User feedback consists of the information you receive from your target consumers or current product users. This provides vital information on how you can improve your product offerings and what the customer enjoyed or disliked about your product. 

Constantly collecting user feedback can be very tedious and resource-consuming. But with a customer relationship management (CRM) and user feedback tools like UserVitals, you can easily automate your feedback collection and analysis.

In this guide, we will be sharing more about the types of feedback and how best to collect and analyze them.

Why Do You Want To Collect User Feedback? 

User feedback is like a pot of gold for your business. Apart from gaining insights on problem areas in your current product, using user feedback tools also allows you to: 

• Inform your product roadmap
• Learn more about product adoption
• Discover product features potential users would love (based on analysing how users engage with said features)
• Measure customer loyalty
• Detect product issues
• Optimize user journeys
• Get feedback on the customer experience
• Make meaningful modifications to improve your current product and user experience
• Find out which areas of your product users dislike
• Connect and engage with your users
• Build a two-way communication channel and establish trust
  

The Types Of User Feedback That Are Useful To Businesses: 

• Explicit – Obtained through direct engagement with users, such as one-on-one meetings, surveys and questionnaires. This helps to find out how users achieve their desired outcome with your product. 
• Implicit – Obtained through analytics tracking tools. Great for supplementing feedback collected through explicit means. Analytics feedback tools such as cursor/finger heat maps help you learn more about user expectations. 
• Continuous - Embedded in other processes, such as email marketing campaigns and in-app messaging. This can take the form of closed-ended questions, such as how a customer would rate their experience.
• Positive & Negative – Feedback with information on what customers liked or disliked about your product. 
  

Read our article to learn more about the many different types of customer feedback tools, such as those for encouraging the voice of the customer (VoCE) feedback, creating customer satisfaction surveys, email surveys, and so on.

When Should You Collect Feedback?

Tricky question, because it depends on the systems you've put in place, as you will see in the next section. But here are some ideas to get started:

• After user onboarding 
• After a purchase and through an email campaign:

• During the offboarding process, when your user is about to cancel their subscription (for subscription-based platforms) or hasn't purchased anything in the last six months (for eCommerce):

• While you’re using the tool. Here’s how Netflix does this:

• Whenever your user is on your platform (through tools like Hotjar)
  

User Feedback Collection And Analysis Process: 

#1. Collect and gather feedback from different sources

There are many types of feedback you can collect, but how do you narrow the scope down?

Focus your feedback collection efforts on how the feedback can help you to achieve your business goals. For example, if you aim to introduce a new feature, then the feedback you want to collect should include what new features users are looking forward to, user preferences, etc. 

Questions to get your user feedback process started

Here are simple questions to get started. You should make them more specific to your experience. In general, avoid double-barreled questions that encourage a particular type of response, as they don't lead to honest feedback. 

Product experience related – Helps in identifying barriers users face when trying to achieve their desired outcome. Here are some open-ended questions:

• Did you face any difficulties in completing your task today?
• What prevented you from completing the purchase process?
• Is there any other information/features that you would like to see?

Conversion rate related – Find out more about your competition through your users and potentially reveal information such as user price sensitivity, reasons why they left, etc.

• Why did you shortlist xxx company? 
• What made you decide to switch over?

Continuous feedback – Users' needs constantly change. Hence, continuous feedback collection is vital in staying relevant. Here, you should ask closed-ended questions that lead to numerical answers. 

• How would you rate your experience with us today?
• How likely are you to recommend us to your friends? 
• How difficult was our product/specific feature to use? 

UserVitals is compatible with various external tools. As such, product managers can collect feedback of all types from places such as Intercom, Gmail, Slack, Email, etc., and view them all on one platform.

#2. Prioritize user feedback

This is important in helping you identify the key areas that you should focus on first. It could be an area within your product that is buggy or difficult for users to navigate. It could be developing a new feature, etc., but how do you prioritize user feedback? 

Use a feedback board.

A feedback board like UserVitals gives you a visual representation of the ongoing and completed tasks. As such, you have a more clear view of where your resources will be devoted to and can make better decisions concerning future product development. 

MoSCoW method to prioritize feedback: 

This framework consists of 4 main parts that classify different requirements, namely:

1. Must-Have: The items in this quadrant are features that need to be built first as they are essential elements in the new product or feature you are developing.
2. Should-Have: The items in this quadrant will impact the new product or feature, but the product/feature will still work without these items. Hence, these are only considered after your "Must-Have" is done and if your team has the time and resources.
3. Could-Have: These are items that you want to include but are unnecessary. Although they may improve the existing product/feature, they are not high on the priority list.
4. Won't-Have: This quadrant focuses on items that your team has agreed not to go ahead with this round. 

Fill up the grid with your team and come to a common ground on what you should focus on in the next cycle. 

Using metrics to prioritize based on:

• Engagement
• Retention
• Conversions
• Others

#3. Use feedback to inform your product roadmap 

When you receive negative feedback about the product experience, seek to identify other feedback relating to the same topic or an identified trend surrounding this issue over a specific time frame. Once you have specified the problem, you can benchmark it against how your competitors perform to gauge where you stand before taking corrective action. 

You need to devise an action plan that allows you to adapt your current strategies to address these negative feedbacks from unhappy customers. After deciding on your action plan, you can then delegate the relevant tasks and update your product roadmap accordingly. 

UserVitals allows you to use labels to group items and categorize functional product areas. Hence, cross-functional teams will not need to worry about miscommunication as you can easily organize information and see their statuses.

#4. Notify users who gave feedback about the roadmap/updates 

For your new feature developments to gain traction, it is important to share updates with your customers regardless of new or existing. 

By simply sharing a message on a new feature, it's not impactful enough to gain attention and traction. Hence, here's a simple 4-step strategy for you to consider implementing.

Step 1: Define your goal – This gives you a benchmark to measure your launch's success and provides you with a clear focus for better decision-making. E.g., Aim for 50% of existing users to start using/trying out the new feature launched. 

Step 2: Identify your target users – This new feature may resonate more within a specific target audience. Hence, by aligning the uses for this new feature and its audience, you can adopt a more targeted approach towards your marketing efforts. 

Step 3: What are your feature priorities? – Each feature has its value, and you need to decide which feature will be marketed more than others. You can start by evaluating the best ones that convert and focus on making sure the right customer segments get to use them.

Step 4: Where are you making your announcements? 

Here are some digital channels to get started.

• In-product messaging: With our HelpScout integration, you have access to your customer's feedback right at your fingertips. Moreover, you can connect directly to customer conversations and immediately notify them within your product/service once the features they wanted have been launched. 
• Blog posts
• Email marketing campaigns
• Social media channels

Each new feature launch should be treated as a mini product launch and given emphasis. You can also collect user feedback through our CRM tool on your marketing efforts. This gives you greater insights into how you can reach more people and what your users want to see. As such, you can better create targeted and shareable content. 

Automate your user feedback collection and analysis process with UserVitals today!

Collecting user feedback is essential in ensuring that your business continuously offers a product or service that your target users want or need. At the same time, it shows your customers that their opinions are heard. With a good customer feedback CRM tool that automates this process for you, you'll be able to save time and resources that can be better spent elsewhere.