Collecting customer feedback: Best methods and tools
Tempo Team
Product development isn’t a one-and-done activity. Product managers must chart the course of a product’s evolution to ensure it continues to connect with customers and convert them into dedicated users.
Product managers gain insight into their target audience’s desires by collecting customer feedback. They may solicit this feedback via surveys and interviews or find it organically by monitoring communication channels – social media, online reviews, and customer support logs. They segment and analyze the data generated from those user insights to reveal actionable improvements, plotting a product roadmap that responds to customer needs.
Here, we’ll examine how to collect customer feedback from surveys, online reviews, and interviews and transform it into long-term market growth.
Why customer feedback matters
The importance of customer feedback can’t be overstated, as it identifies the most valuable problems for the product manager to solve. Data regarding customer behaviors and problems uncovers shortcomings and improvement opportunities for products and services. It answers the following questions:
What issues prevent clients from becoming long-term users?
What is the cost of ignoring specific issues?
At what point in the customer journey do users abandon the product?
Can the team implement any improvements to reduce churn or quitting rates?
Answers to these queries provide a window into various customer needs, wants, and challenges, especially from those who champion the product. Product managers who understand these topics can establish a strategic plan that drives growth and revenue while improving user experience, ultimately contributing to the product’s long-term success.
Types of customer feedback
Customer-centric solutions should respond to the pain points of specific user groups. Product managers seek customer feedback to identify these problems and inform strategies targeting performance and success metrics.
Although many tools can uncover data on customer needs, all customer feedback falls into one of four categories:
Direct feedback
Direct feedback is the most common customer feedback type. Whether positive or negative, it provides insight into users’ thoughts about the product or service. Direct feedback comes to the product manager through these channels:
Online reviews and ratings on the company’s website
Emails
In-app surveys
Communication with the customer service team
Indirect feedback
Any public feedback that users do not directly communicate to the company falls under the indirect category. Examples include:
Product reviews and ratings on third-party sites (e.g., Yelp, Google, or Trust Pilot)
Social media
Blogs
Forums
Inferred feedback
Inferred feedback derives customer insights based on behavior analysis from these sources:
Purchase history
Customer journey
Product usage
Brand engagement
Solicited feedback
Companies often seek out customer feedback through various survey metrics, such as:
General customer feedback surveys
Net promoter score (NPS)
Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT)
Customer effort score (CES)
Product usage surveys
Interviews and feedback forms provide additional data about the customer experience.
Building a feedback collection process
Assessing user sentiment about a product is a complex process. Here’s how companies can gather insightful customer feedback and turn it into actionable initiatives:
Understand user/product interactions
First, leverage observable, quantitative feedback to understand what challenges customers are trying to solve with the product. Organize these insights based on common categories and themes, then use those commonalities to form target groups based on customer behavior. This process is called customer segmentation.
Once your product team establishes user segments, it can investigate their behavior further by conducting exploratory interviews. These conversations generate an empathetic understanding of users and the issues they hope the product will solve. Their perspectives ensure the product team’s strategy addresses real customer needs.
Prioritize insights
Not all customer feedback is created equal. Some insights are valuable and actionable, whereas others are not. The product team must establish relevant metrics to build customer-centric solutions that target specific user segments.
Prioritization allows you to focus on one segment and its issues, develop solutions that maximize user benefits, and drive optimal value for the company.
Find out what drives segment behavior
After segmenting and prioritizing customer needs, conduct qualitative interviews targeting specific segments to uncover pain points and use cases. Interviewers should seek answers to the following questions:
Which problems do users face?
What are users trying to achieve?
What would a successful solution look like?
How urgent is this problem?
Do users have a current workaround to bypass the problem?
Refine segments
Based on analytics from interview data, you can identify relevant users to define the segments further. Once you’ve established a set of customers with pertinent insights, continue gathering their solicited and unsolicited user feedback.
Close the customer feedback loop
To drive continued engagement with targeted user segments, close the customer feedback loop by acknowledging and acting on feedback. Communicate the team’s actions and expected changes to users and stakeholders.
These actions demonstrate the company’s commitment to customer loyalty and satisfaction. Users who participate in the feedback process feel valued, making them more likely to continue sharing insights into the customer experience. These customers become a vital source of ongoing information.
How to segment and analyze feedback data
Your product team can segment data from customer satisfaction surveys, interviews, and online reviews using any of the following criteria:
Behavioral segments: This approach focuses on how customers interact with the product. Metrics include login frequency, usage rates for specific features, overall usage rate, time on site, and behavioral flows.
Descriptive segments: Some product managers divide users based on qualitative factors like their industry, company role, or subscription type. You may also delineate active vs. churned users or sort by net promoter score.
Functional segments: This perspective identifies segments according to customer needs, problems, or goals.
No matter how you divide customer segments, you can then prioritize them based on their contribution to business objectives. This value is frequently measured via AARRR metrics: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. You can also assess customer lifetime value scores to determine if customer insights will deliver long-term benefits.
When product teams segment data from customer surveys and other sources, they often identify the following user types to help prioritize improvements and updates:
Power users: Customer satisfaction scores indicate that these contributors frequently interact meaningfully with the product and use most (if not all) features. The product solves most of their problems, making them the most likely segment to advocate for it.
Intermittent users: Users within this segment may become power users if more of their needs are met. Find improvements that appeal to them to create an actionable product roadmap that drives valuable growth.
Weak users: These customers are the least engaged and most at risk of abandoning the product. The product team can afford to deprioritize and disregard customer feedback analysis from this segment, as they are highly likely to churn.
Common challenges when collecting customer feedback
Several common issues prevent many organizations from collecting actionable customer insights. Avoid these pitfalls, and you will gain valuable data that drives significant improvement:
Too much unstructured feedback
A product manager may waste hours sifting through unstructured, unprompted feedback if they don’t segment their data correctly. Disorganized information is difficult to analyze and delivers little to no value for the company or other customers.
Over-indexing vocal customers
When product teams prioritize input from outspoken customers, they inject bias into the process. Feedback from this loud minority could skew development, prompting improvements that benefit a limited number of users and drive meager returns.
Ignoring internal feedback
Sales and customer support teams are on the front lines of feedback. They are valuable proxies for customer interviews, providing details about common issues or desired improvements before online reviews, social media monitoring, and other feedback channels.
Product managers can collect additional data on customer satisfaction from a customer service portal or service management platform.
Failing to act on negative feedback
Feedback from customers is valuable – even if it hurts to hear. Negative feedback and constructive criticism uncover opportunities to improve the product and grow the business. Failure to act on this information wastes potential and risks harming customers’ loyalty because the company refuses to address their concerns.
Insufficient follow-up
Product managers must build follow-up practices into the feedback strategy to promote ongoing success. A follow-up procedure provides two significant benefits.
First, it sets the stage for collecting additional insights. For example, the team can follow up after sending out an NPS survey to ask additional open-ended questions and gather background on a user’s review.
Second, providing updates on issue resolution closes the feedback loop, reassuring users that the company listens to and acts on customer insights. This builds customer loyalty and improves customer satisfaction.
How Tempo supports customer feedback + free template
Integrating customer feedback into your product’s evolution requires careful coordination across numerous teams. Fortunately, Tempo can help your team gather insightful, actionable data.
Once your team has the necessary analytics, Tempo’s Strategic Roadmaps tool helps you visualize and sort customer insights. Its Idea Manager functionality lets you prioritize features based on feedback portal data. From there, you can easily produce a boardroom-ready product roadmap that outlines your team’s growth strategy and release plans.
With Tempo, no good idea goes to waste.