May 5, 2021
How to Make Feedback Management Efficient
Here’s a rundown on all of the different types of feedback and where to collect them from, and how to gather all of this information with UserVitals.
Here’s a rundown on all of the different types of feedback and where to collect them from, and how to gather all of this information with UserVitals.
User feedback is incredibly important for any company to collect. Listening to your customers and their opinions can be vital to your business, but having a system to handle that feedback efficiently is even more so.
Here’s a rundown on all of the different types of feedback you need to collect and where to collect them from, the hallmarks of an efficient feedback management system, and how to gather all of this information effortlessly with UserVitals.
There are many different types of customer feedback, all with their own pros and cons. Let’s go over a few and discuss why they’re beneficial.
Freely-given opinions can be one of the most common forms of customer feedback. It can come in many different forms, from survey answers to social media posts to much more. But while these opinions can glean great information, that information can also be highly targeted.
Survey answers often focus on specific questions and rating scales instead of longer answers. And without the structure of surveys, opinions may not be targeted at all; your customer’s feedback may not be relevant at all.
Feature requests focus on the updates your users want to see in your product in the future. While this can be good for figuring out next steps in your roadmap or what updates to prioritize, feature requests don’t give any feedback for your current product. This can be hard to gauge what is working well and what isn’t.
Customers might also reach out to you to let you know about any bugs they’ve run into with your software. While fixing these issues and making your product more user-friendly can certainly boost customer satisfaction, it is only a short-term boost. New updates and additional features are known to help keep your customers more satisfied in the long term.
Customer complaints are a great way to gauge pain points in your product. If a customer is reaching out to you with a problem, it’s generally something important or substantial that affects how they use your product or their experience with it.
Yet on the other hand, these complaints can sometimes end up being user issues instead of product issues, making the feedback more relevant to that individual than the majority of your users.
Product reviews can offer an interesting point of view, and are often unique as users might write them with potential customers as their audience instead of the company itself. People will also often review products after they’ve become familiar with your product. While this does mean that they will have a better understanding of your product, their feedback may be more focused on general usability instead of onboarding or early issues.
Likewise, there are many other channels you can collect information from that are important to keep in mind. Let’s discuss them and how each customer feedback source can benefit you.
Many companies have a dedicated customer support email for customers to reach out to. While this feedback is often focused around issues customers have been having with the product and may not be as targeted as you’re looking for, it’s still a very valuable channel to keep open for complaints and potential bugs.
Your website can be one of the simplest ways to gather feedback, as your product’s website is often the first place customers will go when they encounter an issue. Many websites include a contact form or feedback widget for customers to add their opinions because of this.
But while having a dedicated place for feedback on your website is important, the information you gather can vary and may not be as targeted or as relevant as you are looking for.
Surveys allow for more targeted, valuable feedback as you get to choose the questions you want to ask customers. While this is incredibly helpful for any company to have, it can be hard to motivate customers to fill out surveys, and when they do fill them out, customers might have a strong positive or negative bias going in.
Regardless, try and figure out a way to incentivize customers to fill out surveys or make them more widely available if possible.
Social media can give you a lot of feedback from your customers that you might not have known about otherwise, but it can also be tricky to gather the right information. People might simply mention your product without any hard opinions or information, or their feedback might simply not be helpful.
User interviews are one of the best ways to gather feedback. You’re talking directly to your customer and asking them the questions you want answered, and you have the opportunity to follow up on specific answers to get the information you’re looking for.
Unfortunately, these interviews can be hard to come by. Many customers may not have the time to sit down and talk with, you or they may not want to do the interview at all. Regardless, you should take every opportunity you get to interview customers and get their thoughts.
Support tickets are a great way to find out about usability issues and any bugs your customers might come across in your product. They can also allow you to follow up with customers to get more information on a product and get feedback on any changes you make, allowing you to see the ticket the whole way through.
This includes product directories and any sites where users can leave reviews on your product. While this can be a great way to gather information you might otherwise not have, product sites are often a closed loop : you’re getting feedback at one specific point in time, and it can be hard to track down reviewers and follow up with them to learn more.
When choosing your customer feedback management system, here are a few things to keep in mind.
First and foremost, you need to have good organization. This means labelling for different feedback types, sources, common issues, and more.
Your feedback will come from multiple sources, so your management system should be able to account for that. Whether this simply means allowing for and sorting different feedback types or automatically pulling in feedback from external sources, look for a system that is built for multiple sources.
No company is the same, and a good feedback management system needs to keep that in mind and allow you to customize the way your feedback is stored and organized to suit your product.
Finally, your feedback management system should keep your customers involved in the process. This can come in many different forms, from making your changelog and feedback boards public to allowing comments on those platforms and much more.
UserVitals makes automating your feedback management system easy and pain-free.
Our product is meant to help you gather feedback from your users together and collect them into useful stories and insights. Though we have a dedicated portal for customers to leave feedback and custom widgets for your site, we also integrate with many platforms like Slack, Gmail, HelpScout and Intercom to bring feedback together from as many sources as possible.
You can also manually add feedback you get into our platform from the dashboard, and pull in feedback you find across the web with the help of our Google Chrome extension. This variety of information can help you get a fuller picture of your users’ wants and needs and make more informed choices on future updates and releases.
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Once you sign up with UserVitals, you can start adding or pulling in feedback and organizing them however you like. You can collect similar pieces of feedback, each known as an Insight, into Stories and sort them even further by type, source, and different labels.
We also make it easy to create public roadmaps based on your Stories by grouping them together based on status. Each story listed on your roadmap has a section for further feedback, allowing your users to give their thoughts on each one and help you further understand your audience’s needs.
Last but not least, we help you put together a changelog for all of your product’s updates and releases, so your users can stay up-to-date with any changes and be more involved in the product.
To learn more about UserVitals and how it can help you better understand your customers’ needs, check out our website and sign up today.
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