The Ultimate Guide to Collect Product Feedback
It can be overwhelming for a business to start collecting feedback because there are so many ways you can do it and you don’t know where to start from or how to start one. There are a lot of other questions that are still unanswered if you are new to this. We are here to help you with understanding the entire process of collecting product feedback.
If you are a business like most others, below are some of the questions that you will have in your mind.
“What do I do with the data?”
“How do I make the situation better for a customer who has complained about something in the feedback?”
“What are the right questions to ask to get feedback about my product?”
“How many responses should I expect?”
“What are the right steps to follow?”
The fact that you have decided to get your hands dirty with collecting product feedback means that you care about your customers. There are several pieces of research which suggest how the average customer loves being asked about their experience with a brand or a product. Asking questions to your customers regularly helps you unearth nuggets of wisdom about how to run your business.
Billions of dollars are spent by organizations around the world to understand what customers think about their brands. Getting feedback from your customer is the first step towards building a brand that will last a lifetime.
Why is collecting feedback important?
There is no business without your customer. Even if someone refuses to admit, everything that you do, from building a brand name to deciding on the pricing, every decision that you make is made with the customer in mind. No matter how many goals you have for your business, almost each of them would be to keep the customer happy.
Keeping your customers happy with stellar products, services and support team should be the first thing that you keep in mind. Your team can bring so much value with the way they interact with each of the customers. Collecting product feedback helps you delve further into both product features and the customer’s overall experience with your brand.
5 reasons why every business should collect product feedback from customers
#1 Get to know their likes and dislikes:
When you go to your customers to ask them what they think about your product, you will get to know what they like about it and what they don’t like about it. As a business, you will know what works for your customers and what doesn’t. With such information at your fingertips, you can easily build your product to your strengths when you know exactly what your customers want.
You might be a doyen in your industry, but at no stage would be theoretical data be more important than customer insights that you get. More importantly, the expectations of people change with time. So if you rely on the data that you received from market research, there are high chances that the conclusions that you arrived at do not matter anymore. The only answer is to regularly get feedback from your customers.
#2 Helps measure customer satisfaction:
Customer satisfaction is directly proportional to many things including higher revenue, lower customer churn, increased profit, better market share, and so on. There is a close correlation between customer satisfaction and business performance. Getting customer feedback is the first step to take towards keeping them satisfied. Using rating scales, NPS, text-based comments, etc, can go a long way and using them can be highly advantageous to you.
#3 Improves customer retention:
Your unhappy customer doesn’t have to be stuck with you as there are a lot of options available. It isn’t difficult to find a different vendor (your competitor) and take all of their business with them. Going to your customers asking for product feedback means that you care about them and you are ready to make amends, if necessary.
Every time a customer who is disappointed with your service or product tells you about it, do you make it right for them? If the answer to the previous question is a ‘Yes’, then there are high chances that you can win the client back. They might even go from a Passive/Detractor to an Advocate.
#4 Helps you make the right decisions:
When you are in a highly competitive market, you cannot guess your way into success. There is a lot of strategies and laser-focused action that should be taken. Having full-fledged data helps you in taking hard and fast decisions that make sense. The feedback of your customers is the best thing that you can do to base your decisions on. You will know where to invest your money. You will know if there needs to be more money spent on developing the product or adding more features.
#5 Get more referrals:
Is it shocking if we tell you that getting customer feedback brings you more referrals? With each product feedback you conduct, you will be able to get closer to your customers, especially if you manage to close the feedback loop. Such simple acts make your existing customers happy and they would never hesitate to tell good things about your brand. With each interaction, the bond gets better and you are in a position to get more referrals simply because your customers trust you more.
Different Ways to Collect Product Feedback
While there are a hundred ways to collect product feedback, here are some of the most effective ones that the SurveySparrow team has collated:
#1 Email surveys:
One of the most common ways to conduct product feedback surveys these days is through emails. You could use an online survey tool like SurveySparrow for the purpose. You can either send product feedback forms that have a lot of questions or short surveys. For an email survey, you will have to ensure that you only ask the most pertinent questions because you don’t want your respondent to lose interest or dropoff from the survey midway.
Each of the questions that you ask in your product feedback survey should have a specific goal in mind. You don’t want them rambling random stuff but give you precise and concrete answers that make sense. While multiple-choice questions are your best bet, you can ask them open-ended questions if you are looking for a detailed answer.
Detailed answers can usually be expected from a customer who has been there for a long time. Even then, the onus is on the business to keep it as short as possible.
#2 In-app surveys:
It is a given, that as a business, you always want to improve the product for your customers. But do you also realize that your customers want the same? They want to know how to best use the product for their benefit. They are always looking for ways to see how your product could be more useful for them. Do you understand the value of asking constant feedback now?
One of the best times to ask your customers for product feedback is when they are using your app. In-app surveys have higher response rates and the feedback will also be precise because they are in the process of using that feature. Remember that in-app surveys should be much shorter. It is certainly not the time to be asking them more than 2 questions. If you could, keep it at just one question that is relevant to the page or feature where they are.
#3 Net Promoter Score surveys:
With net promoter score surveys in place, you will not need a long product feedback questionnaire. A single question does the trick. Many think how can a simple question be one of the most effective ways to understand the pulse of the customer. Net Promoter Score asks a simple question like the one below:
“How likely are you to recommend our company to family/friends?”
The answers can be given on a 10 point scale. The simple question measures the sentiment fo the customer towards the product. The customers are categorized according to the rating given.
- Rating of 9 and 10 — Promoters.
- Rating of 7 and 8 — Passives.
- Anything below 7 — Detractors.
After categorizing and grouping , the Net Promoter Score Calculation can be done by the formula given below:
NPS = Percent Promoters — Percent Detractors.
NPS scores range anywhere between -100 and +100.
A negative score is bad while anything that is positive is considered good. A lot of companies use NPS to improve their customer service and change the way they do business. NPS is one of the best feedback metrics out there because of its simplicity. It takes a few seconds for the customer to reply and you can compare your NPS score with the rest of the industry to know where you stand.
#4 Surveys during transactions:
What is a transaction email? Any email that a customer receives after they take an action which involves some sort of transaction is called a transaction email. It could be right after they purchase a new plan, upgrade their existing plan, talk to your customer service agent, had an email conversation, etc. This is a great chance for the company to interact with the customer and develop a relationship. These emails are usually computer-generated, but the entire experience that you offer for your customer should be taken into account when you send an email survey at this point.
There’s a small catch with transaction emails though. While the email open rates are not something that entrepreneurs rejoice over, these emails are opened by customers because they want to know if their payment went through or if the intended action was taken. Sending a survey on the email itself can work wonders for your response rates, especially since the interaction is fresh in their minds.
#5 Social Media:
What better place to get to know what your customers think about you than Social Media? No matter which industry you are in, you can safely assume that you will have potential customers as well as your existing customers lurking there. While many customers will directly mention your brand name or comment on your posts with their feedback, you can still dig a bit more to hear it from them. Some of these social media sites even have options to conduct polling which is a great feature if you are looking for immediate responses.
#6 Create a community of users:
Creating a community on any of these social media where most of your customers lurk is the best way to get product feedback on a regular basis. With a community, you will have your customers at a single point of interaction making it much easier for you to collate feedback.
While a community would be able to generate excellent feedback, it needs to be monitored on a regular basis and produce enough content to evince the interest of everyone involved. It is a great way to strengthen your relationship with your customers. You could also use the community to talk about your products in detail, conduct contests around it, post updates about everything that happens in your company, and so on.
How to Leverage data from the product feedback?
There are a lot of companies that do nothing with the data that they get from the customers about the product. Even if you manage to close the product feedback loop for half of the customers, it would have been a successful exercise.
Here is what you can do with the data from the product feedback:
Find areas of improvement:
Users of your product would be familiar with your product and are more prone to diagnose the mistakes in your product. It would be wise to take the results from the survey and use it to improve your product. Your product users will have completely different perspectives that you would not have thought of earlier. Why? Because their insights come from rigorous use of your product every day.
In fact, you would not have to brainstorm with your customers, instead, they will have all the answers ready because they have also been wanting a solution in that regard. When you are willing to listen to your customers and appreciate their time and feedback, they will be more enthused to provide you with more insights which will help you better.
Reach out to the respondents:
Not every company responds to customer feedback, the more you do it, the special they will feel. It is also a great chance to strengthen the bond between your brand and the customer. Change them into your brand advocates. If you see that some of the reviews are positive, then reuse the same content for marketing. If there are positive replies about your product, then show it to your employees.
Prevent customer churn:
Use the feedback that you get from customers to churn, right? Yes. Customers know that the feedback that you take is for the brand’s benefit. But you can make a small change by involving them too during the follow-up phase where you will solve their problems. When you close the product feedback loop, you are effectively stopping many customers who were planning to deflect to your competitor. How? By closing the feedback loop, you have put an end to the problem that bothered some of them. The fact that they have taken time to respond to you is proof enough that they want it to work between you two as well. Wise up and use their feedback responsibly.
Improve the morale of your employees:
You will also be receiving a ton of positive feedback from your customers. Make it a point that your employees also get to know the praises that have been heaped on them. This will not only keep everyone happy but encourage healthy competition amongst everybody. It is always best to go with positive reinforcement instead of negative reinforcement.
Fine-tune your business:
Some of the greatest businesses have had to pivot their business models, product or even their delivery model. It is nothing to be shocked about and it is good for the business as long as you are in the right track. Customer feedback is the closest thing that you can get to perfection where you will get the smartest ideas from your customers. You will be able to identify patterns which will help you understand and choose which will work best for you. Always try to ask for feedback from your customer, at any point and any time.
Conclusion:
The biggest truth about businesses is that it can easily go belly up if your customers decide to stop giving you business. This article has outlined the different ways in which you can collect product feedback and how talking to your customer is the right thing to do. Collecting product feedback at regular intervals should be ingrained in the minds of your business partners.
Thankfully, the most powerful ways to collect product feedback is via emails and there are online survey tools even that can help you with the task. Imagine the kind of ROI that you will get by collecting feedback from customers at every interaction touchpoint and that too at a cost that is extremely easy on the pocket. It is best to choose a survey tool that has a lot of features which makes the entire process easy to use.
If you are looking to get the most powerful online survey tool in your arsenal to up your feedback game, don’t worry, the folks at SurveySparrow are here to help you. Connect with us here so that we can explain how we can help you win at getting product feedback.
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Originally published at https://surveysparrow.com on December 22, 2019.