Did you know that 55% of companies consider aligning their products more closely with customer needs as a key business objective? The best way to align with customers’ needs is to listen to their feedback.

But how to manage customer feedback, especially when it's coming from multiple sources?

Organizing customer insights in a meaningful way, identifying relevant and actionable items and balancing competing priorities is a real challenge.

To help you with customer feedback management, we prepared this guide and broke down the process into five actionable steps. Let's dive in.

How to manage customer feedback: 5 key steps 

Creating a tight customer feedback loop enables you to address customer expectations quickly and efficiently. Here are the five key steps to deal with customer feedback.

Collect customer feedback

You can use multiple ways of gathering customer feedback:

• Customer surveys: one of the most essential ways of collecting feedback data. Here are the best customer survey types to start with:

1. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) survey is a survey you can run after customers have performed a particular action on your platform to gauge their satisfaction level.
2. Net promoter score (NPS) survey helps you learn how likely customers are to promote your product or service. You should conduct it every three to six months.
3. Customer effort score (CES) is a type of survey to run when you want to know how easy it is for customers to use your product or service.

• Focus groups: Focus groups offer a high degree of flexibility and provide rich qualitative feedback. Their advantage is that they allow customers to express feedback in their own words, and they can provide in-depth, nuanced insights. They allow you to observe customers' body language and discover views you haven't considered.
• Email and SMS: A very convenient way of feedback collection. You can use it to gain customer insights at significant customer journey touchpoints. For example, when a customer cancels a subscription, you can send them a message asking what caused the decision. SMS is also a great channel to send surveys for immediate feedback.
• Social media: An environment where customers feel free to express their opinions and concerns about a brand's offering. You can use platforms like Instagram, Facebook or YouTube to run customer surveys or keep an eye on social media comments to learn what people talk about your company and find out if your product needs adjustments.
• Website analytics: Website analytics can help discover how customers interact with your product. You can analyze every touchpoint of the customer journey to learn where they spend the most time or find if there are features that they quickly abandon. Having these analytics data, you can determine the areas of improvement.
• Third-party websites: Third-party websites are also a good source of information on what people say about your product. Analyze review sites like Capterra, G2 or Product Hunt to see what customers love or dislike about your product. This indirect customer feedback will help you identify patterns and realize how to improve your product.
• Usability testing: Usability testing is a valuable part of a customer feedback strategy. It can be helpful when introducing new features or adjusting your product interface. Recruit a small group representing your target audience and ask participants to complete tasks outlined in your prepared test plan. Usability testing will help you gather customer feedback on their experience with the beta version and identify any usability defects.
• Embeddable pop-ups: Pop-ups are a great tool for collecting customer feedback in a timely and efficient manner. They are quick, easy to set up and can gather real-time feedback data. You can customize those pop-ups to appear on specific pages to specific customer segments, making the feedback more targeted.
• Live chat data: Live chat tools are handy for customer feedback collection since 26% of consumers prefer using live chat over other customer service channels. They can provide information on challenges customers experience when using your product, such as navigation difficulties or inability to log in. So, it's worth reviewing previous chat data to identify areas to improve customer experience.

You have to admit all that adds up to a ton of information from multiple channels. How do you handle that?

Zeda.io, our user feedback platform, offers a solution.

Its feedback module collects customer feedback from multiple sources, such as Intercom, Zendesk, Slack and more. Zeda.io puts those insights into a centralized dashboard, where you can view all the feedback at a glance. It's like a flexible inbox where you can easily access and address items like bug reports or feature requests. You can move them to your backlog or link them to specific features.

Zeda.io helps you further enrich those insights and facilitates the customer feedback process by offering integrations with customer service and CRM platforms like Zendesk, HubSpot and Salesforce.

Analyze customer feedback

The next step in the customer feedback management process is feedback analysis. You need to organize all the data you have gathered, evaluate and interpret it to gain valuable insights into customer preferences and measure overall customer satisfaction. Here's how you can do it:

1. First, to get a clear picture of the different types of customer feedback you have received, organize it into categories. Consider factors such as user experience, product features, customer service, pricing or any other customer pain points that come up in the feedback.
2. Determine labels for each category to represent the topics you have identified. They should be clear, concise and mutually exclusive.
3. Go through each piece of feedback and assign it to the main topic it addresses.

Are any patterns reoccurring in the customer feedback? Sometimes, they are hard to identify at first glance, but you can use different techniques to uncover feedback patterns:

• Sentiment analysis: Try to understand the sentiment distribution and develop categories, for example, positive, neutral and negative feedback. It will help you recognize common areas of satisfaction and identify pain points.
• Keyword analysis: Identify words or phrases that commonly occur in customer feedback. It will show you the most common issues customers face.
• Theme analysis: Determine customer feedback’s most common themes or topics, such as 'Navigation and layout' or 'Speed and performance.'

Having identified patterns in customer feedback, you can extract actionable insights. To do so, evaluate how significantly each item influences the overall customer experience or your business's key metrics. It will help you decide what to tackle first.

Does the whole analysis process seem like a lot of work? Zeda.io's customer feedback management platform can save you a ton of time on manual analysis, extracting valuable insights from incoming feedback and providing you with detailed reports.

Prioritize action items

After you have analyzed all your customer feedback, it's time to decide what to work on prioritization.

How do you prioritize product features? It may be challenging, but you can use different product prioritization frameworks, such as:

1. Kano model: It assesses the impact of the product features on customer satisfaction. This prioritization model is based on the assumption that when it comes to product value, functionality is not everything. Product design should also account for the customer's emotions. 

Kano model classifies features or attributes into three categories: Basic needs, Performance needs and Excitement needs. Then, it prioritizes the features based on the potential to delight customers and meet their basic requirements.

2. MoSCoW method: The name of this prioritization framework is an acronym for "Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, and Won't Have."

• Must-have: Critical tasks or features that allow the product to function correctly.
• Should-have: Features that are important but not critical.
• Could-have: Desirable features, but not urgent. They would make a great addition to the product.
• Won't have: Features you won't address in the current iteration. You may add them in the future.

The MoSCow approach is very dynamic, and it can help develop a solution in a short time.

3. RICE model: It allows you to estimate the importance of the features using four criteria:

• Reach: The number of users or customers whom the feature will impact.
• Impact: The potential impact of the feature.
• Confidence: How confident the company is about the features's impact and reach scores.
• Effort: The amount of effort you must devote to develop the feature.

Next, convert these rankings into a general score.

4. ICE model: This model is similar to RICE but evaluates the product's features based on impact, confidence and ease. You weigh these three metrics with scores to shortlist the features' importance and prioritize them.

Prioritizing action items may seem daunting, but Zeda.io can facilitate this feedback management process stage. Its innovative segmentation capabilities allow you to prioritize and explore product opportunities based on factors like customer needs and revenue impact. This data can help you choose the right direction to act on the feedback and improve customer satisfaction.

Create a roadmap to keep everyone on the same page

Now that you have collected, analyzed, and prioritized the feedback, it’s time to develop an action plan: a strategic roadmap that will align all the people working on the deliverables you determine.

Creating a roadmap is easy when you use Zeda.io.

Choose the 'Create a Roadmap' button in the top right corner of the 'Features' dashboard and follow the prompt.

The template will help you keep things simple. Fill it in with product features and other details.

When the roadmap is ready, share it with your team and stakeholders to receive their input.

Close the feedback loop

After acting on product feedback and answering feature requests or fixing a bug, take the next step and inform your customers about the product update. Zeda.io helps you close the product feedback loop ten times faster with release notes.

Creating a short and sweet release note with Zeda.io takes only a few seconds. You can customize it with images, categories, tags and authors.

When your release note is ready, share it on multiple channels to inform your customers about the product update. Showing you care about solving their problems will help increase customer satisfaction and gain positive reviews.

Conclusion

Following the five steps from this article will help you effectively manage all the feedback data you receive, improve your products and retain existing and acquire new customers.

The most important thing is to do it smartly and use the proper software to streamline the process.

Zeda.io is an invaluable tool for strategizing the product management cycle and discovering solutions that align with your business goals and customer requirements.

This comprehensive customer feedback platform collects feedback from different sources like customer portals, widgets or integrations. Then, it automatically derives insights and pinpoints customer problems and preferences.

Zeda.io offers prioritization frameworks like RICE or Value-Effort and AI-powered road mapping and decision-making to help you choose the best direction when acting on customer feedback. And on top of that, it has beautiful release note templates to swiftly inform your customers about product updates.

Ready to enhance your product feedback strategy? Sign up for Zeda.io and start your free trial.