Gathering Customer Feedback is Vital and Here’s How to Streamline It.

The reason we build products is quite simple: to solve a problem for our end users.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Of course, there are several other secondary reasons why products are built or improved, such as growing business revenue or achieving a social goal (for non-profits), but the primary reason why any product is created is to solve a pain point for the end-users.

So, how do you determine whether your product is solving your users’ problems, or is just another fancy alternative out there?

Customer feedback is the way to go.

In short, customer feedback is the information your customers give you about your business, your product, and their experiences using your product.

Why is customer satisfaction feedback important?

Gathering customer feedback is critical to your business’s success because, at the end of the day, your products are built for your users. As long as they see your product as being valuable, they’ll keep engaging and paying for what you offer.

But if, and whenever your customers determine your product no longer offers the value they expect, they may move to the next available option.

Customer feedback helps you avoid this; it helps you stay up-to-date on what your users need and how well your product is delivering it for them.

Here are four reasons why customer feedback is important in sales management.

1. Feedback creates a channel for engaging your customers

Although we often see the business world as a cold, emotionless, dog-eat-dog world, it’s not. Especially when dealing with your customers. The human factor plays a huge role in how customers see you, whether they’ll bring you their business, and how much they’re willing to trust.

Gathering Customer feedback gives you an avenue to relate to customers on a personal basis, i.e. connect with them to find out exactly how they’re using your product and what you can do to offer them a richer, more fulfilling experience.

People do business with those they love and respect and when you can connect with your users, you’ll be able to display that human part of your brand they can love and respect.

2. An avenue to better understand your customers

Great products are a product of great understanding.

How?

A product is designed to solve a problem. But to solve your users’ problems, you must first understand what their problems are. And it goes deeper than just that.

Solving your users’ problems demands that you first understand their user story, touching on things like why they decided to use your product, what they used before they adopted your product, what problem your product is currently solving for them, where your product could do a better job and deal-breakers that may get them to stop using your product.

With this, you can create a picture of where your product management seats in your users’ reality, and how to build a better product that’s more useful, indispensable even, for your users.

Gathering customer feedback gives you unbiased feedback on who your users are and what they want out of your product. With this data, you can build a better product that meets their needs.

3. Gathering customer feedback helps you understand where you can improve your product

When you have a better understanding of who your customers are, you can determine exactly what they expect from your product.

The logical next step is to build those ideas into your product to offer a richer experience to your users.

Gathering Customer feedback offers direction on how to develop your product from where it’s right now to where your users expect it to be in the future. More importantly, customer feedback can help you prioritize product improvement initiatives so you can build features that are demanded often by your users before those that are on the fringe.

4. Obtain testimonials, reviews, and referrals

We all talk about what we love.

Whether it’s the cruise you took over the last holidays, your new iPhone, Airpods, or even eating out at your favorite restaurant, it’s natural for human beings to talk about whatever makes them feel better.

This is one key reason why you should double down on collecting customer feedback. In fact, according to stats:

• referrals are the single most effective means of acquiring customers, and,
• existing customers spend more, and more frequently than newly acquired customers.

Gathering customer feedback helps you channel your customers’ satisfaction into positive testimonials, reviews, and referrals that grow your bottom line faster than you would with paid promotion campaigns.

Best ways to collect Customer Feedback

If we’ve established one thing, it’s that customer feedback is the engine that powers great products. Great products deliver great experiences. And great experiences attract, engage, and retain your customers.

How then do you collect customer feedback?

Most importantly, given how important is to your business’s growth, how do you build a feedback engine that helps you keep collecting customer feedback so that you can maintain excellent customer relationships and keep developing your product on autopilot?

Here are 11 actionable channels and tips you can leverage to gather customer feedback faster and more efficiently.

1. Responsive live chat

In the age of Intercom messages that get replied to in 3 days, it’s no longer enough to just have a live chat bubble on your website. Ensure there’s always someone available to reply in the shortest possible time.

2. Leverage NPS to understand how your customers view your products

Net Promoter Score isn’t just an overview of how awesome —or not—your customers think your product is. Modern NPS tools are built to enable customers to throw light on their ratings and what exactly you could do to offer them a more fulfilling experience.

3. Social media polls

Facebook, Twitter, (and recently) LinkedIn have all adopted polls that enable you to quiz users and get their feedback in seconds.

Polls are a low-hanging fruit you should use since they put little obligation on your users and enable you to collect refined customer feedback on options you got from other feedback channels.

4. Ask for post-transaction feedback

The best time to ask for feedback is when you’ve delivered a remarkable experience to your customers and they’re raving about how good, urgent, tailored, etc., your product is. And there’s no better time than after you’ve just completed a transaction with a customer.

Even if this ends up not being particularly positive feedback, it’s still an avenue to learn from your mistakes and build a better experience for your users.

5. Motivate feedback with a gift or prize

6. Engage your online community frequently

7. Leverage negative public feedback (e.g. Google, Facebook, Yelp) as an opportunity to show professionalism and responsiveness. Don’t ignore or antagonize negative feedback.

8. Collect feedback inside your app or any online store where your apps are published, e.g. Microsoft, Google Play Store, App Store, etc.

9. Monitor your social media reactions, comments, and messaging channels.

10. Monitor and collect on-site data, viz. analytics, and heat maps.

11. Use email campaigns to engage new and existing customers for their feedback, user stories, etc.

Most of these channels can be set up to run on autopilot, while some others will need the human element to keep track of data and make sense of it all.

The key is to build your unique strategy by choosing how you’re going to combine some of these tools and templates listed above to build a customer feedback engine designed around your users.

Best practices on how to better manage and keep track of customer feedback.

1. Organize it, ideally with a Kanban tool

Before you can make sense of your customers’ feedback, you must first group it. This gives you a better picture of what your customers are asking for the most, which channels they’re making their feedback on, the parts of your product that are getting mentioned often (pro tip: they probably need a lot more attention), and problems that come up often.

Organizing customer feedback makes it easy to take a look at all the data you’ve collected and know what to do with it.

Our take? Use a Kanban board. A Kanban board gives you an easy interface you can organize product feedback with, grouping them into different groups, and grading them based on urgency and customer demand.

2. Prioritize it.

A customer may ask for your product to be more colorful, but it doesn’t hold the same value as 120+ users asking you to integrate dark mode every month. If you manage to organize your customer feedback into one place where it’s easy to visualize it all, you’ll be able to see how important each piece of feedback is and be able to prioritize accordingly.

More importantly, prioritizing customer feedback is the key to winning the product development game. By focusing on features that are more of a pain point to your users, you can be sure you’re building what your customers need and that the problem you’re solving is the most relevant one to your customer base.

You need a project management tool so that you can manage visually so you’ll be able to spend less time organizing all this data and more time making sense of it, adjusting as priorities change, and building a better product.

3. Communicate

Your team is critical in the product management process since they help you digest customer feedback and determine exactly what to build, based on what your customers are saying.

As a result, you need to review customer feedback with your stakeholders, but their points of view into consideration, and then determine the best step forward.

To achieve this, you need a robust project collaboration software complete with chat, and functionality such as mentions and notifications to keep stakeholders engaged as work progresses on building the features suggested by your users into your product.

Manage your customer feedback smarter with an intelligent project management tool

Managing customer feedback is essentially a form of project management since just like in conventional project management, you choose a target (customer feedback items) and then use them as project objectives for improving your user experience.

As such, it follows that managing your customer feedback from a project management software will offer you the most advantage and help deliver a richer product experience to your users.

So, which project management tool should you use? Try out Kissflow Project, our project management app equipped with all it takes to manage customer feedback smarter.

Kissflow Project offers diverse features such as:

• Kanban boards for grouping and managing customer feedback,
• mentions, notifications, and comments for engaging internal stakeholders,
• reporting and data management for feedback data,
• sub-projects for grouping customer feedback items into bigger issues, and
• file sharing for organizing data contextually.

Kissflow Project offers an intuitive project tracking tool that simplifies feedback management so you can collect, track, and execute your customers’ feedback? As a result, you engage and convert even more users.

Take a Kissflow Project for a spin here.