Are you using customer feedback effectively?
One of the best ways PMs can decide on what to build next is by incorporating customer feedback while making product decisions. Unfortunately, customer feedback comes in different shapes and forms and takes colossal effort to consolidate, effectively organize and aggregate it. PMs spend 20 to 25% of their time organizing and aggregating customer feedback. Some big tech companies have dedicated teams classifying and categorizing the customer feedback to identify keywords or phrases to quantify the qualitative user feedback. In this post, let’s dive deeper into customer feedback and credible ways to include it in decision-making.
There are two types of customer feedback- direct and indirect customer feedback. Direct feedback is the feedback coming directly from the customer in form of Net Promoter Score or NPS, in-app solicitation, idea boards, etc. Indirect feedback is the feedback that reaches the product organization via internal teams such as sales, customer success, customer support, etc.
Direct feedback is extremely valuable but often feedback collecting methods are long and tedious. Users feel that their feedback is not being heard and they do not see any incentive in giving feedback. Therefore, the customer’s response rate is low, and feedback represents smaller user community. Solution to this issue is to have short, simple surveys, if possible, with one question. It is extremely crucial to inform the customer that the business is actively listening to their feedback. This can be achieved by responding to the user feedback on idea boards, sending follow-up emails after receiving NPS scores, explaining to the user how their feedback is used in improving the product. When the users feel their feedback is being heard, chances of them giving complete and honest feedback also increases.
Indirect feedback is as valuable as direct feedback, especially when the business is B2B. The indirect feedback reaches the product teams via meetings; therefore, the originating end-user is unknown. Challenge here is receiving feedback in form of second-hand reports, not in primary form, might be biased with the team’s own goals. It is difficult to consolidate and aggregate indirect feedback received from two different teams as their scoring methods are aligned with their own goals. Therefore, it is essential to log original or paraphrased version of the customer feedback and give PMs direct access to it.
The most effective way to organize customer feedback and make it available to product organization in consumable form is by creating a single repository for both direct and indirect feedback. The user feedback stored in repository should be as close to original form as possible. Although this is a labor-intensive approach, it has multiple benefits. Firstly, it brings PMs closer to the root cause and focuses their attention to making product decisions, developing and de-risking product roadmaps, which in turn helps bring internal confidence in product’s roadmap. Then by linking the user feedback repository to the CRM database, the support teams can also leverage immensely in mapping market, developing business models. financial analysis, etc. Lastly, the whole approach of feedback collection, repository storage, data-driven decision making and inclusion of users in feedback process would give businesses more evangelized customers.
