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User Feedback, an Ultimate Guide: How To Collect and Make it Valuable Every Time

Representative image showing how to collect, analyze and act on user feedback

With so many SaaS options out there and new ones rolling out every day, it’s important to consider that customers may be likely to feel bombarded with that much information (head-exploding territory at times). When they give you user feedback, take it seriously!

What distinguishes one app or software from another? For customers, it’s the user experience. For you, it’s how you can best develop your software to meet customer needs. That is why the personal feedback that your users offer is so valuable.

Is User Feedback Critical for Saas Businesses?

Bet your bottom dollar, it is! User feedback, also known as user experience or UX feedback, is critical for your SaaS business, and really for any business.

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SaaS developers and engineers need to realize that it’s a competitive market out there, and the reality is that your current (and prospective) customers have many options. Personal remarks and critiques give you real-time feedback about how people are able to apply your product to their everyday lives.

Why Is User Feedback So Important?

As Jared Spool, the founder of User Interface Engineering (UIE) says, “Business outcomes make great results, but not great goals.” In other words, growing your company is a fantastic result of what should actually be your goal—pleasing your customers.

Show the Importance Of the Customer

Customer feedback is always important, but what’s also important is how you choose to use it. Creating a customer-centric business culture should also be one of your top priorities.

dashboard showing conversations and user feedback

Brand Loyalty

User feedback is incredibly important in building brand loyalty. If customers see your company making positive changes, they will respond positively. This can help you build brand loyalty where the customer feels emotionally tied to your brand as well as enjoys your product(s).

Improvement Process

It’s likely that the UX feedback from your customers will only serve to improve your design. Companies can compare and contrast with competitors’ price points to help you navigate towards a more customer-centric product process.

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Iterative Improvement

It’s important to remember that product improvement is a step-by-step process. You and your development team have likely been living and breathing your product for quite a while by the time rollout comes.

customer feedback software showing product decisions and customer sentiment

But this isn’t the case with your customers, which is precisely what makes UX feedback so valuable. You want to make constant improvement a hallmark of your build, not just a one-time incident.

Improvement In Segmentation

User feedback can also help you identify the individual segments or groups within your target market. For example, you may be reaching a certain demographic better than you originally thought. Collecting, analyzing, and implementing the feedback usage can help you continue to meet the needs of your customers plus potentially open up new markets for your product.

Leverage Negative and Neutral User Feedback

We don’t often take to it very well, but negative feedback can also be invaluable in helping your company adapt and grow. Learning to accept negative feedback with a good attitude and leverage its lessons to your advantage is crucial in building a solid user feedback mindset.

Pie chart for customer experience and customer sentiment

User Feedback Collection in the Product Development Lifecycle

Collecting feedback from your users is always important, but it’s especially important in the ideation stages and the beta testing days. Getting user feedback during development and testing processes will help your team create a more tailored and user-friendly product.

Product managers and developers should keep in mind that how you catch users is how you keep them. Integrating user experience feedback questions from the beginning is the best way to start.

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Stage 1: Pre-Product

In the early days of a new product, it’s just an idea. Maybe you see an unmet need in the market, or maybe you see a company offering goods or services but you have an idea to do it better.

You wanna know how to turn a good idea into a great one? Having the feedback at your fingertips, early in the development process. This can be a challenge for developers and product managers. This helps define (and then redefine) your target market.

  1. Who is your future customer?
  2. What do your future customers want?
  3. Do you know what your future customers need?
  4. What are your future customers willing to pay for?

Some user feedback strategies for the ideation phase are:

  • Interviews
  • Focus Groups
  • Surveys
Interview requests for qualitative user behavior analytics

Stage 2: Development of New Features

As you and your team get to work and start to build, it’s a good idea to continue consulting the trial customers that participated in your interviews and focus groups. You can put early wireframes or mockups of the product in front of your potential customers and see how it’s received.

Product feedback widget to understand customers

As the product comes to life and features are added and fleshed out, your beta testers can offer valuable usability feedback. You can also find out at this stage what features testers would like to see or find useful. Your mock customers can offer feedback on how intuitive a product is, and how it meets their needs.

Stage 3: Idea And Design for Roadmap

One of the key features in product design is creating a roadmap for how you and your team will intake and implement customer feedback. It’s important to plan for both the beta testing stages as well as the actual product launch. Use feedback such as personal remarks to your advantage and incorporate their critiques early on.

Keep in mind that, as UX influencer Cory Lebson says, “Sometimes the needs of the business must come before the ideal products.” Although you want to keep yourself and the team customer-centered, don’t forget that you have a business to run and a profit to make.

Stage 4: Endless Improvement

In reality, even once you finish designing your product and it’s ready to go, you’ll still be tweaking it for endless improvements. One method is to create and invest in features such as a customer feedback platform or a product feedback software early on.

Example customer survey question to get user feedback

Remember, you’re creating your product for a future audience in a future market. As thoroughly as you research your market and clientele, your development team won’t be able to anticipate everything. Developing methods to receive a constant stream of feedback is essential for keeping tabs on your customers. You want your product to evolve alongside their needs, not behind them. This is why feature prioritization becomes so important to zoom in and zoom out of, and you can always have it front of mind when starting the process over again!

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Types of User Feedback

Have we laid out a convincing argument for why you should care about generating and collecting user feedback? Good! Let’s discuss strategies for collecting feedback as well as some product feedback tools.

Proactive User Feedback

NPS pop-up example for user feedback

Proactive feedback refers to an active developer approach to collecting feedback. Examples include:

  • NPS surveys
  • CES
  • Point of Conversion
  • one-on-one questionnaires centered on user experience

The basic idea of proactive feedback is that the company or development team is actively seeking out user experience and opinions.

Customer Experience Feedback

Customer experience (CX) feedback is a great tool that can be used for far more than just improving a product. It can also be useful in defining a business and creating a sense of unity among employees.

CX also attracts new clientele, acting as a sort of referral business channel. Customers will actively seek out intuitive, easy-to-use products and services. Customers will also devote time to researching a product and reading reviews, which you can influence through a UX mindset.

Take a look at this example from Amerisleep, where they compile all the products’ features along with customer reviews. This brings more trust to prospects by giving them an overview of real buyers’ experiences with the products. By picking reviews from those who share specific physical conditions and preferences, it simplifies the decision-making process for prospects, helping them find the perfect mattress that fits their unique needs.

A somewhat more specific approach to gathering feedback is to use surveys on your website. Not only can this help you analyze your website traffic, but it also provides a way for customers to interact with a different aspect of your product.

Embedded question to improve content

Good questions to ask before choosing the tool for website feedback. Does the customer:

  1. easily find the relevant information?
  2. find value in the website content?
  3. trust the website content?

Reactive Feedback

The defining characteristic of reactive feedback widget is that it is unsolicited responses or reactions from your consumers. Examples of reactive feedback include trojan horse reviews or requests for assistance.

Email Campaign Feedback

In terms of product feedback tools, email campaigns can be pretty effective. Emails that ask your customers their opinions will help your business appear customer-centric (which it is, right?) and let your users know that you care. It’s another way of creating a one-on-one conversation with an individual and helps to field user experience feedback questions.

Ongoing User Feedback

Unfortunately, many companies and developers make the mistake of not seeking out ongoing user feedback. While most businesses do offer a feedback platform or feedback service such as email or a live chat, the proactive search for customer feedback becomes a secondary quest.

customer satisfaction feedback widget that pops up after specific events

Offering your consumers the chance to supply UX feedback is a key component of successful business. You want them to be able to do this at any time, not just when you ask.

Feedback Based On Loyalty

Loyal customers are key in helping your company grow. Try to learn all you can about your continued users:

  • Who are your users?
  • How did they find out about you?
  • In what ways is your product working for them?

Their feedback is extremely valuable because it offers you and your developers insights into what you do right and what value you are bringing to the consumer.

User Feedback From Your Mobile App

Consider using your mobile app to collect feedback. Most of us have our phone on hand anyway, so this is an effective method. Customers tend to see it as a more interactive method.

Usersnap mobile feedback collectors for apps

Website UX Feedback

You can and should use your website directly in your repertoire of user feedback tools. Asking users about their experience on your website will help you determine how user-friendly the site is. It will also give you insight into areas to enhance and make even better. What you really want to know is, does the customer enjoy interacting with the website?

Screen showing a button doesn't work

Feedback hub – All other channels with centralized project platform

Add your different sources of user feedback to a Usersnap project to help you analyze trends and prioritize important topics.

Success Metrics For User Feedback

Here are a few ways of collecting user feedback and creating space for user voice reviews.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS surveys are divided into two types: Relationship and Transactional. These surveys are offered either after a customer has completed some type of transaction with your business (Transactional) or the survey asks the customer how they think or feel about the company (Relationship).

NPS surveys can be a great way to measure customer loyalty. To keep it effective, stick to analyzing survey results from current and/or long-time customers—this will give you the most relevant data.

Goal Completion Rate (GCR)

Goal Completion Rate (GCR) is a method used to figure out whether or not a user has achieved their objective while interacting with your product. You’ll most often see this method in the form of an exit survey (“Did you find what you were looking for?”). GCR surveys can help turn disappointed users into “warm” leads.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score (CES) methods measure how hard (or hopefully) easy it was for your user to complete their objective. CES questions are best asked after the customer has made a purchase or interacted with your product. This can be a great way for you to get a glimpse of UX and measure product usability.

Website Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Website Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is just what it sounds like. These surveys try to measure how closely your website met the expectations of your customers. A common format is to ask customers to give the website as a whole (or a specific page) a numbered score reflecting their satisfaction.

The Right Way To Utilize User Feedback

So you have successfully implemented a few of the above methods, and your users are responding!  Great. Now…what do you do with all this incoming data?

As Marcin Treder, the founder and CEO of UXPin writes, “Those who have mastered the magic of crafting the user experience are able to smash their weaker competitors.” Gathering data is one thing, but analyzing it to tease out the relevant UX data is quite another.

That means you are going to need help. This is where UserVoice comes in. What is UserVoice? This SaaS helps you collect and analyze your feedback data. UserVoice reviews are overwhelmingly positive.

Analyzed From Collected Feedback

The first step in putting your user feedback into action (also known as UserVoice integration) is to analyze your data in an organized fashion. You’ll want to look for things like:

  • Patterns in feedback responses
  • Common feedback themes
  • Frequency of the comment
  • What groups are commenting on what issues

Taking Action

Post-analysis, you’ll want to hone in on what your feedback is teaching you. It’s a good idea to sort your feedback data by different metrics such as age, gender, customer status, and so on. Ask your team (and yourself) questions that can help you implement the feedback:

  1. Which issues are important to which demographic?
  2. Is this feedback from loyal customers, or potentials?
  3. Are these reasonable changes?
  4. Can this feedback be incorporated into the current product?
  5. Based on this feedback, what are ideas for new products?

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Useful Tips

Getting feedback to use can be the most challenging part, but there are ways to increase the likelihood of receiving feedback. 

Always Ask 

Integrating user experience feedback questions from the beginning of your product lifecycle is the best way to start. Give customers many opportunities to tell you what they think, including if they stop using the product.

Social Media

  • If you know how to sell on Instagram but cannot understand if your customers like your products enough, ask questions on Instagram stories.
  • Additionally and importantly, post links to surveys on all your social media platforms
  • Finally, interact with customers to show you’re listening.

Contests and Rewards

You don’t need to bribe customers, but it can be nice to potentially receive something for a survey. Hold draws for prizes for those who submit feedback.

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