Before you create a new product, you must first find out if your target audience will buy the product. You must understand if there is a demand for your product by learning what customers are saying about it.
You will need to answer questions like:
- What new features do your customers want?
- What are their likes and dislikes?
- What goals are they looking to achieve?
- Does your product help to make achieving these goals easier?
By answering these questions, you can build products that meet demand, improve customer loyalty, and ultimately sales. So, how do you go about getting these answers? By asking customers for product feedback!
If you don’t know how to begin, you are on the right page. We’ll look into the methods to collect customer feedback, and how you can leverage the insights to improve.
But before we begin, let us take you through the meaning of product feedback.
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Why Collect Product Feedback?
Product feedback includes all the information your users share about their experiences using your product or service. By understanding how customers feel, along with their complaints about your product, you can point out areas to make it better.
What’s more, you can ensure the improvement is in line with what your customers expect to ensure satisfaction.
Collecting product feedback is vital for any business that wants to be successful for many reasons, such as:
- It helps to identify problems, bugs, and missing features that customers expect
- It can help provide valuable insights into what your users love or find annoying in a product and boost user experience
- Improving products based on customer feedback helps build loyalty since it shows you value their opinion
As you can see, product feedback is crucial, and every business owner should learn to collect it. Now, let’s proceed to the available product feedback tools you can use.
5 Best Strategies to Gather Feedback
There are many ways to collect customer feedback, but they all fall under two categories which are direct and indirect.
Direct methods involve asking the customers to provide feedback. In contrast, indirect methods are those that you did not ask for. They all serve the same purpose, so all that’s left is to pick one that suits your objectives.
Knowing this, let’s explore some of our best product feedback tools, starting with surveys.
1. Use Surveys
Surveys remain a reliable product feedback tool for any business. The right surveys will help you understand how customers feel about your product and services, including how you can improve. However, you’ll need to do it correctly to get the best result.
There are different types of product feedback surveys, all of which give you different types of information relating to your product. Here’s a breakdown of the most common customer surveys.
NPS Surveys
The Net Promoter Score survey is great for getting information that shows you how customers see your company. They are straightforward and quick, with one question in mind:
“What is the possibility of you recommending our company or product to a friend or colleague?”
These surveys work with a rating system of 0 – 10, with customers falling in any of these categories:
- Promoters: These are customers that have an experience rating of 9-10. They are more likely to keep working with your company and recommend your product to others.
- Passives: Customers in this group view your product in a positive light. However, while they are fine with your product, they are open to trying out products from the competition. Those who rate their experience 7 -8 fall into this category.
- Detractors: These are customers who are unhappy with your product and won’t refer anyone to you. Worse still, they can leave negative online reviews and comments that can negatively affect your brand.
We recommend using the NPS survey if you want to measure how loyal customers are to your product and business.
They are also great for finding out areas you can improve upon.
Customer Effort Score Survey
Try to think back to the last experience you had with some products you regularly use. Which of them left a mark, and what made it better than others?
Presuming an experience failed to meet the bar you set, why do you think this happened? Was it hard to use the product, or perhaps it failed to do what you wanted?
The Customer Effort score is an excellent survey for answering all these questions in relation to your product.
With this, you can measure the success of your interactions with a client. What’s more, the CES survey ensures that customers remain loyal and shows areas of your products that you can improve.
Customer Satisfaction or CSAT Surveys
The CSAT feedback survey gives you quick insights into the level of satisfaction customers have with your product. It is a great way to ask customers what parts of your products they like and those they don’t.
In addition, the CSAT feedback can also point out areas in which you can improve the customer experience in the future. Most importantly, it lets your clients know that you h and value their output – which encourages them to leave feedback going forward.
The Product Market Fit (PMF) survey
Last is the PMF survey. The goal of this product feedback survey is to measure how your product fits into the market. Ultimately, the survey will ask your customers one question:
“How would you feel if you were unable to keep using this product?”
Getting PMF is crucial because it will let you know if your product or service is meeting the demands of your target market. What’s more, it will give you insights into things to do to ensure your product stays relevant in the market.
Using Surveys the Right Way
While surveys are easy to use, you’ll still need to keep a few things in mind to get the right results. Here are some of our top picks:
- Keep it Short: Nobody likes a time-consuming survey. So, make sure your survey questions are straight to the point and respondents can complete them within minutes. If product surveys are too long, many people will rush through the answers while others will abandon them completely.
- Ask Open-ended Questions: You want in-depth feedback regarding your product during surveys. This means avoiding Yes/no questions. Instead, ask questions that will encourage the participant to go into detail. For instance, “How has the product helped to make your life easier?”
- Send at the Appropriate Time: Do not send product surveys at random. Instead, send after a major interaction such as after purchase or a follow-up after delivery. Sending a survey years after a customer has forgotten about buying your product to gather product feedback may not be a success.
2. Take Advantage of Social Media
While surveys remain the go-to option for most businesses that want product feedback, social media is also another excellent tool. There is a high chance that your clients already have an account on social media, so it means half of your work is done.
By creating profiles on the top social media platforms, you can interact with customers in real time through various formats. Also, social media lets you measure customer behavior and provides you with correct insights.
If that’s not enough to convince you, it is a great way to improve your brand reach and engagement. So, how do you take advantage of this powerful platform?
Let’s find out below.
Share your Survey
You can expand the reach of your product surveys by sharing them on your social media pages. This saves you the stress of contacting each client individually and drawing them to your page instead.
To do this, use a tool like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms to design and create a link you’ll attach to your page.
Whether you use LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok, encourage your followers to be honest – so you get accurate results.
Ask For Feedback
Directly asking your social media followers for product feedback is another excellent option. Sometimes, customers may need that extra nudge to take action. Fortunately, most social media platforms today let you send a direct message.
You can easily communicate with individual customers and request feedback.
They can then respond through your private messages, which you can read to get the necessary insights.
Create Polls for Quick Questions
Polls can get you deeper insights into the minds of your customers or audience. There is a high chance that your target audience consists of ideal customers, industry experts, and other industry influencers.
So, leverage this crowd by conducting a poll asking questions regarding the product.
For instance:
- Is the product easy to use?
- Did it satisfy your needs?
- Are the features worth it?
Going through the responses on your social media polls will give you great user insights to improve. You can learn more about what they care about, what they are doing, and how you can fulfill their needs.
Encourage Feedback Using Incentives
The reality is that many people, including your customers, don’t like doing things for free. This means that even if your clients or followers are happy with your product, they may not be motivated to share insights.
So, why not encourage them to participate and provide product feedback using fun contests and games?
Note that this is not about bribing your clients to leave you product feedback.
Instead, you will create contests to keep your audience engaged and encourage them to leave feedback. Your objective at this point is to make your audience continue to contribute while having fun.
Incentives can come in various forms, such as gift cards, free delivery, free samples, or discounts.
Engage with Customers
If you actively respond to your customers in your social media section, you develop a relationship with them. This insignificant action will make you stand out from many others who ignore comments from audiences.
To make the most of your comment section, learn to properly create conversations from simple comments. Respond thoughtfully and show empathy while putting yourself in the shoes of the customer.
Showing that you have a genuine interest in customer needs makes them feel valuable. When the time comes, and you request that they complete a survey or leave feedback, they’ll be happy to!
Try Social Monitoring
Social monitoring is unlike the other product feedback tools we’ve covered so far. Here, instead of interacting with customers directly to collect feedback, you search for it instead.
To do this, you’ll listen or track social media comments for anything relating to your brand. While this may take longer than other options, you are more likely to get genuine customer feedback.
This is because customers are more likely to be truthful about their feelings when they are not communicating with you directly.
3. Use a Beta Test
Beta testing involves releasing an early version of your product to a group of users called beta testers.
These testers are actual customers who’ll use your product and give you feedback before you launch the product fully. Beta testing is commonly used for software, but it can work for other types of products as well.
This strategy is useful because it can help you identify problems with your product and address them before you launch. The goal is to have a final product that is in line with the preferences and needs of your target audience.
Once they have tested the products, they can fill in surveys or feedback forms highlighting their overall experience.
To do this right, you will want to keep the following in mind:
- Use loyal customers: Users should consist of loyal customers who understand your range of products. They’ll be more likely to provide you with genuine and constructive feedback since they care about your business.
- Outline your expectations: Let the testers know that you require genuine feedback and how you intend to use them. There should be clear steps for testing and reporting any problems or suggestions that might come up.
- Provide Channels for Feedback: There should be channels for submitting feedback. We recommend email threads, forums, or group chats or channels. This makes it easier to follow the discussion and promptly deal with feedback.
- Offer a Reward: While they may be willing to help you due to loyalty, offering an incentive can go a long way. Offer gifts like discounts, special recognition, or free products to show testers you appreciate the effort. The right kind of incentive can also encourage testers to go all out when providing feedback.
- Correct Issues Promptly: After getting the feedback, use the suggestions to promptly improve your product. Then, update the testers about progress so they can see you value their feedback. This will also encourage them to help in the future if you ever need more testers.
Ideally, you want your beta group to consist of only a small selection of users. If there are too many participants, it might be more difficult to find the right feedback.
4. Interviews and Focus Groups
Having a one-on-one interview with your customers is another reliable way to get direct product feedback. Here, you request an interview with a customer who has used your product and ask questions about their experiences.
This will allow you to learn about the experience of the customer, pain points, and how to make it better in the future.
By asking the right questions during customer interviews, you can also spot problems you didn’t get from other outlets for product feedback. The best part is that interviews can help you improve customer engagement.
If one-on-one interviews are not an option, focus groups are your next bet. Instead of a single client, you gather between 6 – 12 of them. This allows you to get the opinions and different viewpoints of multiple people at the same time.
The results you get are no different from one-on-one customer interviews, except from a larger group.
5. Monitor Customer Interactions
Your customer support tickets are full of genuine feedback. Requests, complaints, and issues from customers who reach out to your team can offer useful insights. This is the case regardless of if they contacted you using telephone, live chat, or email.
So, how do you do this?
First, organize your tickets and try to resolve the problems or answer the questions fast.
Then, check through the complaints and see if there is a recurring complaint or problem about your product. If you find any, write them down and start working towards correcting the issue and making your product better.
If you want to take things further, you can add frequent complaints to your FAQs page or help section. This will help customers solve issues themselves and reduce the strain on the support team.
Conclusion
Product feedback has a vital role in guiding business decisions and improving customer relationships. By consistently getting feedback regarding your product, you can make them better and ensure long-term customer loyalty.
We have listed some of the best strategies to try out today. Surveys remain the easiest, which we suggest for anyone just starting out.
Once you can harness the power of genuine product feedback and work on it, all that’s left is to sit back and watch your business grow!