User feedback is the key to building a successful product. But what exactly is user feedback? And how can you collect it in the most effective way possible? In this article, we’ll explore all of these topics, as well as discuss why user feedback is so important for growing your SaaS company.
What is user feedback?
User feedback is the information you collect about how your customers use your product. It can be in the form of surveys, feature requests, bug reports, or customer service conversations. You get this information by asking your customers questions and listening to their responses. And then making changes based on what they tell you.
It's an essential part of the customer development process and helps you understand what your customers are saying, as well as respond directly to their needs.
There are two primary ways to collect user feedback:
Analytics and metrics
Surveys and interviews
But regardless of format or method, effective user feedback will always help you to increase your product development ROI (by building the right things).
What are the different types of user feedback?
There are two main types of user feedback:
Qualitative and
Quantitative.
Qualitative feedback
Qualitative feedback involves asking users open-ended questions and getting them to expand on their answers.
This type of feedback is useful for:
Understanding why people behave the way that they do,
What their motivations are for doing so.
Quantitative feedback
Quantitative feedback involves collecting data from a survey or an online form where users have the option to answer multiple-choice questions about your product.
This type of feedback is useful to:
Get a general idea about how people feel about your product,
Find out what features are most popular and which ones need improvement.
User feedback has a lot of value for product managers and product teams, as it can help you understand:
What your users want
How do your users are using the product
How users feel about the product
How to improve the product
What features do users want, don't want, and don't use
Who should collect user feedback?
Good news: you don't need to be a data scientist to collect user feedback. The best people to collect user feedback are the ones who understand your product best, and that's your product team.
If you're not sure who the right person is, ask yourself this question: "Who knows the ins and outs of our product?"
If that person isn't you, then it's likely they are the right person to collect user feedback. Once you've identified a potential collector, it's time to start.
To collect user feedback, you need to get your hands dirty and dig into their experiences. Many people can and should collect user feedback. This includes:
Product managers
Product teams
User experience designers (UX)
Customer success managers
Why do product managers and product teams need user feedback?
Product managers and product teams need user feedback to understand what their customers want. This is especially important when it comes to building new features or improving existing ones because they have the power to either build a better product or waste time and resources on something that isn't necessary or useful.
User feedback can also help identify pain points that customers experience, like confusion or frustration. This is especially important because it can be difficult to know how people are using your product if you don't ask them directly.
It’s an excellent opportunity to learn more about your customers’ experience with your products or services, which is essential to improve those experiences over time.
The benefits of gathering user feedback include:
Understanding how customers view the quality of their interactions with your company;
Learning whether they feel that they receive value from using/purchasing from you;
Understanding when they felt this way;
How long they have been doing so; and
When they stopped doing so (if applicable).
There are many ways to collect and manage user feedback, but the main purpose behind it is to help you understand how your product is being used by customers. When users give you feedback, they tell you what they want from your product and how they use the features.
User feedback allows you to do three things:
Understand what users want from the product. Do they like a certain feature? Do they wish for something else? Knowing this information helps guide future development efforts.
Understand how users feel about the product. Do people love it or hate it? Why? This information can be used for marketing purposes but also helps inform future product decisions as well.
Understand how to improve the user experience (UX) of your existing features and offerings—and potentially add new ones based on customer requests!
How user feedback helps SaaS companies grow?
User feedback is an essential part of growing your SaaS company. It helps you understand your target audience, their needs, and how they use the product. User feedback impacts revenue for two reasons:
It helps you understand which features are most important to users so you can focus on making them better or adding more of them.
It allows you to better prioritize what features need improvement by determining which ones aren’t being used as much as others and why.
The most important feature for a user might be something you have never considered before, so user feedback can help you identify areas where your product lacks or is lacking in terms of features and functionality.
User feedback will impact your SaaS revenue in ways that are difficult to measure because it has a long-term effect on acquiring new customers by helping them choose the right solution. It also helps maintain existing customers by improving their experience with your product, which makes them more likely to renew their subscriptions or increase their usage over time.
How to manage user feedback?
There are several ways to manage user feedback, but it all starts with listening. You can’t expect your customers to tell you what they need if you aren’t hearing them out.
That means making sure your business is equipped with a good support system that can easily handle customer questions and complaints as well as a way for users to give feedback directly through the product itself.
It is important to collect feedback from your users as it helps you in improving your products or services.
To manage user feedback, you can use customer feedback tools.
You can also use a feedback form where the users can submit their comments and suggestions directly on your website or app.
User feedback should be collected via different channels:
Social media channels (Twitter, Facebook)
Support tickets (Zendesk or Help Scout)
Surveys on websites/apps
Once you get your feedback in one place it will be easier to analyze customer insights and share them with others within the company so that everyone can benefit from the insights gathered.
A great way how to do this is through regular meetings (typically weekly or bi-weekly) where everyone involved sits down together in one place and discusses what has been done since the last meeting as well as what needs to be done next.
How to prioritize user feedback?
A common problem with gathering user feedback is that there’s simply too much of it. To quickly prioritize your work, product managers should look for patterns in customer behavior and expectations. From there they can decide what needs to be done first, second, and third.
For example, if users are constantly complaining about the same feature then it might not be worth spending time on other things until this issue is resolved.
There are several ways to prioritize user feedback, from the impact it has on your business to its value.
Prioritize by impact
The most common approach is to prioritize by impact. This can be measured by how many customers have experienced this issue and how frequently they see it or talk about it. If you're running an e-commerce store, for example, you can identify those who've abandoned their shopping carts in the past 30 days as having a high impact. A lower-impact item might be something like "I wish there were more information on our website about our products."
Prioritize by value
Prioritizing by value is another way to rank user feedback; this method would ask what sort of value each piece of feedback brings to your product or service rather than focusing simply on whether or not users experience a problem with it (which could be very expensive). For example: "I want my customers' first experience with us when they visit our website" is more valuable than "I don't think we need a live chat feature on our web page."
Prioritize by user segment
Finally, one-way businesses can prioritize their user feedback is by customer type: Which segments of users need which solutions? Your business may have different needs based on whether you're primarily targeting consumers or businesses and even within either segment, there could still be different subgroups with unique needs that should be considered separately when prioritizing features or changes in marketing materials.
Conclusion
It’s hard to believe that companies are still getting their feet wet with customer feedback and testing. But we live in a world where there’s so much information available at our fingertips; it’s easy to let the dust settle on an idea before trying it out for yourself.
Well, this is one of those times when you have to take action instead of waiting around for someone else to get things done! You can start by asking your customers why they chose your product over another one or what they would change if given the chance—and then actually listen when they answer.
The whole point behind testing something out is so that you don’t have any regrets later on down the road because you didn't try hard enough during the design phase. So go ahead and give feedback collection a try! We promise it will be worth it in the long run.
