Feedback loops

4 minutes read

Feedback loops is the process of collecting our customers' feedback continuously and improving our product based on their suggestions and opinions. It is the fuel that improves our product and grows your revenue.

In his book Lean Startup, Eric Ries has described it as a ‘build-measure-learn’ process wherein you -

  1. Build the product: Turn an idea into something tangible that customers should love
  2. Test the product: Measure if customers love it
  3. Improve the product: Learn from mistakes to make a product that customers will love

How to collect feedback?

Feedback can be gathered from various sources, and one needs to weigh the pros and cons of each source before finalising which method to choose.

  • Customer surveys
    Via a survey you can span across a larger number of customers to provide feedback. You can drop in feedback forms as soon as the customer finishes interacting with the feature or product. The main drawbacks of surveys are that many times customers prefer skipping answering feedback forms and there is no way to ascertain clarification of answers. Most popular customer surveys are Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). One can also use Customer Effort Score (CES), post-purchase survey, Product development survey or usability survey.

  • Customer Interviews
    This is one of the most popular methods of collecting feedback as you can get in-depth understanding of the customers' needs, problems, pain points, desired solutions and new ideas. Interviews give actionable information about how customers actually interact with your offerings. However, they are very costly in terms of effort and time involved.

  • Social Media
    Customers often provide feedback by posting comments on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, LinkedIn and a variety of other social media, blogs and review sites, App store or Google play store. The main challenge is that filtering the feedback is time-consuming and sometimes the majority of feedback and comments are not relevant. However, on the positive note, online social media comments/reviews provide new customers with a sense that your business is genuine and provides a real product or service.

  • Sales
    If you have a dedicated sales team, they can be a great source of feedback as they are in constant touch with current customers or prospects. Via them, you can learn what value drivers resonate most with customers.

  • Employee feedback
    Although employee feedback is traditionally confined to the context of HR and performance appraisals, you can ask employees about their insights in case they use your product. This can help identify issues before they trickle down to actual customers.

  • Customer support
    Customer support are often talking to your actual customers 24/7 and they can be a great source of valuable feedback on the features, bugs, suggestions, improvements.

  • Customer Metrics
    Collecting data about how users are interacting with your site gives us insights on which parts of the product are being used the most or the least. Few metrics which can be used are churn rate, retention rate, average time spent, task completion rate, cart abandonment rate etc.

What to do with Customer Feedback?

Once you collect your feedback, determine which feedback is useful and which feedback is useless. Note that negative feedback is also useful feedback as that's an opportunity to improve certain aspects of your product. Depending upon the volume of the feedback you can categorise customer issues (ex: product bugs, product new ideas, product improvements etc). Share the feedback with the wider organisation as other teams/stakeholders can draw up actionable goals for their relevant teams.

Why is Customer Feedback important?

Any insight from your customer is very valuable. Product Managers can use these insights to:

  • Validate assumptions on the go-to-market strategy
  • Prioritise the product features
  • Enrich and enhance the user experience or provide personalised experience
  • Create new customer personas
  • Chalk out customer journey maps
  • Develop new product offerings
  • Predict churn
  • Expand product into new markets
  • Maximise customer lifetime value
  • Increase customer satisfaction
  • Etc

Conclusion

Building great feedback loops into your product is very important as you need to know what kind of experiences the users have when they use your product. It gives us an understanding of key pain points and whether the user will continue paying for our product. Closing the feedback loop is also necessary. You need to act on the feedback, deliver the changes and then go ahead and do another round of feedback collection.