Feedback and customer interactions are crucial to business growth. Yet, research shows that  42% of organizations do not collect feedback from customers.

Building great products require continuous improvement and it is only through feedback that you can start making improvements.

However, collecting product feedback is not the only thing required for creating great products. There’s one more aspect often overlooked and that is product feedback management.

What you do after collecting product feedback is what matters the most. Once you successfully extract insights from the feedback data, you can start tweaking your product for the better.

Read on to know about product feedback management, its importance, and the process to gather actionable insights from feedback data.

What is product feedback management?

Product feedback management is the process of collecting customer feedback from various channels, organizing, and implementing them to build a better product. The process is all about breaking down the overall feedback data into actionable insights that can help streamline a product with customer requirements.

Product feedback management is no longer about getting customer responses. It is about listening to the customer's requirements and creating the ideal solution for their problem.  

To adopt this new customer-centric approach to doing business, you must actively leverage product feedback management software like Zeda.io that can help you manage feedback efficiently.

Why is product feedback management important?

Product feedback management is the start to building the right product or service. It is critical to an organization because of the following reasons:

• The process helps understand customer pain areas and thus, building better products.
• Product feedback management drives progress. It streamlines customer experience with your improvement efforts to achieve the best possible outcome.
• It helps in measuring customer satisfaction levels.
• Product management feedback loops make retaining customers easy
• It acts as a reliable source of information for building better products.
• Product feedback management also helps get a third-party perspective on products, which, in turn, helps make informed decisions.

Product Feedback Channels

Product feedback comes from multiple channels. Let’s see the list of feedback channels available to help you obtain product feedback.

1. Surveys and polls

Want to know what customers think about your product?

Surveys and polls can be one of the most useful product feedback tools. You can send product feedback survey links to customers and take their feedback on your products.

Create surveys using tools. Share them with your customers via emails, social media platforms, or send links during customer conversations to capture your customers’ valuable feedback. You can also embed your survey link on your website.

Besides, you can also create sidebar surveys and polls to capture user feedback on product management faster.

2. Interviews with customers

Interviews are ideal for gathering comprehensive information about customer feelings, thoughts, and behavior.

User interviews are a great way for designing a better value proposition, customer journey maps, user problems, and much more. So, if you want to know in detail what customers think about your product, go for interviews. They will ensure in-depth research on customers’ thoughts and insights into your product.

3. Email

Collecting feedback via emails is the most personal way of asking customers’ opinions on your product.

So, unlike surveys, you can add more questions that help you understand what customers expect from your product. And when sending feedback emails, ensure to implement an SPF record checker to ensure your emails reach customers' inboxes and avoid being marked as spam.

Here are two quick tips for creating ideal email feedback forms.

• Tell customers how important their feedback is for improving your business. Show gratitude towards the customer. You can also reward them so that they do not skip giving the feedback the next time.
• Get a centralized place where you can store the collected feedback. Since you will send the email feedback forms to hundreds or thousands of customers, you must get a central dashboard to track the feedback.

Zeda.io’s feedback dashboard is ideal for viewing and tracking all the collected feedback and feature requests.

4. Phone Calls

Phone calls can be great product feedback tools. Several companies use phone feedback recordings to train their customer support representatives.

The recorded customer conversations help you understand different customer personalities and how they must be handled in different scenarios.

Also, phone feedback helps you to understand the knowledge gap that your support agents might have. Hence, they can work on improving their service further.

5. Text Messages (SMS)

The average open rate for text messages is 98% and the response rate is 45%. That’s enough numbers that tell why one must choose SMS to collect product feedback.

Also, text messages are a great way to reconnect with existing customers and drive the odds of them converting to repeat customers.

However, avoid sending long texts via SMS. Ask one or two survey questions that customers can answer with a short text. For more in-depth surveys, embed mobile-friendly survey links in the SMS.

6. Review platforms

Several review platforms like Gartner markets, G2, Capterra, Trustradius, and others can act as a reservoir of insights for you. It is often customers' reviews and feedback on these platforms that can help you make informed future decisions.

Track these review sources and encourage customers to leave product reviews on such platforms.

7. Social media

Today, feedback on social media channels is one of the fastest ways to get customer opinions and thoughts. Users can instantly share any issue they discover in the product on social media platforms like Twitter.

Also, if you check the Facebook comment section, you can get an idea of how customers respond to your product. You can find both delights and complaints in the comments.

8. Forums & knowledge base

Companies also collect product feedback from forums and self-service support portals. Forums can provide you with different customer opinions. Plus, you might get to know a few customer problem areas too.

Further, companies also try to build a strong knowledge repository with articles that might be helpful for customers. At the end of these articles, they place CTAs to product feedback like – Was this information useful?

Such CTAs directly take customers to a separate feedback form where they can collect product feedback.

9. Dark social

The term dark social refers to website referrals that are difficult to track. For example, private communications on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Slack, forwarded emails, Patreon groups, and others.

The rise of dark social (slack channels, messaging apps, social networks, e-meetups, events) has opened ways for companies to collect product feedback from these channels.

Since dark social is more personal and authentic, you can get genuine feedback from customers. Be it Facebook or LinkedIn groups or WhatsApp, these channels can help you collect insightful user feedback.

10. In-app chats

Asking for product feedback via in-app chats can also be beneficial. This product feedback can help you make customer-driven improvements. You get to understand what to create and how based on the users’ ratings and experiences.

Also, it is pretty easy and smooth to collect in-app feedback. You can simply nudge the users on your app and ask them a few right questions without hampering their experience.

Types of product feedback

There are five types of product feedback you can come across. Let’s see what these types are one by one.

1. Bug reports

Bugs are issues that your customers might face while using the product. They can be of various types - from simple UI issues to the entire website is down.

When a product has bugs, it mostly leads to churn. If the product doesn’t work, customers don’t get access to their value. Hence, they are most likely to leave in such situations.

This type of user feedback in product management matters because the bug reports show you what isn’t working. Also, they give you insight into how your customers are using your product.

Consider bug reports seriously, work on the issue, and squish it. Make sure it doesn’t occur in the future. It will show customers that you care about the user experience which, in turn, will drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

2. Questions

Customer journeys are full of questions. At every stage, you will need to respond to customer questions like;

• What is the price of your product?
• What does it do?
• How to set it up?
• How to get started?

And the list goes on…

So, you must ensure that your documentation, landing page, or the product itself has the answer to such questions.

But you will still come across customers who cannot find the answers they are looking for. Hence, in a way questions act as feedback for you.

Receiving a question from a customer could mean that something could be clearer or something might be missing in the information you provide. When you get the same question from several users, it’s time to consider it and find out an answer.

It might result in an extra question in your FAQ section or a short article in your help center. The solution will save your time and satisfy customers too.

3. Feature requests

Feature requests are ideas for product improvement. They tell you how you can improve your product.

Feature requests usually come from customer pain points – when they are up to doing something, but cannot. Thus, they make a feature request.

For example, a user might want to track the changes being made to the project, the time spent on the project, time spent on resolving issues, etc. Hence, this calls for a new feature to be added to your product.

When you add features that customers want, you add value to the product. The more value-added, the more satisfied your customers are. So, feature requests are very significant. Agree?

4. Reviews

Review platforms allow users to talk about your products. Often, when your product becomes the topic of discussion on review platforms, it’s not good news.

But then they might not always be negative reviews. You might come across both positive and negative comments. While some users might have a 5/5 experience, others might be mad about something.

Reviews on public platforms are important as it shows what customers like and dislike about your product. Moreover, the reviews give you a chance to publicly address the customer's concerns.

So, track these reviews and don’t miss out on the chance to respond to your customers publicly – on a positive as well as on a negative review!

5. Appreciation or Praise

Praise is good. It's definitely a good sign when a customer tells you about their positive experience with your company.

Appreciation can motivate you to grow and improve. But on the flip side, if you take the praise lightly and get lazy, it might lead you nowhere.

So, whenever you come across a positive experience shared on a review platform, as the customer if there is something you can improve. You can also ask them for a testimonial, their willingness to feature on your customer success stories section, and so on.

However, do not be pushy. Let the impression be a good one.

Product feedback management best practices

Managing product feedback is not that difficult if you implement a few best practices. Here’s a list of what these practices could be. Take a look!

Gather feedback across several channels

Collecting feedback is so easy nowadays. Thanks to technology, you can gather customer feedback in product management from multiple channels.

You can turn any platform like social media, app, website, or pop-ups. into a survey channel.

Scroll above and check out the various product feedback channels that you can use to collect user feedback.

Align the survey medium and the intent

Ensure that your product feedback management and the feedback collection system match the feedback type you are looking for. For instance, email would be the best channel if you need a bulk response for the survey. You can also connect with customers using website pop-ups, in-app chats, etc.

On the other hand, if you need more detailed and personalized responses, you might choose a few customers and email them the survey links. However, here, you must craft the survey request carefully, more personalized.

Prioritize collected feedback

Once you have asked the right product feedback management questions and collected customer responses, it’s time to prioritize them.

Create a clear-cut strategy to prioritize your product feedback. You might filter the feedback based on customer importance. Like you might consider the feature requests of your loyal customers first. Or you can also prioritize based on other attributes.

You can also use a framework like Business Potential Scores for the feedback. Assign the scores for feedback and take action accordingly.

Feedback with a Business Potential Score of 3 will have the largest positive impact. So, scores below 3 will indicate that you must make the required improvements.

Analyze the feedback data efficiently

Collecting feedback is easy but analyzing it – not so much!

You might want to organize the data first and then start with your analysis. For NPS, CSAT surveys, one might get the average of the numbers using a spreadsheet. You can also use independent tools to analyze customer feedback.

For open-ended questions, you might use keywords to organize the responses. Or, you might also categorize the feedback into positive and negative.

Work on improving customer experience

When your customers have communicated their thoughts, opinions, and feeling about your product, you must use them. Use the feedback to improve the user experience.

The feedback from users might indicate issues with your product like website navigation issues, complex ordering processes, payment gateway issues, and others. Or you might also receive feedback about your product’s user-friendliness, and how customers love using it.

Whatever the conclusions, be ready to get into action, and make the necessary improvements. Once you have drawn the insights from the feedback, start making adjustments. It will help you grow in the right direction.

What’s next?

So, after you have collected and analyzed the received product feedback, what’s the next step?

The next step is to act on the customer insights derived from the customer feedback. Based on the responses you receive, start building and validating different solutions.

The product feedback management process will reach its completion once you have the right solution in place for the customers’ issues.

Want to get started with product feedback management? Switch to Zeda.io

To grow, you need to improve. And to improve you must know what your customers think about your product.

In short, product feedback is the very start of creating the right solutions for your customer's problems. So, to ensure the best product feedback management, consider exploring Zeda.io.

Zeda.io’s product management platform brings you everything needed for building the best products.

Collect product feedback with its customer portal, in-app widget, track the feedback from Zeda.io’s feedback dashboard, identify trends, and never miss out on anything noteworthy.  

So, ready to build the right product?