make sure you ask only questions that provide you with the information you need. Prioritize the questions that give the most value to your product and business outcomes.
- Consider writing open-ended questions. If you ask the right questions, you can get the most value out of open-ended questions.
- Make rating scales consistent. Otherwise, you will get conflicting answers or skewed data from surveys.
- Try not to ask questions that are biased or hard to understand.
2) Customer Interviews
Customer interviews require a great deal of time. To maximize your time investment, you need to ask the right questions. You have to walk a fine line between asking too vague or biased questions.
Rather than asking your customers for opinions, begin by getting them to provide facts about their experiences. Instead of asking “Would you…”, you should specify it by asking, “Tell me about a time when you….”
When considering new feature ideas, don’t ask, “Would you use this feature?”. Very few customers respond to this question with “No.” They will probably say “Yes” without thinking deeply. Instead, ask, “Which features do you use most often?” and “What are your specific objectives for using this feature most?”
3) User Portal
Giving your customers a dedicated feedback board to share their ideas helps you collect feedback continuously. Gathering valuable insight from customers is not a one-shot task. You need to listen to the voice of your customers every time and act on them. It does improve not only your product in the right direction but also increases customer satisfaction level. Producter’s user portal feature makes it easier to collect customer feedback in one place and helps you build the right features backed by customer insight.
4) Usability Tests
Getting in touch with someone who’s in your target market is your first step. However, try not to do this with friends and family members. They think you’re fantastic at everything you do. In this case, they won’t be able to compare your product based on a neutral point of view. The conversation will be softer with negative feedback and more positive with the bolstered positive feedback. You need something completely different right now, so don’t do that. Find some targeted strangers to get unbiased feedback reflecting real user insight.
The second step is giving them a simple task. Observe their experience and try to figure it out without offering any guidance or assistance. The most significant defects will be revealed right away, so you need to fix them quickly. Usability tests might be time-consuming, and it’s not easy to interview many people to increase the sample size to improve the confidence score.
5) Instant Customer Feedback
Collecting instant customer feedback method offers your customers a consistent channel to provide insight. It can be a bug report, feature request, or just an idea.
By embedding a feedback widget to your product/website, you can help your users to submit problems or ideas easily. So you get to know about the challenge without creating frustration or act on the feature requested. Sending a feedback form is another method. You can easily collect instant customer feedback without having to carry out more hands-on testing and interviews. Feedback widget and link are the most used features on Producter. You can learn more about the feedback management module here.
6) Social Media Listening
Social media listening can be done by using social media listening tools, which allow companies to track mentions of their brand or product across various social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
To use social media to collect feedback, companies can:
Set up social media listening tools to track mentions of their brand or product across various platforms
Monitor social media conversations for mentions of their industry or competitors
Track and respond to customer complaints or issues on social media
Analyze sentiment and engagement metrics to gauge customer satisfaction
Use social listening to identify areas for improvement and inform product development
How to Use the Feedback Collected?
It’s essential to address the fragmented, inconsistent, and occasionally conflicting data you’ve gathered from various users. To take significant actions, it’s critical to examine customer feedback thoroughly.
To evaluate the feedback you received, you must first recognize that there are several customer categories. As each customer has their own expectations from your service, grouping them according to usage frequency and plans may be quite beneficial.
You can design the feedback after carefully reviewing the data to highlight the common patterns. The feedback’s volume and frequency are also essential. If a surprising number of customers from various segments complain about your latest feature release, you should listen to their concerns.
Collecting customer feedback in one place makes it easier for you to catch these common patterns.
Producter allows you to gather important feedback from your customers and make them easier to use. It’s free during the private beta; click here to join the waitlist 🚀
“Every day, companies solicit feedback from customers, yet only a few translate that feedback into meaning. An even smaller fraction of companies actually take action or close the loop with the customer, to let them know their voice was heard” - Whitney Wood
In Conclusion
There are various methods for collecting feedback, such as customer feedback surveys (NPS), customer interviews, user portals, usability tests, instant customer feedback, and social media listening. Each method has its own strengths and weaknesses, and it's important to choose the right method based on your goals and resources. It's also important to ask the right questions, avoid bias, and be consistent in order to get the most value out of your feedback. Additionally, it is important to act on the feedback received to improve customer satisfaction level. It is recommended to use a feedback management tool like Producter to make it easy to collect customer feedback in one place and build the right features backed by customer insight.s
Producter is a product management tool designed to become customer-driven.
It helps you collect feedback, manage tasks, sharing product updates, creating product docs, and tracking roadmap.
