In this article, Itamar Rogel, co-founder and CPO, Affogata, talks about the importance of customer feedback. He also shares useful tips that can help marketers to get honest product feedback for their offerings.
Properly learning from customer feedback makes the difference between spending millions on a product update that will end up flopping and making adjustments that will resonate with your target audience and boost both customer satisfaction and the bottom line. It’s the key to gauging exactly what’s working and what’s not in a new product, update, or feature.
But the tricky part about customer feedback is that it definitely isn’t created equal; some user feedback is worth much more than others. And with so many customers reluctant to express how they really feel — only 1 out of 26 people complain, even when they’ve had a terrible experience with a brand — it’s critical to determine how to get high-quality product feedback that can actually make a difference in your development process. The secret? Thinking past surveys and other types of “voluntary†feedback and listening in on conversations that are already happening about your product outside of the confines of your company-commissioned poll.
Learn More: 4 Flaws of Traditional Customer Success Thinking: Why Customer Success Should Be a Companywide Goal
Self-Censorship Is a Challenge
When companies start trying to gather customer feedback, they often turn to the classic “focus group†model. While it might sound old-fashioned, brands spend more than $2 billion each yearOpens a new window on focus groups, where a group of people gives their opinions on a new or existing product. Whether they take place virtually or in-person, focus groups are a solid way to obtain customer feedback. They’re also simple to create — find people interested in your product, typically past or existing customers and offer them the chance to test out a new product. Add to the mix instructions to be as honest as possible, and many companies believe they’ve done enough to pave the way for neutral, honest feedback from customers.
In reality, it’s almost impossible for people to turn off their filter and deliver the cold, hard truth, especially when they’re faced with a CEO who probably views their product as their baby. And it doesn’t take a face-to-face meeting to activate someone’s ingrained politeness. Just knowing that a survey or poll is commissioned by the company is enough to make respondents limit themselves.
More than that, focus groups, being a small and artificial setting, fail to bring out that heat-of-the-moment, authentic feedback of a customer or user who’s actually trying to get something done. People are essentially asked to “make believe†in a nice, curated environment .. and that’s just not a recipe to get those juicy authentic responses that we’re really after.
For the issue of self-censorship, one way to address it is to commission a poll that’s completely anonymous via Google, SurveyMonkey, or other third-party services that will obscure the fact that it’s your brand asking the questions. If you’re aiming to get as much feedback as possible, you can also add simple emojis to the bottom of a purchase or delivery confirmation email, so customers can instantly give feedback about their experience on a “1 to 5†scale.
One more challenge brought on by focus groups is in analyzing the data. Too often, professionals would take a focus group’s attendees and map them out to “personas†that are either extrapolated way too much, based on preconceptions, or both. It’s simply very hard to analyze such a small set of data, based on people you’ve met or observed in person, in a cold, objective way.
Finally, a key limitation of focus groups is that they are a discrete “eventâ€. You can only do them every so often, and learning at such a slow cadence just doesn’t cut it in today’s market. To stay competitive, every product release has to integrate and apply the latest learnings from “liveâ€, raw customer feedback… Customer feedback needs to stream in and inform your product decisions every day.
Learn More: Customer Success as the Flywheel of Corporate Growth and Profitability
Where Unfiltered Conversations Happen
Uncovering the best possible insights for brands requires finding where people are speaking honestly about your product. These in-depth conversations likely aren’t happening on your brand’s social media pages or within emails sent to your customer success team. Passionate online communities, including enthusiast blogs and niche forums, are where brands can view raw data about how your product is being perceived by those who are most invested in your brand. Plus, you can learn from conversations about competitors, alternatives, or the market in general – giving you a much more inclusive perspective.
For an interesting data point on that, Verto Analytics partnered with Reddit to research the online community’s impact on customer spending, observing purchasing journeys of commonly researched products such as computers and cell phones. They found that Redditors trust their community’s endorsement of a product so much that they spend 15% Opens a new window more Opens a new window on average than customers who searched for a product on more mainstream sites like Instagram and Facebook. Additionally, Reddit users made purchase decisions a whopping nine times faster than those on other social platforms.
It’s clear that enthusiast feedback and endorsement can provide much more value than comments coming from people who are neutral about your product. Not only are enthusiasts more loyal to your brand, but they’re also the ones who are likely to purchase more frequently and with higher-stakes sales. Listening to these consumers can mean creating a lifelong brand advocate who will evangelize on behalf of your company for years to come.
Keeping It Real
Ingrained politeness is a way of life for many people. Demurring, or delivering a soft blow rather than a painful truth, is something that we’re all trained to do. Think workplace evaluations. Even if you’re asked for honest feedback about your boss or a coworker, it’s unlikely that you’ll let loose just because you’ve been given instructions to be truthful.
This same concept applies to customer feedback. Eavesdropping to public conversations is a much more effective way to get to the heart of the matter and learn what your customers are really enjoying and what they find frustrating about your product.
The best customer feedback is never going to be what you’re told directly. Rather, it will come from unfiltered conversations between people who are genuinely passionate about your product. It will come in when the customers feel the need to voice it and not when you feel like asking. And it will come in, break, and continuously reshape your preconceptions about “personas†derived from that survey you did ten months ago.
Learn More: 3 Practical Ways for Brands To Build up Customer Empathy
Closing the Gap
Traditionally, companies gathered customer opinions through feedback forms and focus group meetings, but those methods are slow, cumbersome, and can incorporate bias. Today, there are platforms that offer fully objective data that draws on millions of data points, making the conclusions less biased and more trustworthy than a small selected focus group that might not be truly representative of your customer base. With this wealth of data, you can understand the voice of the customer and their experience through each step of the customer journey.
By analyzing millions of data points from across the open web, including app stores, community forums, review sites, social media and more, you can gain rich insight into the real conversation around your brand. Most of the time, these indirect mentions are the most relevant ones in terms of honest customer feedback and the ones that companies are missing the most.
Opportunity lies in the corners of the Internet where people continuously discuss your brand, without the boundaries or restrictions of a traditional customer experience survey. Look to these places for an authentic, timely, and raw perspective on your product. Coupled with feedback on your brand’s social media pages, surveys, and emails to your customer success team, you’ll have a winning combination of both enthusiast and layperson experience that can help you build the best product possible.