How to Translate Customer Feedback Into Action

So, you’ve collected customer feedback – now what?

In this webinar, we give you the answer! Melanie Fox, Product Manager at Apptentive and Ryan Galloway, Senior Product Marketing Manager, dive into how product managers (specifically those strapped for resources) can translate customer feedback into action.

They cover:

• Tangible advice from real product experts
• Why mobile-specific feedback matters
• How to collect better feedback that’s more actionable
• Strategies for analyzing customer feedback data and sharing findings
• What to do with the customer feedback you’ve collected
• And more!

You can watch the full webinar on-demand or read the summary below.

We used the “Capture, Analyze, Act, and Close the Loop” framework to organize our tips and strategies.

Capture the right feedback from the right people at the right time

With that being said, let us start with a focus on capturing feedback. Whether you are B2C or B2B, capturing good feedback is a crucial first step to creating an exceptional customer experience.

So, let’s dig in a little bit deeper. How do we get the right feedback from the right people at the right time?

First, gathering the right feedback starts with setting a goal (and a hypothesis!).

• What’s the purpose of your survey?
• What do you hope to understand about your target market through it?
• Are you looking for validation or direction?
• How do you even write a good survey question?

We’ll get more into best survey practices later, but there are so many questions to ask yourself before you even launch a survey, including our second category here which is targeting the right people.

If you’re asking all of the right questions but to the wrong audience, your feedback will not be useful. You need to intentionally target your customers. If you have user personas, this is their time to shine. Don’t know which customers of yours are which persona? Use a survey for that! You’ll continue to refine your audience as you mature in this process.

At the end of the day, some people may not even want to take a survey, and that’s okay. But making sure they have the option to do so is really what we are after. We want to give a voice to every customer (and whether they want to use it or not is on them).

Finally, presenting a survey during a crucial moment in your user experience will likely throw them off. You have to think about where you present your feedback so you can reduce friction in the user experience and genuinely make your customer feel like they are being heard.

So, what happens when people don’t fill out your survey?

While survey fatigue may not always be the reason folks aren’t taking your surveys (we can go down that rabbit hole for a long time), something we hear time and time again from our customers is, “I don’t want to over-engage my audience and create survey fatigue.”

Launching a survey every other day is a great way to get your audience to be irritated with you. So, we wanted to offer some quick tips and tricks to make sure you aren’t wearing out your audience but still getting the quantity of results that provide quality feedback for your team.

First thing’s first: Have a plan. Sit down at the beginning of each month as plan out your surveys as if you’d plan out a content calendar. If it’s in the calendar, it will happen. This allows you to track how many surveys are being run, especially if you have a large team (and multiple folks pulsing your audience). This sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be shocked how many people are only reactive versus proactive when it comes to gathering customer feedback.

Second, master the micro survey. We always recommend keeping it simple. Your questions should be short and clear. We recommend shorter surveys that can then be retargeted to those who answered the question in a specific way. The data you can collect just with one or two questions is extremely powerful, and it allows you to be much more intentional with how you target your feedback efforts.

Analyze customer feedback data effectively

We like to think that getting a ton of customer feedback data is a good problem to have. But it can be extremely overwhelming. So, how do you sift through all of your customer feedback data to make sense of it all?

Start small. When Mel first became an Apptentive customer and began collecting a wild amount of data, she first stayed hyper-focused on Apple App Store and Google Play Store reviews to identify trends there.

Once she got comfortable with a cadence of checking reviews and a process for documenting her findings, she was then able to level up my research and start creating a plan.

This is when things start to get tricky: When you have tons of customer feedback coming in, categorizing that feedback becomes extremely important. Fortunately, the Apptentive Insights Dashboard did a lot of that for Mel when she was a customer. She was able to tag comments coming in to highlight what feature they were referencing, sort feedback by sentiment to understand general sentiment was around specific features, and so on. This part of the process gets continually more complex as you introduce more and more feedback mechanisms into the mix, which is why it’s the “run” stage.

Take action on your customer feedback

If you’re lucky, you’ve probably identified 73 new things that need to be accomplished to meet your customers’ needs — but how in the world do you prioritize those items?

The best way to sift through and take real action is to have a prioritization matrix that helps you prioritize your top five priorities, and then your team can focus from there. In Mel’s personal prioritization matrix, she takes into consideration items like level of effort, number of customers it will impact, competitive necessity, and revenue opportunity.

→Download the eBook: 7 Steps to Product Roadmap Success

Once you’ve narrowed it down and your team has your most important item to focus on, it’s time to get developing. This isn’t rocket science, just go through your usual software development process, and know you will have the space to iterate and pulse your audience once you’ve released something.

We suggest adding a survey into the mix after your customer has used a new feature for the first time. They can give some extremely insightful feedback that can drive future iterations of that feature and your product.

Continue the feedback loop

Closing the loop is such a crucial step in the process that often gets overlooked. It is critically important to let your customers know that you are listening to them and that you are acting based on what you are hearing.

You can do this in two ways:

• The more traditional way of shouting everything to everyone.
• The other option is to target your messaging to make it feel more personable.

We recommend you do both. Target your audience who really kicked and screamed for these updates first and then follow up with a more generic message to your audience once you’ve iterated based on some initial feedback.

→Download the eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Closed-loop Feedback

Bonus thoughts on well-written surveys

Start simple

Ask questions that won’t require much (or any) thought early on. Once they’ve started, respondents will be more likely to see the task through; so when the more complex questions show up toward the end, you’ll still get your answers.

Aim for simplicity throughout

“Simplicity” means many things. Your questions should be short and clear. Ditch all technical language and industry jargon. Avoid words that are abstract, vague, or easily misinterpreted. One person’s “occasionally” is another person’s “often.” The moment they don’t understand one of your questions, respondents will drop off.

“Simplicity” also means sticking to one topic at a time. Questions like, “On a scale of one to ten, how important is it that your service be prompt and friendly?” isn’t going to get you good data. Those who care a lot about prompt service but less about friendliness may give you a “5,” whereas if you’d asked two different questions, you’d get a “10” and a “3.” This might make a world of difference to your branding strategy and your business’s priorities.

Avoid leading questions

You want respondents to tell you how they really feel, not how you want them to feel. A question such as, “Based on your experience, are you more likely to choose Brand X over others?” is virtually asking for a positive response. If participants respond positively because of the way you phrased the question—and not because they actually feel that way—you’re going to end up working off of skewed data. Instead, try, “Based on your experience, how likely is it that you’d choose Brand X over others?”

Avoid assumptive questions

“What did you enjoy about the last agency you worked with?” assumes your participants did enjoy something. Even a simple insertion of the phrase “if anything” (“What, if anything, did you enjoy…”) keeps users from feeling like they had to have enjoyed something, and ensures you’re not receiving made-up answers.

Order the questions logically

Start general and move toward more specific questions. Let users slowly wrap their minds around the topic you’re approaching before you ask them to get introspective. Imagine it like a first date: You’d probably ask, “What do you do for work?” before you asked, “Do you feel as though the line of work you’re in is fulfilling you on both an interpersonal and a spiritual level?”

If you’re ready to start collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback, you can get started with an Apptentive demo today.