Customer Feedback Management: Definition, Importance, Steps

Customer feedback is the cornerstone of a product’s success.  It reveals their satisfaction with your product and how they would like it to improve. Hence, customer feedback is immensely important to strategize and integrating a customer-driven approach to your product development process. In this article, you will learn what is customer feedback management, the importance of customer feedback management, how to gather feedback, and the different steps for feedback management.  

Toward the end, you will discover how a feedback management system can transform the feedback management game!

What is Customer Feedback Management

Customer feedback management (CFM) is a process of collecting, analyzing, and acting upon customer feedback to improve products, services, and customer experience. It plays a crucial role in product management and can be considered its driving force. 

Why is Customer Feedback Management Important?

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

Build Product Intuition

Product intuition is an essential skill that you should master in order to make intuitive decisions for your customers and your business. By engaging in feedback immersion or actively seeking and analyzing customer feedback, you can build product intuition, which can largely impact your product decisions and drive growth. 

Test Your Hypotheses

Customers are the most trustworthy source for learning about preferences and needs. Engaging with them allows you to put your theories to the test and gain priceless information that will help you develop a product that meets their needs.

Minimize Risk

With an intuitive customer feedback system, your business can eliminate the guesswork in product decision-making. By leveraging direct insights gathered from your customers, you can make informed choices that cater to their needs and preferences, reducing the risk of disappointing or losing customers due to unmet expectations.

Effective Prioritization

Through customer feedback management, you can identify what to build next. It helps you to analyze customer feedback and derive valuable insights. Hence, CFM enables you to build products or features that cater to customer needs and preferences. 

Build Relationships

Asking and acting upon customer feedback is the best way to prove to your customers that you care. Moreover, when customers feel heard, they are more likely to promote your product through positive word-of-mouth. In simpler terms, a customer feedback management process will help you maximize revenue, minimize churn, and improve customer relationships.

Competitive Advantage

Excelling at feedback management can help you gain a competitive advantage and stay ahead of the curve. When you adopt a customer-centric product approach, customers will be more likely to be satisfied with your product, making you stand out from your rivals. 

Customer feedback management platforms help a SaaS product management team collect all of them through different channels, which are explained below.

6 Effective Methods of Obtaining Feedback from Customers

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 but also 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 feedback via these scores as they take a few seconds to complete.

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.

Social media‍

Customers are more likely to discuss the good and bad of your product with their friends and followers on social media.

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.

5 Steps for Managing Customer Feedback

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 not to ask open-ended questions, as they can lead to vague answers or may simply be ignored.

One of the crucial challenges of feedback management is to gather feedback from all sources and put it all in a centralized place. This brings order to the whole process of feedback collection and makes it easier for you to derive customer insights from them. 

Robust feedback management tools effortlessly collect feedback from sources like emails, texts, surveys, etc. Feedback management systems’ direct integration with platforms like Slack, Gmail, intercom, etc., eases the process of feedback collection and management. 

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. Moreover, this feedback aids you in refining your product and make it more valuable for customers. 

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 about their feedback.You can directly talk to customers to learn more about their feedback.

‍

3. Prioritize action items

You may receive a lot of feedback from your customers, and you would prioritize them in order to decide what to build next. 

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 process for your product. 

Using the centralized dashboard, you can prioritize based on the popularity, recency, and relevance of the feedback you receive.

You can use prioritization frameworks like RICE and Value-effort to make informed decisions. Moreover, you also have the provision to build product using your own custom framework. 

While prioritizing your next feature, you should also analyze the impact it would have on your business and your customers. This can pave the way for product success. 

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.

By selecting action items from the feedback list, you can create a roadmap. Platforms such as Zeda.io offer integrations with various developer tools like Jira and Zapier, making it easy for development teams to pick up tasks and streamline the development process.

As new features are released, the product manager is responsible for keeping an eye on the product’s key performance indicators (KPIs) through customer feedback management software. Product KPIs, such as session duration and frequency, 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. Close feedback loop

The final step in the customer feedback management process is closing the feedback loop. Closing the feedback loop means ensuring that customers are aware of the changes made in response to their feedback and that their concerns have been addressed.You can keep your customers informed about the latest developments in their feedback through changelogs. Additionally, personalized messages can be sent to communicate that their feature request has been deployed.

This approach can increase customer satisfaction and make them feel valued, which in turn can increase customer retention rates and reduce churn. Collecting feedback and acting on it to make essential changes can take your product a long way.

Furthermore, this step provides the most insights. You will learn things like which channel is best for collecting feedback, which segment of your customers is your ideal audience, or whether you should choose 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. Closing the feedback loop by following up with your customer and ensuring that the customers are satisfied with the changes. 

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 comprehensive app for product teams that can become your all-in-one customer feedback management software. It manages all the steps involved in the feedback management process, making it easier to build products that meet the needs and preferences of your customers. 

Start your free trial today.

Suggested Read:

Driving Product Success with Customer Insights

How to crowd-test your product idea and get valuable feedback

10 Questions You Need to Include in your Product Feedback Survey

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.

‍