Product Feedback: How to Collect and Manage Them

Let’s start with some facts.

• Around 30,000 new products are launched every year, with 95% set to fail.
• 1 out of 5 products fail to meet customer expectations.
• 63% of customers tend to purchase products that are already in the market for a while.

We hope you got the gist. If not, what we intend to do here is to let you know how competitive the market is growing to be for products. As a result, staying unique and meeting customer expectations is a necessity now.

And the best way towards it is through continuous improvement through product feedback.

In this blog, we will help you understand what product feedback is, its importance, how to collect it, and more.

So, let’s get going.

What Is Product Feedback?

Customer opinions and concerns about a specific product are called product feedback.

The feedback can be positive, negative, or neutral and covers various aspects of the product. These are crucial for companies, especially SaaS, to improve their products, meet customer expectations, and enhance product experience.

Some Examples of Product Feedback

• Positive – “The new feature is just awesome. Using the tool has never been this easy. Thanks a lot.”
• Negative – “The app was working until the last update. There are a lot of bugs, and it automatically shuts down at times, taking my work with it.”
• Neutral – “Altogether the tool is good with decent UI and all. It could be better if there were more customizable options.”

Difference Between Product Feedback vs. Review

Though product feedback and reviews sound the same, they serve different purposes. The following will give you a quick idea about the difference between the two.

	Product Feedback	Product Review
Audience	Directly to the company	Public, for other consumers
Purpose	Product improvement and development	Informing potential buyers
Communication	Private	Public
Detail Level	Often more detailed and specific	Can vary, often includes general impressions
Collection Method	Surveys, focus groups, customer support, in-app	Online platforms, social media, blogs
Frequency	Ongoing, continuous process	Typically a one-time submission

Product Feedback

What is product feedback is already defined, so let’s look into its purpose. They are –

• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of a product
• Gather insights for future product development
• Understand user needs and preferences
• Improve overall customer satisfaction

Some examples include,

• A customer filling out a survey after using a software tool, mentioning what they liked and disliked about it.
• A user submitting a bug report through an in-app form.

Product Reviews

Product reviews are public evaluations or critiques of a product by its users. You can find these reviews on review platforms like G2, social media, and so on.

The purpose of product reviews is –

• Inform potential buyers about the product’s quality and performance
• Share personal experiences and opinions with a wider audience
• Influencer purchasing decisions

Some examples of reviews are –

• Product reviews on e-commerce sites like Amazon and Etsy
• A blogger publishing his review on a new product in the market

What Is a Product Feedback Survey?

Product feedback surveys are focused feedback collection methods for gathering invaluable feedback from users.

If you are using tools like SurveySparrow, then a typical product feedback survey will look like the following. The template is free to use. So, feel free to try it out.

These surveys work best when they are done within the product. The importance of considering in-product feedback will be discussed in detail in the next section.

What’s the Importance of In-Product Feedback?

Any feedback collected from users directly from within the product falls under in-product feedback. The following are some reasons why you should consider in-product feedback.

#1. Instant Feedback Insights

The feedback can be collected in real-time, allowing you to capture customer reactions and thoughts. So, you don’t need for the survey campaign to end to get the results. You can prioritize and make the improvements as you go.

#2. Better Response Rates

Users can leave feedback without leaving a webpage or website. Therefore, you can expect a higher rate of response from them. Also, users are likelier to share their thoughts when the feedback mechanism is accessible.

#3. Easy Bug Detection and Fixing

With the feedback forms readily available, users can make use of it to report bugs. Believe it or not, customers share their dissatisfaction with you first before going public. So, if you are able to fix these bugs quickly and efficiently, they are likelier to stay.

#4. Engage Your Users Better

If you actively listen to user feedback and make changes, users will feel valued and more connected to your product. This engagement can further improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

#5. Competitive Advantage

By making changes based on customer feedback, you are essentially making your product more customer-centered. Not to mention the increased desirability of your product. All these could help improve the competitive advantage.

How to Collect Product Feedback?

We have understood what product feedback is, and its importance, now let’s see how you can collect them. There are many ways to go about collecting feedback. We have already discussed one – in-product (or in-app) feedback forms.

Let’s have a look at the rest.

Method 1 – Surveys and Forms

This is one of the best ways to collect product feedback. You can use survey tools like SurveySparrow to create and share survey across different channels incuding in-app.

The major plus point of choosing SurveySparrow like tools is that it allows you collect feedback from customer support and review platforms as well. Therefore, you can get a comprehensive picture of product feedback, leading better improvement.

Integrate surveys within your product to capture feedback directly from users while using it. The interesting thing is that you can make these surveys placed strategically at key customer touchpoints. This can lead to getting more focused feedback on areas that actually matter.

Method 2 – Customer Reviews

These are reviews left by customers on app stores and review platforms. If your product has an app and is available on the Google Play Store or Apple Store, check the reviews there.

As for review platforms, there are many. You don’t necessarily need to go through them all. Focus only on those reliable ones like Gartner, G2, Capterra, etc.

Or you can use online reputation management tools to consolidate all the customer reviews on one platform. SurveySparrow provides one. You can use it to monitor, track, and even respond to customer reviews – all within one platform.

Method 3 – NPS® Surveys

Running a Net Promoter ScoreSM survey is another method to collect product feedback. The key thing here is you can understand how satisfied and loyal your customers are.

Don’t like to brag, but here also SurveySparrow can be helpful.

By running NPS® surveys, you can focus on detractors (customers who have liked your product the least). Either you can follow up within the survey to get qualitative feedback (through open-ended questions), or connect with them directly to get the reason for their score.

In most cases, they have experienced something very dissatisfying with your product. It can be a simple bug or a major feature malfunction. Find out what it is and resolve it ASAP. This way you can improve your product and possibly convert detractors to promoters.

Method 4 – Focus Group

Focus groups are rather time-consuming and lengthy processes to consider, though effective. You will have to start by onboarding people for the groups, then the person who will run this group, and so on.

The benefit here is, you can see in real-time how users (customers) react to certain aspects of your product. Not to mention the raw opinions and suggestions you can expect from them.

Best suited for beta testing a new product or a feature.

Method 5 – Customer Support Interactions

Majorly look into two things – tickets raised and support chat.

Use ticket management software to keep track of tickets raised by customers. By analyzing these tickets, you can identify the most common issues faced by customers or recurring themes, if any. Work on these to improve your product.

Secondly, the make use of the live chat tools. The conversations can provide immediate feedback on their experience and pain points.

How to Manage Product Feedback?

Now that you have collected product feedback, let’s see how to manage it. Fair warning: It’s a bit of work. With that being said, let’s have a look at how you can manage product feedback.

Step 1 – Centralize all Feedback

Before you start with feedback analysis, collect and centralize all feedback in one place. For this, you can use either feedback management platforms or tools like Jira or ClickUp.

Once you have centralized the feedback, categorize them into different sections. This can be anything from feature requests and bug reports to UX issues.

Explore SurveySparrow integrations with product management tools.

Step 2 – Prioritize the Feedback

Go through the categorized feedback and evaluate each based on the following –

• The Impact on the user experience
• The effort required to implement it

On top of this, consider the customer segment you got the feedback from. If the feedback comes from high-value customers, prioritize them first.

Step 3 – Analyze the Feedback

Now, the feedback you collected will have quantitative and qualitative feedback.

Quantitative feedback includes metrics like the NPS® score that help you understand where you stand with respect to your competitors. As for qualitative feedback, it includes customer interactions with the support team, customer reviews, etc. Therefore, make sure you have a robust tool like SurveySparrow.

Upon analysis, look for common issues, customer sentiment, and hidden trends. These can essentially provide actionable insights into improving your product.

Step 4 – Implement & Communicate

With the insights in your hand, start implementing the changes. Delegate the tasks, assign them to relevant team members, and set a deadline for implementation.

Use agile methodologies for better efficiencies.

Now, communicate the same with the users. Be transparent about the changes, and let them know about the changes that are being done based on their feedback. This way, the users will feel valued, and it shows that you are striving for betterment.

The follow-up can be done through email, release notes, or in-app notifications.

Step 5 – Monitor, Measure, & Improve

Track the KPIs to understand the impact of the changes you have made. The KPIs can be customer satisfaction score, NPS® score, retention rate, and so on.

A spike in the NPS® score means the changes are working. At the same time, stagnancy or a drop in it means you need to carefully reevaluate the changes you have made.

Follow this process until you see great numbers for your KPIs.

Product Feedback Questions to Ask

It’s a good practice to collect feedback. However, to gather accurate and relevant feedback, you need to ask the right questions. So, for those who have doubts about the type of product feedback survey questions, refer to the following.

Survey Questions for General Product Feedback

1. How would you rate your overall experience with our product?
2. How often do you use our product?
3. What do you like the most about our product?
4. What do you like the least about our product?

Survey Questions for Product Feature Feedback

1. Which feature in our product do you use the most?
2. Are there any features that you find difficult to use? If yes, please explain.
3. Which feature do you find the most valuable?
4. Are there any features you feel like missing in our product?
5. Are there any features you think we should add or improve?

Survey Questions for Product Usability Feedback

1. How easy was it for you to navigate our product?
2. Did you encounter any issues while using our product? If yes, please explain.
3. Are there any aspects of our product you feel need improvement?
4. Have you found any part of our product frustrating or confusing?

Survey Questions for Product Satisfaction & Loyalty

1. On a scale of 1-5, how satisfied are you with our product?
2. On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our product to your friend/family?
3. What would make you likely to recommend us to others?
4. What is the one thing we could do to improve your satisfaction level?

Open-ended Survey Questions for Product Feedback

1. What made you choose our product over our competitors?
2. Is there anything else you would like to express about your experience with our product?
3. What was the reason for your score? [For NPS® and CSAT surveys]
4. Do you have any additional suggestions for improving our product?

The above given are simply some examples of how to tailor survey questions. For the actual survey, the questions will depend on what you intend to achieve with it.

Are you tired of tailoring survey questions manually? Don’t worry. SurveySparrow has got you covered.

It offers an AI-powered feature to help you create surveys from scratch in an instant. Simply add the type of survey you have to run and its end goal, and SurveySparrow AI will do the rest.

SurveySparrow for Effective Product Feedback Collection and Analysis

Throughout this blog, you might have read about the various use cases SurveySparrow can help you with. So, the fact that it is one of the best product feedback tools is kinda obvious now. But still, here are some other reasons why you should consider SurveySparrow for product feedback collection and analysis.

Easy Survey Creation and Distribution

You can create surveys by leveraging SurveySparrow’s 1000+ pre-built templates or its AI feature. Either way, it will be easier.

For the distribution part, you will primarily need both in-app and website-embedded surveys. SurveySparrow provides both and several other channels, including QR code and WhatsApp.

Understand Customer Sentiments

Analyzing product feedback in bulk and identifying the right customer emotions can be daunting, but not with SurveySparrow.

Be it hundreds or thousands, you can analyze the feedback and understand the customer emotions behind each one.

Key Drivers of Your Business

Understand all the key drivers of our business from the product feedback. This includes those that are performing well and those that aren’t.

Topics & Keywords

Define the topic you want to track within the feedback and see how much your users have discussed about it. Also, learn about the most used keywords by the users about your product.

Intrigued yet?

Use SurveySparrow’s free forever plan and the 14-day free trial to explore the tool in complete. You can use the following to sign up for free!