“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we catch excellence.” - Vince Lombardi
The quote by the popular American football coach applies perfectly when we talk about improving our products. There can be no perfect product on the globe. However, if you keep on improving your product from time to time, you can make it to the leading position in the market.
With the constantly evolving needs of the users, product developers have to keep their products improving and updating to make the users’ lives easier. Nowadays, most users prefer to use products that they can use easily and smoothly without getting stuck on something and then following a long process of raising tickets and waiting for customer support agents to respond. Even if they have to raise some concerns, they expect them to be resolved as quickly as possible and with a very smooth process.
This strengthens the need for product improvement at every touchpoint of the user experience, be it buying your product, using it, requesting and adding a feature to it, or getting customer service or support in case of queries and concerns.
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With Product Feedback Surveys, understand what users need and learn ways to delight your customers.
Businesses focus on adding more and more features to their products, and it is good with respect to sustaining in the competitive and ever-changing industries. However, merely introducing new features from time to time will not work. You also need to focus on the essential aspects and ensure that your product provides a seamless experience to the users at every touchpoint.
Collecting regular Product Feedback and making product developments and improvements accordingly can help you attain business growth and develop world-class products.
In this article, we will discuss how you should go ahead step by step with product improvement through Product Feedback so that you can go in the right direction to be in line with what customers actually want from your product. Let’s first understand what is Product Improvement and why you need it.
What is Product Improvement?
Product Improvement is the process of bringing changes in a product or its features to make the product seamless, easier, and better for the users with the objective of increasing customer satisfaction to retain the existing customers and attract new prospects.
Product Improvement can be done by eliminating the flaws in the product, removing loopholes in the processes, or upgrading the product with new and better features. Whichever changes you do to the product, the end goal is to satisfy and retain the existing customers, attract new customers through a better product, and even bring back the old customers who churned. Let’s explore more about why you need to improve products.
Why Improve your Product with Product Feedback?
Imagine yourself using a product since a long time, but you face petty issues every time while using some specific features. You have raised the issue a couple of times and it was resolved after following a ticketing process. Still, you face those issues sometimes. Although it does not have a big impact on your business, however, it makes you feel irritated whenever you face it.
Now, a competitor product comes into the market that is providing you the same features and you take a free trial. While taking the free trial, you feel that this new tool is way easier and smoother than the one you are using, and you also don’t face any issues. What would be your next action? Most probably, you’d think of switching to the new tool, isn’t it!
The same is with your customers. Even if they are using your product for a long time and are ignoring petty issues, when they explore and use a better product, they tend to churn. Therefore, it is essential that you keep a watch on these issues and continuously improve your product with time to prevent your customers from getting attracted to your competitors.
Let’s list out some more reasons to understand better the necessity of Product Improvement.
Reasons for Product Improvement
- To Ensure Customer Satisfaction
- To Eliminate Customer Issues
- To Develop Better Products
- To Stand Out in Competition
- To Sustain and Grow in the Industry
1. To Ensure Customer Satisfaction
Customers can remain satisfied with the features they like. But if they constantly face issues using those features, it will ruin their satisfaction. Whereas, if you keep on collecting product Feedback and improving your products with new features, as well as, old features working better and more seamlessly for them, it will boost their satisfaction and they would start loving your product.
2. To Eliminate Customer Issues
Issues and shortcomings in your product affect customer experiences to a large extent. So when you get to know about those issues through Product Feedback, it is essential to fix up things to improve customer experience and ensure that the same issues do not trouble your other customers and the same customers again.
By improving your product, you can lessen the possibilities of potential bugs and other issues going forward.
3. To Develop Better Products
Bringing in improvements in your product makes your product better than before each time, and the end result is a world-class product in the market. Product Improvement takes your product towards excellence and gradually it takes you towards the path of becoming a product leader in the market.
4. To Stand Out in Competition
Continuous improvement in your product is necessary to withstand the competition. Not making necessary improvements and upgrades to your product can leave you behind the competition. Whereas, if you keep your product updated and provide quick and improved services to the clients, you acquire a good competitive position in the market.
Even the support and service you provide to your clients create and affect the overall user experience with the product.
Researches suggest that customers are 94% more likely to make repurchases and renew their subscriptions when if they get effortless customer service.
So it is necessary to improve your product in all aspects to stand out in the competition.
5. To Sustain and Grow in the Industry
As discussed earlier, when customers explore and use new products and get more seamless and delightful experiences, they easily get attracted to them and tend to switch to them. So it is necessary to continuously improve and provide your product users with delightful and smooth experiences of using your product in order to sustain and grow in the industry.
Let’s learn how you can improve your products and ensure customer satisfaction and delightful experiences with your upgraded products.
4 Steps to Product Improvement through Product Feedback
Step 1: Collect and Embrace Feedback
When people are using your product, they will definitely share their views about it. And it can be both negative and positive. Whether you like it or not, it is certain that you will get feedback about your product through various channels be it your customer support process, complaint tickets, or social media. So rather than avoiding feedback for the fear of negative reviews, it is always way better to welcome and embrace it!
Product Feedback is valuable information that can help you to a large extent to make improvements in your products. So you should deliberately set up a good feedback collection and management system and provide your customers with enough opportunities to share feedback. You can share Product Feedback Surveys through multiple channels like email, SMS, or on your website and request customers to take the surveys and give feedback about your product.
When they share feedback, whether it is negative or positive, show gratefulness to them for sharing this valuable information with you and apologize for bad experiences in case you receive negative feedback.
Collecting and embracing feedback will let you know what customers expect from your product and how well is your product developed to meet those expectations. You will get to know issues that your product users face and you can work on those issues to eliminate them and provide your clients with better and smoother experiences.
Deep dive into feedback data and identify customers’ pain points, so that you can work on them and resolve their concerns. Ask the right questions to know the real customer insights and be able to do what they really need and expect.
Ask Follow-Up Questions
In your Product Feedback Survey, don’t just ask customers to rate your product. Include follow-up questions to know the reason behind their ratings in order to have a better understanding of their perspective. Do a good Sentiment Analysis of your customers and try to understand what they feel about the experience they get using your product and service.
Use Open-Ended Questions
Always give some open-ended space to your customers to share their exact feedback in their own words and vent out their feelings. If you don’t give them space to speak up their mind, they will do it on social media and you may end up having your name going viral on social media with negative reviews and experiences.
Know your Competitors
Ask customers and try to know what your competitors are offering them. Most product users compare products with competitor products and then make a decision. So if you receive negative feedback with a request for cancellation of your subscription, only taking action on the negative aspect will not be enough. Look into what competitors are doing better than you and try offering even better solutions to your customers.
Step2: Segmenting, Analysing, and Prioritizing Feedback
The next step is to convert Product Feedback into actionable insights so that you can utilize it in the best way to make product improvements and enhance customer experience. Create segments of data so that you can easily decide on what actions to be taken on which feedback. You can also use CX metrics for this purpose.
Use the right metrics
Use the right metrics in your Product Feedback Surveys to obtain feedback from your customers, and leverage the data so collected to take action. You can use metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES to collect product ratings from customers.
- NPS or Net Promoter Score helps you gauge customer loyalty by asking the customers to rate your product on a scale of 0 to 10 on the bases of their likeliness to recommend it to their friends and known ones. (10 means Most Likely, 0 means Not at all Likely)
- CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Score helps you measure customer satisfaction with any aspect of your product or their overall experience with the product on a five-rating scale.
- CES or Customer Effort Score helps you measure customers’ perceived efforts to get a job done with your product or brand by asking the customers how likely they agree that their tasks were simplified and issues were easily resolved with the help of your product or service.
These metrics help you segment your feedback data into various categories. For instance, NPS survey responses can be divided into three categories, viz., Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), and Detractors (0-6)
Segregate Feedback Data
Like metric survey data responses are divided into categories, you should divide all the feedback data into different categories so that you can take appropriate action on them. You cannot of course respond in the same way to negative feedback as you do to positive feedback. Moreover, different segments of customers have different choices and preferences. So it is better to divide the feedback segments and take action accordingly.
Create a proper Customer Feedback Loop and assign tasks to your customer success teams and responsible employees to look into the feedback and close the feedback loop accordingly by taking action and responding to the customers.
What actions should be taken?
Thank the happy customers for sharing feedback and praising your product. Ask the customers with neutral feedback what better you can do and what changes they think you should make to your product to improve their experience.
In case of negative feedback, apologize to your product users for their negative experiences and do what you can to improve their experience. Ask follow-up questions and give them open space to share their opinions about your product and suggestions to improve it.
Analyze Feedback Data
Analyze carefully all your feedback data and data segments to know what exactly your customers want. Some may want more ease of use, some may want better speed, some may want more features, and some may want more knowledge base, while others may require instant support from your customer service agents. Analyzing all feedback will help you make more appropriate decisions as to what your product users need and how you can meet those needs.
Prioritize Product Feedback Data
After you segregate the feedback data into different categories, prioritize it on the basis of urgency. For instance, if you feel a customer had a pathetic experience and there is a strong possibility of churn, work on the feedback on priority and try your best to make improvements that can bring back the miffed customer and prevent churn.
While analysing feedback data, if you feel there is an ongoing issue in your product that most users face, prioritize work on it and take appropriate actions to improve your product, which in turn will improve your brand. Moreover, prioritize the essential features first in case any issues or bugs occur in the essential features. Then go with the other features.
Step3: Working on Customer Suggestions and Product Planning
The next step is to take action on Product Feedback. Before that, see whether the suggestions given by your customers are feasible for your business or not. Of course, you cannot do whatever customers demand or advice. However, analyzing customer feedback and suggestions will help you know to which extent you can follow them.
Analyze the customer's path to see how your customers are using your product and where they face issues. Build Product Improvement Ideas based on Product Feedback and discuss with your internal teams about them. Engage your teams and plan the actions you are going to take and the changes you can incorporate into your product in order to provide better experiences to your customers. Make actionable Product Improvement Plans, share them with your teams, and decide how you are going to implement them in your product.
Create Product Roadmaps
A Product Roadmap is a shared source of information that tells clearly about the vision and direction of the product. It has an analysis of the company’s objectives and how a product is progressing to meet them. It establishes a sync between the short-term product objectives and the company’s long-term goals.
Creating a Product Roadmap will give you and your teams a direction to go ahead and a way to reach your destination. Moreover, be omnichannel to support your customers in their product journey.
Provide Useful Knowledge Base
No matter how much you improve your product, customers will have some queries and concerns and most customers don't want to get involved in lengthy processes of raising tickets for small concerns, and waiting for them to be resolved. Nowadays, customers prefer to have enough knowledge base to help themselves.
So it is always a good idea to provide them with an adequate knowledge base like blogs, help articles, and video content readily available for them in a few clicks. This will be helpful and time-saving for both you and your customers because the customers will resolve most of the common issues themselves with the knowledge shared.
Build Dedicated Team for Support
Even if you share an abundance of knowledge in your help articles, blogs, and video content, there are some issues that need human interference. Although you can use AI-powered automated chatbots to resolve small issues, it is necessary to build a dedicated customer support team so that customers can reach you and share their queries and concerns and get them resolved quickly.
Ensure that there is not a long waiting time for the customers to connect to your agents, and once their ticket is raised, it gets resolved within the specified TAT, and even before. For this, you should ensure you have enough agents in your Customer Support team.
Step4: Testing, Finalizing, and Implementing Changes to Improve Product
The next and final step is to make decisions regarding Product Improvement and implementing them. But before launching any new product features or incorporating any changes to your product, test it with your own staff or a set of customers.
A/B Testing
If you are in dilemma with actions and are looking to make a final decision among the two best alternatives, A/B testing is a great solution for this purpose. You can make Plan A and Plan B and test them with two sets of users. These users can also be your own internal teams. Gather their insights and check which one works the best for your users. Then make the final decision to incorporate changes in your product.
Implementing the Changes
When you have made your final decision, implement the change. You can also try implementing first on one segment or group of customers, and then finally implement it for all.
Conclusion
It is crucial to make continuous improvements in your product to satisfy the evolving needs of the customers. To make the right improvements and changes to your products, you need to be in touch with your product users to be updated about their requirements and the issues they face. You should be open to feedback, collect it proactively, and work on it to resolve customer issues and develop better products.
Product Feedback is the core of making Product Improvements. You should use an effective Product Feedback Software or app to collect meaningful insights from your product users to make and implement your product improvement plans.
Zonka Feedback is one of the best Product Feedback Tools that you can use to create effective Product Feedback Surveys and share them with your customers through multiple channels. It not only lets you collect feedback, but also assign tasks to your team to work on that feedback and close the feedback loop to improve customer experience and prevent churn.
You can try Zonka Feedback for Free and see how it works for you by providing actionable Product Feedback and helping you make and implement great product improvement plans.