Echoing Steve Jobs' perspective, the journey of product development must commence from the customer experience, leading back to the technology, not the other way around. This emphasizes the importance of understanding customer needs and preferences at every phase of your product's lifecycle, ensuring the final outcome resonates with your target audience.
What is the most straightforward and effective method for gathering insights from users? Utilize product feedback surveys and questionnaires. This guide is dedicated to empowering you with the knowledge to employ these tools effectively.
We've meticulously assembled comprehensive insights on harnessing product feedback, enabling you to enhance and refine your offerings throughout their lifecycle. Here's a glimpse of what this guide offers:
Let's dive in and explore how to leverage product feedback surveys to their fullest potential.
Want to create great product feedback surveys that gather the right data for you? Then bookmark this guide and save this specially curated list of questions for every stage. We have grouped the questions based on different scenarios. A scenario can be applied at various stages of your product cycle.
Just pick the scenario and choose the questions that fit that particular stage where you want to collect the product feedback. You can tweak the questions as required.
If you want to cover more than one scenario in the same survey, you can add multiple questions to it. Just remember to keep it short and simple for the respondents.
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The answer - is because your products need to evolve with time and customers. And to make sure you are headed in the right direction, you need to hear what your customers are saying.
Product feedback plays a vital role at different stages of your product cycle.
From helping in coming up with new product ideas and validating their efficacy to fueling after-release optimization, you need customer insights to deliver what they want from you.
Here’s a look at the uses of product feedback in detail:
A product roadmap summarizes your strategy and planning process for building the product or releasing new updates on a time scale. Each stage may contain one or more ideas that you plan to work on.
With limited resources and time, how will you prioritize each of them? By collecting product feedback.
Using simple polls, targeted surveys, or Q&A boards can reveal which updates or products should go to the next development stage. It will also help you add new ideas that your customers might be looking forward to but you may have missed including in the roadmap.
You can track customers’ demands and preferences and release new updates that appeal to them with a data-backed approach.
Suppose you have a product idea that you think will improve sales and increase your customer base. What should be the next step - To start building it or research its demand among your audience?
Product development is a lengthy and arduous process. It requires planning, capital, and iterations. That's why it is crucial to research to back up your ideas.
Using product opportunity surveys, you can cement new ideas with actual customer feedback data, pinpoint issues with your current products, do some competitive research, and find out about your customers' interests.
With this feedback, you can make necessary changes to your initial design and build a satisfying product experience. It provides the power to explore customers' problems and implement the solutions directly into your product development cycle.
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At Twilio, understanding customers’ needs and problems is the backbone of their product development strategies. They use Qualaroo Nudges™ to conduct surveys for user testing, collect product feedback, brainstorm new ideas, map customers’ expectations, and more.
With targeted product feedback surveys, they can test the validity of their ideas and share the feedback data with over 18 teams so everyone can benefit from it. They use product feedback surveys to connect directly with the customers to collect feedback, prioritize different hypotheses, and make data-backed decisions at every stage of product development.
Not all customers are the same. Their preferences and interests change with demographics and psychographic factors. As a result, your best-selling product for one segment or location may not appeal to another.
Then, how will you make sure that you offer the right kind of product to the right customers?
By asking them what they want or don't want.
Product feedback surveys let you identify different audience segments and design products that cater to each of them. You can release location-specific products or include features that benefit different customer segments. You can also launch variants of the same product with slightly different features based on the feedback to target specific locations, age groups, customer types, and more.
At Udemy, user feedback drives product innovation and marketing strategies. They use product feedback surveys to understand incoming traffic sources and identify different audience segments to allocate their advertising budget appropriately.
By segmenting customers using survey data, they discovered that students outside English-speaking countries were also enrolling in courses taught in English.
From this insight, they introduced a new feature - automatic captioning in English courses so the users can easily understand them. It has helped Udemy to expand its reach to students around the world. They continuously collect user feedback using this feature to run timely product optimizations.
Put the microphone into the customer's hands and let them speak their mind.
Measuring customer satisfaction can help you understand how happy your customers are with your products and services. It also lets you ask follow-up questions to get deeper insights.
If they say they are happy, you can explore the reason behind it and employ the same ideas to other products and optimize them. If they say they are not satisfied, you can uncover their pain points and issues with personalized follow-up questions. Then, use the feedback to make the required changes and improve their product experience.
Belron, a leading automotive windshield manufacturer, aims to provide the best and easiest experience to every customer. It maintains an NPS score of 80 using customer survey feedback. Their customers include people who are looking to replace the windshield on their vehicles. So, Belron gathers insights by collecting NPS through product feedback surveys from previous customers' experiences to provide satisfactory solutions to new customers.
They also target leaving customers using exit-intent surveys to understand what is missing from their website. The responses are then analyzed with advanced techniques like sentiment analysis and text analytics to uncover the points of friction and frustration.
The feedback is filtered through every department to improve both online and in-store experiences. Customers' satisfaction with the service and product is reflected directly in their sky-high NPS score of 80.
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Better products = happy customers, which ultimately equates to brand promotion.
86% of the customers with excellent purchase experience are likely to buy from the same company again. If your products provide the solutions that your customers are looking for, they will return to you again and again.
Product feedback can help you identify satisfied customers, brand advocates, and promoters. It will let you understand what makes your products stand out from the competition. Leverage that data to deliver a better customer experience and increase brand awareness.
Airbnb, the world's leading vacation rental website, is all about experiences, and testimonials play an essential part in connecting guests with hosts. Airbnb uses customer stories and testimonials on its website to build trust among new visitors.
After their stay, the customers can leave feedback about their lodgings. The reviews and ratings help hosts make changes improve their listings, and allow new visitors to find the right place for their vacation. The entire cycle acts as a perfect driver to bring in more business for the hosts and Airbnb.
Every product you build should provide value to the customers for their time, effort, and money.
There are plenty of ways to use product feedback to bring in new customers:
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Adobe's website is one of the prime examples of using product feedback and success stories to showcase the might of its products. It offers products for digital marketing, designing, Business Intelligence solutions, and others. Its testimonial page is beautifully designed to display how each product can help you out.
In addition, they have categorized customer stories according to product type, and each category has its sub-sections. So, when you land on their page, you can find testimonials about the product you are looking for and quickly browse other product types to explore their benefits for your business.
Product feedback surveys are one of the most efficient ways to hear customers' complaints, delights, and grievances. They are easy to deploy, and you can target your core audience to ensure higher data reliability and accuracy.
However, you cannot distribute your product feedback surveys whenever you want. You need strategic planning to target users at the precise moments to collect contextual and accurate data.
To help you with this, we have listed the different stages in your product cycle and the associated scenarios that may arise at each stage to collect different types of feedback.
Scenarios
Releasing new updates
Exploring product opportunities
Researching new products
Doing competitive analysis
Mapping customers' preferences
Once the votes are in, you can prioritize the updates based on the number of votes to each feature. It will directly show you the most anticipated feature. The best people to ask for this kind of product feedback are your verified customers because they are already using the product.
Set the product feedback survey to appear to only verified customers using the suitable targeting options.
If you are brainstorming ideas about a new product, start with audience segmentation and understand each segment's expectations of your brand.
Apple continues to garner the best customer satisfaction ratings because the company lets customer feedback lead its innovations. In addition, they have an official Apple support account on Twitter with a turnaround time of fewer than 12 hours, considering the thousands of messages they receive every day.
They also send post-purchase CSAT surveys via email to gauge customer's purchase experience and satisfaction with the product.
NPS surveys are also a part of their feedback management system. They channel this feedback data into their product cycle and marketing efforts to deliver what customers want. For example, recently, they measured the satisfaction level of their Apple Watch among the customers, which showed an overwhelming 97% approval rating.
Scenarios
Collecting early Feedback
Testing usability
Mapping customer preferences
Gauging product experience
Checking for issues or bugs
Looking for suggestions
When your product gets released, it is essential to collect early feedback from the first users. For this, add a product feedback questionnaire to collect user feedback at various touchpoints.
Scenarios
Collecting early Feedback
Testing usability
Mapping customer preferences
Gauging product experience
Checking for issues or bugs
Looking for suggestions
The product demo is one of the best ways to test its usability. Embed the product feedback survey into your product demo to collect valuable insights. Ask for product feedback as soon as the demo is complete.
You can also add a small lead generation form before the product demo and then send the product feedback survey to the users via email.
Scenarios
Competitive analysis
Gauge customers’ purchase preferences
Collecting CSAT scores
Ask for feedback just after the customer places the order to undertake competitive analysis and customer preference mapping. For example, you can probe the reason that helped the customer make their decision. Also, which other products did they consider before buying this product?
Lalamove, an Asian logistics company, uses customer feedback to understand user preferences and problems. They use survey-based feedback loops across their organization to know how happy customers are with a specific feature and what needs to be improved within their app.
It also helps them uncover the most effective channels to bring in new customers. Using Qualaroo survey insights in their marketing, development, and other teams, they have experienced a growth rate of 20-30% each month across 110 cities.
Scenarios
Measure overall product experience
Customer satisfaction evaluation
Collect data for optimization
Collect NPS score
Explore product opportunities
Who better to give you the targeted product feedback than the actual users?
Target your verified users at different intervals during the product usage to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the product.
These simple steps will help in rapid product optimization and customer retention.
Scenarios
Mapping overall product experience,
Customer retargeting
Finding issues and customers' fears
Churned customers are a direct loss to your revenue stream. Collecting feedback from such customers will help you improve your product and give you insights to retarget and bring them back.
Channel this information through your sales teams to see if you can retain the customer. And send the issues and bugs to your development team for optimization.
For example, if a customer states price as the reason for leaving the product, you can reach out to them with a suitable offer.
Or, if they want a specific feature added to their product, you can customize it individually for their account as a chargeable service. A lot of SaaS-based product companies offer customization services.
The journey of creating a product is a continuous cycle, enhanced by customer feedback to ensure innovation remains at its core.
This feedback loop allows for engagement with users from the initial idea to the final use, aligning your offerings with their expectations and delivering superior solutions. However, streamlining this process doesn't have to extend timelines.
Modern platforms offering product feedback surveys streamline the collection and analysis of user insights, enabling product teams to integrate this valuable information into their development process swiftly. These tools allow for the gathering of feedback in hours rather than days.
Incorporating product feedback questionnaires into your strategy establishes an ongoing cycle of improvement, boosting product functionality, customer satisfaction, and loyalty.
With the right product feedback survey software, like Qualaroo, deploying these surveys and gleaning actionable insights from the feedback becomes effortless. So, why delay?