Customer Feedback Management: Definition, Importance, Steps

Customer feedback relays a customer’s experience with a particular product. It reveals how satisfied they are with a particular product and how they would like it to improve. Hence, customer feedback is immensely important for product managers during roadmapping. 

Customer feedback management (CFM) is a process through which the product management team takes action to improve the product based on the insights extracted from the feedback. It can be said that the customer feedback management process is a part of product management.

Let’s examine why it is important.

The importance of customer feedback management

Throughout product management, customer feedback plays a key role in determining the action items in the backlog. Here are the crucial reasons why you need to have a robust customer feedback management system in place:

1. Minimize risks: You don’t have to guess what your customers expect from your product. You can rely on the first-hand information that you have collected from them.
2. Effective prioritization: Some features are more important than others. No matter how many prioritization frameworks you use, the best way to prioritize features is by asking your customers.
3. Tests your hypotheses: Working on customer feedback will help you understand the pain points and the expectations of your customers better.
4. Build relationships: Asking and acting upon customer feedback is the best way to prove to your customers that you care.

In simpler terms, a customer feedback management process will help you maximize revenue, minimize churn, and improve customer relationships.

There are various kinds of feedback: opinions, feature requests, bugs, usability issues, and more. Customer feedback management platforms help a SaaS product management team collect all of them through different channels, which are explained below.

Most effective customer feedback channels

Customer feedback channels are mediums through which companies collect feedback from their customers. The most effective ones, in terms of the quality and usefulness of feedback collected, are:

1. Customer interviews: This channel is simultaneously the most effective and expensive in terms of time and effort. You can directly hear from your customers and ask them in-depth questions.
2. Text/email: This channel has the biggest reach when it comes to getting direct feedback from your customers. You can send multiple questions and surveys through each message.
3. Live chat: Collecting feedback from your customers live is a bit difficult as it depends on their availability and the size of your customer success team but it is almost as good as customer interviews.
4. NPS/CES/CSAT scores: These scores are easy to collect and interpret. Furthermore, your customers are more likely to give their feedback via these scores as they take a few seconds to complete.
5. Third-party review platforms: There are various software review websites such as Capterra, G2, etc., which can be a good place to learn about your audience.
6. Social media: Customers are more likely to discuss the good and bad of your product with their friends and followers on social media.

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Customer feedback management platforms get feedback from the above sources and organize them in one place. This is the first step in the customer feedback management process which is explained in the next section.

Customer feedback management in 5 steps

1. Gather feedback

The first process executed by customer feedback management systems is to communicate with customers of different cohorts and ask them relevant questions. It is a good rule of thumb to not ask open-ended questions as it can lead to vague answers or they will be simply ignored.

We mentioned earlier that a crucial challenge is to gather feedback from all sources and put it all in a centralized place. This makes the rest of the steps in this process smooth while eliminating confusion, leaks, and mistakes. 

The best customer feedback management software solves this problem with ease by integrating with customer-facing feedback tools. Zeda.io brings answers from your customers whether you collect them via email, texts, or third-party tools like Jotform and SurveyMonkey.

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2. Extract actionable insights

After you have all the feedback in front of you, you need to act on it. This step will help you determine action items for the upcoming sprints in the form of feature updates, bug fixes, etc.

You should be mindful that your customers will share feedback based on their experience with and feelings about the product. For example, they are more likely to say, “the navigation menu is confusing” rather than “regroup the items in the navigation menu based on functionality”.

This is where you might need to reach out again to your users through the customer feedback management tool to ask for more details on their feedback. Zeda.io facilitates that by allowing you to delve into research and directly contact the user behind the feedback.

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3. Prioritize action items

The order of resolving the identified issues to improve or retain the desirability of your product depends on the degree to which each of them affects the customer experience.

For instance, “enabling night mode for the product” isn’t a priority over fixing a critical bug that hampers everyday usage.

Zeda.io’s well-rounded customer feedback management solution facilitates this prioritization in two ways.

First, you can assign a score to each of the action items that reflect their importance. You can rely on various prioritization frameworks available. Zeda.io offers the RICE prioritization framework ready-to-go, but you can also configure your own.

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Second, you can ask your team members to vote on which feature should be prioritized first. Product team members can vote for their preferred action item with just a click.

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4. Execute and measure

The next step is to bring about those changes that will improve the customer experience. You can simplify this process by putting all the action items in their prioritized order on a live roadmap. A roadmap keeps everyone on the same page and aligns the organizational efforts.

You can create a roadmap by selecting the action items in the feedback list with Zeda.io within seconds.

Zeda.io integrates with various developer tools Jira and Azure DevOps via Zapier which makes it easy for the customer success team to collaborate with the developers.

As new features are released, it is the responsibility of the product manager to keep an eye on the product’s key performance indicators (KPIs) through customer feedback management software. Data such as session duration, session frequency, etc., are easy to track and draw insights from.

The customer feedback management solution provided by Zeda.io gets you data from user analytics tools such as Mixpanel and Google Data Studio so that you can do it all in one place.

5. Follow up with your customers

The final step in the customer feedback management process is to contact your customers again for thanking them for their valuable feedback and asking them whether the new changes solved their problem.

Apart from the methods described in the first step of this process, you can also reach your audience via in-app messaging with some quick yes/no questions.

This is the moment of truth for your product team which determines the accuracy of your process and the utility of your customer feedback management tool.

Moreover, you will find the most insights in this step. You will learn things like which channel is the best for you to collect feedback, which segment of your customers is your ideal audience, or whether you should choose a new customer feedback management software.

Summing up

Customer feedback management is a cyclic process that collects feedback from customers, iterates the product based on insights from that feedback, and verifies whether the new changes make the customer experience better.

With good customer feedback, product management can minimize risks and plan future iterations for maximum revenue impact. The process can be summarized in five steps:

1. Collect feedback from your customers through various channels and methods.
2. Analyze them to identify action items that will improve your product.
3. Use your customer feedback management platform to prioritize them.
4. Execute the changes and monitor their impact on the customer experience.
5. Follow up with your customer to thank them and ensure that their problems are resolved.

One more thing.

Your customer feedback management process is as good as your tool. You need to choose a solution that helps you efficiently run and manage all five steps of this process.

Zeda.io is a super app for product teams that can become your all-in-one customer feedback management software. As we mentioned while explaining the steps of the process, Zeda.io’s functionalities make it the only tool you need for CFM.

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FAQs

1. Why is customer feedback management important?

Customer feedback management is important because it maximizes revenue, minimizes churn, and improves the customer experience.

2. What is the best way to organize customer feedback?

The most effective way to organize customer feedback is by sorting them on the basis of their types — opinions, feature requests, bug reports, and others.

3. What are examples of customer feedback?

Customer feedback exists in many forms. An NPS score, a tweet about your next feature, and a review on a third-party website are common examples.

4. What are the benefits of customer feedback?

Customer feedback takes the guesswork out of your product planning process. You don’t need to make decisions based on your gut feeling or data that you are skeptical about.

5. How can customer feedback be improved?

Customer feedback can be improved by using the right customer feedback management tools which enables you to do everything from collecting feedback to pushing action items to the developers.

6. How to do customer feedback management?

Start by outlining a customer feedback management system that contains processes like collecting feedback, extracting insights from them, prioritizing action items, etc. After putting it into action, you can continually iterate it for improvements.