7 Ways to Use Product Feedback to Solve Business-critical Issues

Facing business-critical Issues & need a quick solution? Here's how you can use product feedback to solve business-critical issues. 

Experiencing challenges and obstacles is an inherent aspect of running a business. However, there are certain issues that go beyond the typical bumps in the road and can potentially jeopardize the long-term success and financial stability of the company. These are the business-critical problems that have the potential to derail the entire business.

By capturing product feedback, businesses can gather crucial information to solve critical issues, improve customer satisfaction, and drive business growth. Product feedback serves as a valuable source of insights that can help businesses understand their customers' needs, preferences, and pain points. It provides them with a direct line of communication with their customers, allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of their experiences and satisfaction levels. 

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Collecting product feedback is essential for many reasons. Here's how you can implement a feedback process and use this information to solve business-critical problems.

Table of Content 

• Ways to Use Product Feedback to Solve Business-critical Problems 
  • Develop a Structured Product Feedback Strategy
  • Measure the Product Feedback
  • Find the Root Cause
  • Set Debugging Priorities
  • Consider Feature Requests
  • Assessing Your Resources
  • Building Customer Relationships
• Final Thoughts

Ways to Use Product Feedback to Solve Business-critical Problems

Collecting product feedback is essential for any business looking to solve business-critical issues and improve its overall customer experience. Below, we will explore some effective ways to use product feedback to address these issues and drive positive change in your organization.

1. Develop a Structured Product Feedback Strategy

Developing a structured feedback collection strategy is a must when operating a product-based business. While many businesses have a basic collection process in place, it's easy to miss the mark. Having a single feedback request survey after a transaction isn't sufficient for hearing the voice of customer and capturing information to help solve business-critical issues; you need data capture points throughout the process.

Incorporating several feedback points should be a core part of your digital customer experience management strategy. Consider how customers navigate your website or product. What are the key stages of the journey?

Incorporating unintrusive popup surveys for feedback requests throughout the customer journey using a product feedback tool can help you identify any friction points that are causing customers to bounce or drop your product. These requests should be a simple "Did you find what you were looking for?" with a yes or no option. It's also important to incorporate a text feedback area for customers to share their challenges. 

For example, maybe your customer isn't sure where they should navigate to complete their purchase due to a flawed navigation UX. Their experience could be impacted by loading times, an undetected bug that empties their cart, or a lack of CTA buttons on your sales page.

Rather than focusing on how a customer feels after they've converted, create a strategy to collect feedback on the website, in-app, and at every step of the sales funnel. This process could have a significant impact on your revenue.

2. Measure the Product Feedback

It's also important to consider what you're doing with product feedback when it's received. Reviewing and measuring product feedback is often rolled into broader meetings and conversations rather than being a focal point.

Consider putting a review process in place to present product feedback to key stakeholders in your business. Look for overarching themes throughout the feedback. For example, has positive feedback improved since your last product update? Conversely, could your last update have created an issue that's leading to customer friction?

Creating a structured review process will help your business turn information into action. This data should be at the core of business improvement strategies for each sprint, month, or quarter. 

3. Find the Root Cause

As your team collects insights using a product or in-app survey software, do a deep dive to find the root cause. What business-critical issue is it impacting or impacted by? Some notable focal points include:

• Finances and Revenue
• Supply chain 
• Project and team management
• Human resources
• Technology

Understanding how a product or in-app feedback aligns with business-critical issues is crucial for effective problem-solving. By identifying the core problem instead of just addressing the symptoms, your team can implement solutions that have a lasting impact on your business.

When analyzing product feedback, it's important to look beyond the surface-level issues and dig deeper to understand how they connect to broader business goals. For example, if customers in your post-purchase survey questions are always answering with reports on difficulties with the checkout process, it could be indicative of a larger problem with your e-commerce platform's usability. By addressing this root cause, you can improve the overall customer experience and increase conversion rates.

By aligning product feedback with business-critical issues, you can prioritize your resources and efforts. It allows you to focus on the areas that will have the greatest impact on your business's success. Instead of wasting time and resources on temporary fixes, you can invest in long-term solutions that address the underlying problems.

4. Set Debugging Priorities

Determining the root cause of a problem as it pertains to business-critical concerns will also help your team set debugging or improvement priorities. 

When evaluating product feedback, consider how it ties into business-critical activities like revenue generation. If you determine a product flaw or have received similar issues in your bug report form question, you need to prioritize it. Those that aren't directly related to business-critical issues should be prioritized. 

It's common for product development teams to address small issues as they arise. While this shows great initiative and care for the overall customer experience, it also derails focus from core improvements and priorities. The "it will only take a minute" mentality could be putting your business at risk.

If product feedback can't be related to a business-critical issue, it should be deprioritized until all other issues are dealt with. For example, if in your beta testing feedback survey questions, customers have reported a certain product feature would improve the user experience of your product, that's important, but it's not critical. If your product is broken and customers are asking for a refund, that's critical as it puts your finances (and reputation) at risk.

5. Consider Feature Requests

While feature adoption and improvement requests get deprioritized, they should remain on your company's radar. This type of SaaS product feedback may not have the urgency of a bug or issue, but it could impact the long-term success of your business.

Getting product feature requests lets you identify a problem your customers are experiencing that you have the opportunity to solve. Solving these issues could improve customer retention and conversions. For example, if you notice a theme of potential customers saying, "This product would be perfect if it had X," then you should implement that improvement. This product improvement will ultimately impact revenue.

It's also important to assess the risk of not acting on product improvement feedback. This inaction leaves a gap for the competition to come in and solve the problem for your customers, putting your revenue at risk.

6. Assessing Your Resources

Falling into routine and complacency is a business killer. Product feedback provides an opportunity to challenge the status quo and re-evaluate your resources.

As you define how feedback themes align with business-critical issues, determine what internal solutions you should consider to improve your systems. Assess your resources and determine whether you have the right tools and people in the right processes and roles. For example, if you're struggling to attract team members who could dramatically improve your product, consider what organizational changes should take place to correct that issue. 

7. Building Customer Relationships

As you collect product feedback, you may determine the product itself isn't the issue; the brand story and customer relationships are. This issue typically presents as struggling to attract new customers but receiving positive product feedback from existing customers.

You can use that product feedback to help establish trust and attract new customers. Highlight positive feedback on your website and social media channels as a form of social proof. You can also work with customers who leave positive feedback to create a referral network for popular brands or affiliate programs. 

Failing to attract new clients and grow is a business-critical issue. Rather than focusing solely on how you can use product feedback to improve your offering, consider how you can use it to improve your brand.

Final Thoughts

Putting a feedback collection and review strategy in place are top priorities when using product feedback to solve business-critical issues. It is essential to take a 30,000-foot view of your business to gain a comprehensive understanding of how everything is interconnected. By doing so, you can identify the areas that require improvement and prioritize them accordingly.

Once you have a clear understanding of the overall picture, it's time to dive in and tackle the issues. However, it's crucial to approach this process with structure, systems, and processes in place. This ensures that you can effectively gather and analyze feedback, identify the root causes of business-critical problems, and implement appropriate solutions. 

In conclusion, putting a feedback collection and review strategy in place is crucial when using product feedback to solve business-critical issues. Taking a holistic view of your business, using structured processes and systems, and considering the role of customer relationships are key components of this approach. By implementing these strategies, you can effectively leverage product feedback to drive business growth and ensure long-term success.