Build Your Product with Customer Feedback

Building and listening to a customer feedback network is a fundamental requirement for the growth and sustainability of your business/product. Knowing the behaviors and wishes of users who pay you a certain fee for your product will always put your business/startup one step ahead. Therefore, it is very important to develop your product together with your customers and involve them in this process. In this way, your customers will feel valued and will not only buy a product from you but also buy a quality service and a unique experience.

We already know that customer feedback is an indispensable element of our product, now let's see why this is so.

Why Customer Feedback is Important

In today's growing startup world; customers demand new products, features and services. For this reason, most businesses want to know the reactions of their users, what they think and how they want the product to improve. And it sets its priorities accordingly. Because they are aware that there are many qualitative and quantitative benefits that they can derive from this concept.

The Only Thing Left at the End of the Day: The Customer

No matter how good and functional you think your product is, at the end of the day if your customer doesn't want to use it, there is a big problem. You may improve your interface, you may have added additional features to your application or you may have brought new perspectives to solving the current problem. Despite all this, it is possible to lose customers at the end of these updates. For example, your new interface may have disrupted the user experience that your customers are used to and hit their habits. And maybe the new feature you added may not be meeting their needs.

At this point, it is very important to be in contact with your customers. To avoid such problems, you can follow these steps:

• Create Discord, Slack, etc. channels for your Customer Community and listen to them on these platforms.
• Change your new Interface piece by piece, not all at once, and conduct satisfaction surveys with your customers in the process. For example, NPC survey.
• Before adding a new feature, notify your customers via e-mail.
• Respond quickly to the feedback you receive and if you can, create a separate team for it.

Listening and analyzing your customer's idea in real time will allow you to develop parallel ideas and improve your product.

Understanding Your Customers

Understanding your customers will be the most important key to your success because having this customer-centric mindset will allow you to view your product from many different angles. As a matter of fact, when you have these perspectives, you will make the necessary improvements, develop new functions that you did not think about before, or identify weak points in the product that even the customer may not notice and close these gaps.

Customer Feedback Loop

In a customer feedback loop, you ask your customer for feedback on their experience interacting with your company. When the customer leaves his feedback, you analyze it to draw conclusions. If you can act on the feedback and improve your services, you will. Rinse and repeat this process until you get mostly positive feedback from your customers.

A customer feedback loop includes four main steps. Each of these steps is fairly simple, but depending on your business type, they can be complex to implement. However, following these four steps will help you implement a customer feedback loop that can redefine your business.

1. Collecting Feedback from Your Customers

The first step to a successful feedback loop is to ask them to give feedback on their experience interacting with your business. Gathering constructive criticism from your customers can be done in many ways. You have to find the most ideal way. They are also likely to let you know if they are not satisfied with any aspect of the experience.

2. Analyzing Feedback

After collecting customer feedback, you need to rank and analyze them. This is the most important element of your customer feedback loop. If something goes wrong with your analysis, the entire cycle is affected. After collecting a certain level of feedback from your customers, it is necessary to identify trends and common problem points in the feedback.

3. Applying Required Changes

This item is the most time-consuming and costly aspect of your customer feedback loop. After analyzing the feedback and reaching the results, you should act accordingly and take the necessary steps in your business. You must act immediately on your changes and prioritize those that are most critical and important to the success of your product.

4. Informing Your Customers

Once you receive feedback, it is very important that you get back to them. Customers want to know that their suggestions are heard. It's worth spending the extra time to respond to each customer individually for the success of your product. You can also send them a personalized note instead of sending a template email thanking them for their feedback.

What Is the Best Way to Get Feedback From Customers?

Get feedback from customers in their environments. Make sure to give them multiple options so they can choose the method that works best for them when it's most convenient. And three ways to get feedback from customers:

1. Customer Feedback with Emails

After a transaction, have someone on your team reach out directly to your customer for feedback and let them know you're always there to chat. This is the perfect job for a client manager to review the client's experience and how well your product meets their needs.

2. Customer Feedback with Surveys

Customer surveys can come in all shapes and sizes. One of the most commonly used survey types is customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys. These surveys use a Likert rating scale to understand whether you are meeting customer expectations. Formeer is a useful tool to collect customer feedback using such useful surveys (NPS, CSAT, CES).

3. Customer Feedback with Focused Community

A focused community is a qualitative environment for receiving customer feedback involving a small group of people moderated through a discussion by a moderator. Responses in focus groups, which are often used to gain more experience and knowledge, are typically open-ended. It also helps to gain personal experiences and user stories that cannot be found in data alone. For example; Indie Hackers, Hackernews, Twitter, Reddit groups...

Effective Feedback Management

Customer feedback is not just a control mechanism. It is a guide that helps you align your improvement efforts and user experience to achieve the desired result. But feedbacks by themselves mean little. To drive progress, you need to implement a clear action plan for your customer feedback. Customer feedback management is the general name of the process where you can collect, organize and apply the feedback you receive. If you survey a large number of customers frequently, having a feedback strategy is essential. You can follow these 7 steps for customer feedback management.

• Set your goals.
• Adapt the process to your goals.
• Collect feedback across multiple environments.
• Classify Feedback Collected.
• Take Action on Customer Feedback.
• Monitor Behavior to Optimize Process.
• Create an Official VOC Schedule.