chapter 1

Introduction

Great products are not developed in isolation. When you are dealing with software tools and apps, it becomes necessary that you develop products that satisfy your product users and fulfill their needs and expectations with your product. But how will you know what your customers and product users want? What makes them happy and what ruins their experience?

The way to get answers to the above questions is by collecting Product Feedback. Product Feedback helps you know what users feel about their experience with your product and how they think an ideal product would be. It ensures that the products you create are in syn with the users’ needs and expectations.

So we have put together a comprehensive guide that would help you know all about Product Feedback, its various types, ways to collect it, and how you can leverage Product Feedback to develop products that your customers love. We will cover different topics step-by-step and help you understand everything there is about Product Feedback and how it can help you create amazing products!

Let’s get started by understanding what Product Feedback is all about.

Chapter 3

Product Feedback Types

Feedback is mainly of two types, viz., Solicited Feedback and Unsolicited Feedback. When you ask your customers for feedback or share surveys through different ways like SMS, emails, website popups, feedback buttons or in any other way, it is known as solicited feedback.

On the other hand, when customers provide feedback themselves without using any solicited means, it is unsolicited feedback. Unsolicited feedback can be in the form of requests, complaints, issues raised, comments on social media, or even word of mouth in the market.

It is always better to collect Solicited Feedback rather than waiting for the customers to raise issues. And when we talk about solicited feedback, the most useful way that can fetch you maximum responses is to collect in-product feedback, i.e., through feedback buttons and survey popups.

Let us explore various types of feedback based on what feedback is related to and the type of survey sent to collect that feedback.

1. Product-market Fit

Product Market Fit is when you develop the right product that meets the customers’ needs and is able to satisfy them in a good market. Product Market Fit Feedback helps you know how well your product fits in the market and satisfy the needs of the product users.

What do your customers think about your product? How much useful is your product to them? Does it solve users’ issues? Does it help users to fulfill all their requirements? How unique your product is in the market? If your product suddenly goes unavailable in the market, would your customers' lives be affected, or they would be easily able to switch to other alternatives?

The Product Market Fit survey helps you know the answers to these questions. However, the Product Market Survey is not so long with so many questions. In this survey, the main question which is asked from the users is:

How would you feel if you no longer be able to use this product?

There is no point in developing such a product or a product feature which is no longer required in the market. Collecting the Product Market Fit feedback lets you know the value of your product in the market, and whether such a product is actually required in the market or not.

2. Free Trial Feedback

Free Tail is an important part of the customer journey which majorly affects the decision of your product users to go ahead and pay for your product or not. So it is important to collect Free Trial Feedback to know how your product performs for your potential customers taking the trial.

In a Free Trial Feedback Survey, you ask about users’ experience with your product while setting up, signing up, and using your product during the trial. Track your product on various parameters like ease of use, performance, speed, and more. It will give insights into why your potential customers are converting or not converting, and how you can improve their free trial experience so that more of your potential customers get satisfied and finally make the decision of investing in your product.

3. Onboarding Feedback

So the users have finally made the decision of investing in your product. But the journey of Customer Experience just starts here! To reach your goals of having loyal customers and an increase in new users, it is essential to provide your existing users with truly awesome experiences at every stage starting from the onboarding itself. Onboarding Feedback helps you do that.

Onboarding Feedback lets you know how well your customers were introduced to the product and how well is the Onboarding process for them. This feedback helps you discover the loopholes in the onboarding process and thus work to eliminate them to ensure a smooth onboarding experience for your product users to take them to the next level of their product journey.

4. Product NPS

Net Promoter Score is a popular metric that business use to measure customer loyalty. Product NPS Feedback helps you gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction in terms of how they feel about your product and whether they feel it is right to suggest other users to choose the product or not.

An NPS Feedback Survey asks the likeliness of the users to recommend your product to their friends and known ones on a 10-rating scale. When they respond to it, they are also asked a follow-up question that asks them the reason for their rating.

5. Product CSAT

With Product CSAT Feedback, you can gauge the satisfaction of product users with respect to any aspect or feature of your product, or with the overall experience of the users that they have with your product. This feedback helps you know how satisfied are your users with your product and its performance, and where you need improvement in your product.

In a Product CSAT survey, users are asked to rate their satisfaction on a five-rating scale. Responses to this survey help you measure users’ satisfaction in quantitative terms and work on enhancing it.

6. Product CES

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that measures the customers’ perceived efforts to get a job done or issues resolved. Product CES Feedback is to know how much effort your users have to make with your product to get their work done through it. With this feedback, you can also gauge your product users’ experiences with your customer service or support teams just after they have gone through a service call or issue resolution process. In a CES survey, customers are asked this question:

“To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement, “The company made it easy for me to resolve my issues.”?

A seven-rating scale is given to the customers to rate their experience. The rating options are Strongly Agree, Agree, Somewhat Agree, Neither Agree nor Disagree, Somewhat Disagree, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree.

This feedback lets you know how well your product is useful to get their work done with ease and solve their problems.

7. Product Strength and Weakness

This feedback lets you know the strengths and weaknesses of your product by asking what your users liked and disliked about the product. By doing an analysis of what majority of your users respond to this survey, you can easily recognize the strengths and weaknesses of your product and make your product development plans accordingly aiming to eliminate the weaknesses.

With this feedback, you can also guide your marketing teams to showcase your product strengths, and your product development teams to improve the product.

8. Feature Feedback

Users may love some features of your product but at the same time, some users may hate some particular features or feel them to be unnecessary or useless. Feature Feedback lets you gauge user satisfaction with each feature of your product and know the underlying problems with your product features individually that may be a case of customer churn.

Moreover, this feedback is very useful when you develop and launch a new feature of your product to know whether it works for the customers or not.

9. Feature Request

Feature Request is actually a request made by the customers to add a feature. This request is itself a feedback that something is missing in your product. When the majority of customers are requesting a particular feature to be present in your product, you should understand that you need to enhance your product's capabilities for its survival and growth.

Analyze the feature request feedback carefully and see how many of your product users request which features. This will enable you to make better product development plans and product decisions.

10. Bug Report

Through Bug Reports, customers can report a bug they encounter while using your product. These Bug Reports are a kind of feedback which you must pay attention to and take action to improve your product and lessen the possibilities of bugs.

11. Product Churn

Product Churn Feedback is collected from the customers who cancel their product subscriptions. A Product Churn or Cancellation Survey is sent to the customers to collect this feedback. The purpose of this survey is to understand the reasons behind churn. Analyzing this feedback guides you regarding the improvements you need to make to your product in order to improve user experiences and prevent more users from churning.

This feedback is collected in two ways. You can add a Product Cancellation Survey or have a survey pop up the moment a user lands on the cancellation page. This allows for instantly capturing feedback right on the cancellation page where the users are more likely to answer your questions.

The other way is to send it to the users, who have already unsubscribed via email or SMS. Email and SMS surveys can also be automated for unsubscribers the moment they click on the ‘Cancel/Unsubscribe' button. However, there is always a chance of your email or SMS survey request going unnoticed. So it is better to use In-Product Surveys for this purpose and collect this feedback the moment your users cancel the subscription. You can also use both ways at the same time to increase the chances of getting your survey responded.

12. Demo Request

Demo Requests are made by potential product users who want to get a demo of your product and make a decision regarding subscribing to your product. A Demo Request Survey is used for this purpose which captures the details of the potential customers so that you can go ahead and provide them with a demo.

13. Marketing Attribution

Marketing Attribution Feedback is to know from where your customers got to know about your product. The purpose of collecting this feedback is to understand which marketing channels are working well for you and attracting new users to your product.

It helps to make effective marketing decisions and focus on the right channels to attract more leads and increase your business.

14. Product Review Request

A Product Review Request is a request to the happy and satisfied users to share feedback on aggregator platforms. A Product Review Request form collects Product Feedback and can redirect the customers to the appropriate webpage of the platform where they can share their ratings and reviews of your product.

The purpose of this feedback is to improve the ratings and reviews on popular platforms and grow the visibility of your product in the marketplace.

15. Transactional Feedback

Transactional product feedback helps businesses understand users’ interaction with the product at different touchpoints. A transactional product feedback survey enables capturing the most specific feedback, thereby helping brands improve each interaction with the product or app based on user feedback.

Let’s take the example of a food delivery app to understand transactional feedback. As soon as an order is delivered, the app triggers a push notification that the customers can click to rate the delivery or food quality. The user can share feedback on a 5-star rating scale as well as share what they liked or disliked about their recent experience with the product.

16. Free Trial Feedback

Free trial feedback is taken towards the end of the free trial of your product or mobile app to gauge users’ experiences. This helps in understanding what users like or dislike about the product, which, in turn, helps increase conversions, i.e., subscriptions.

Let’s look at it this way. A CRM software user who has decided to discontinue using the product after the free trial ends can share the reason for the same through a product feedback form. The brand can then reach out to the customer to learn more about the challenges and offer a resolution. This gives businesses a chance to retain users and resolve the repeating issues that may be driving potential customers away.

Here’s an interesting example of a Zapier product feedback form for the purpose of improving the product for current and future users.

17. Onboarding Feedback

Onboarding feedback is critical in order to address customer challenges right from the beginning. This not only helps improve the onboarding process but also positions them as customer-centric businesses.

An onboarding feedback survey is triggered right after a user is onboarded. Here’s an example of an onboarding survey by HubSpot which aims at understanding and improving the onboarding experiences of users.

18. Subscription Feedback

Subscription feedback is super critical for understanding your subscribers’ experiences with the product. It enables you to understand how the product is perceived and whether or not it meets the expectations of the users. This helps brands capitalize on experiences that sell and eliminate challenges that may eventually lead to customer churn.

You can send your customers a subscription feedback survey 5 to 10 days after the user subscribes to your app or product. The key is to give users enough time to actually experience the product and share genuine feedback.

19. Cancellation Feedback

Cancellation feedback is collected on the subscription cancellation page. The idea is to understand why users tend to unsubscribe and what can be improved to retain them.
This can be done in two ways. You can add a cancellation survey or have a survey pop up the moment a user lands on the cancellation page. This allows for instantly capturing feedback right on the cancellation page where the users are more likely to answer your questions.

The other way is to send users, who have already unsubscribed, a cancellation survey via email or SMS. Email and SMS surveys can also be automated for unsubscribers the moment they click on the ‘Cancel/Unsubscribe’ button. However, there is always a chance of your email or SMS survey request going unnoticed.

Tip: You can combine the two approaches and send email or SMS survey requests to people who haven’t already shared their feedback on the cancellation page.

You can also check out our subscription cancellation survey template which uses both open-ended and closed-ended questions to help you understand why users unsubscribe. Here's a sample question from the template: 

20. Feature Satisfaction Feedback

Often the overall product feedback from customers may not highlight the underlying problems or challenges leading to customer churn. But with specific feedback on the product features, you can identify what’s working for the customers and what’s not. For example, Facebook collects its users’ feedback on different features of the product via a product feedback form to ensure that there aren’t any roadblocks while users are trying to enjoy the app.

This not only helps Facebook capture the most specific feedback but also makes way for innovation based on end-user preferences. Feature satisfaction feedback is critical if you’re looking to stay relevant in the pool of quickly-evolving products.

You can collect feature satisfaction feedback via two types of surveys:

CSAT Survey

A CSAT survey is used to measure customer satisfaction and calculate the CSAT score, a global metric for customer experience. CSAT surveys can be shared via email and can also be embedded directly in the app or website so users can share their feedback while using the product.

A CSAT survey prompts the user to share their experience on a seven-rating scale and can be configured to collect feature-specific feedback, for example, feedback on

• The performance of new features or launches
• The new concepts or ideas for innovation
• Pricing and packages
• Suggestions for product improvement
• The overall satisfaction with the product and its functionalities

Here is an example of CSAT survey question:

CES Survey

A CES survey is used to measure customers’ effort in using your product or mobile app. This often includes in-app support via live chat or a knowledge base. The Customer Effort Score helps determine how brands can make their product or app easier to use and provide perfect user experiences.

With the help of CSAT, CES, and open-ended survey questions, you can ask your users to evaluate product features in terms of:

Ease of Use: A simple CSAT question can prompt users to rate the ease of use on a 5-star scale or 1-7 rating scale.

Innovation & Suggestions: You can add open-ended product feedback survey questions to your survey to get suggestions that can help you with innovation and new product features.

Value for Money: You can use a simple rating scale to measure feedback on value for money

Similarly, you can capture feature-specific feedback based on the unique functioning and objectives of your product features.

21. Market Research Feedback

Market research can be done both before the product is launched as well as after the product is launched. When you're trying to understand if your product or app is the right market fit, you can capture feedback on aspects like your target audiences' needs, value for money, innovation, the first reaction to the product, and the probability of your audience recommending the product to others.

Here's what your market research product survey questionnaire before the production stage may look like: 

22. Lead Generation and Attribution

Lead generation and attribution feedback surveys are tremendously helpful in marketing your product to qualified leads. For example, if you add a lead capture survey to your website, you can get details like the customer’s name, email address, contact number, company name, and even details like when they might need your product. Now, when visitors share their personal information via a feedback form, it is considered a qualified lead that you can directly remarket your product to.

If you're looking to get started right away, you can use this detailed lead capture form template that not only captures personal information like name, company name, contact number, email address, etc. but also improves lead quality with information on their budget, timeline, requirement, etc.

Similarly, an attribution survey helps in understanding how visitors come to your website, i.e., the path they followed to land on your website. For example, if you are able to find out that most users reach your website through an organic campaign, you can increase your ad budget and reach out to more potential users with your campaign.

Thus, the information captured via lead generation and attribution product feedback forms can help you target users most specifically and increase conversions, downloads, and subscriptions.

23. Product Usability Feedback

Product usability feedback is users’ feedback on the various aspects of your product like navigation, ease of use, the overall user experience, etc. Usability feedback is sought in the early stages of your product development or launch and involves understanding from the experiences of end users if the product is in line with the expectations or market standards.

You can also capture usability feedback from your team members to get internal product feedback to get a deeper understanding of the product and improve it further before the final launch.

Here’s a system usability survey template that you can try out to understand how usability feedback works.

You can always customize this template as per your product or app. You can also check out our article on website usability survey questions for ideas and inspiration to create an all-encompassing product usability survey. 

Chapter 5

Other Methods to Collect Product Feedback

Apart from the methods to share surveys with your product users, let’s explore some other methods to collect useful Product Feedback data.

1. Using Live Chat

Live Chat is a great way to provide open opportunities for your product users to connect with you and share what they have in mind about your product. Businesses provide the Live Chat option to their customers to make requests, raise queries and concerns, and seek support. In these live chats, people often also share feedback about your product. Moreover, the data for requesting features and raising complaints is also a feedback which you should not ignore.

So use the data captured in live chats with the users to extract valuable Product Feedback information from them and make use of it in making product decisions and product development plans.

2. Social Media Handles

Social Media is a prominent medium nowadays where customers share their negative and positive experiences, and other people make buying decisions based on reviews on social media. So it is always recommended to be present on social media to be within reach of your customers while following an omnichannel approach.

Apart from reviews and ratings on aggregator platforms, customers share their product experiences on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. So it is important that you create your own social media handles on such platforms. Also, ensure that you respond to every feedback in the form of comments and mentions on these platforms as soon as possible. Researches suggest that not responding to social media reviews can result in an increase in churn rate by 15%. 

So make sure you are available and active for your product users on social media to collect and respond to their feedback. 

Content Earlier Written by Bhavika --

Here are the other methods to capture omnichannel product feedback:

1. Product Website Survey

When you’re looking to collect feedback, the focus should be on making feedback-sharing as easy for users as possible. And when we talk about product feedback, it doesn’t only mean feedback on the product features and usability; you may need to understand:

• What path do users take to land on the product download or subscription page
• If the potential users are able to download the product or buy a subscription easily
• If users clearly understood the pricing and packages, etc.

You can collect feedback on all these aspects directly on your website even before people start using your product.

2. SMS Survey

What happens when your emails land in the spam folder of your customers’ inboxes or get lost among a pile of other emails? You can always opt for SMS surveys to capture product feedback. This is because 97 out of 100 messages are opened within 15 minutes of being delivered. So, this may increase your survey’s participation rate.

An SMS survey request consists of a survey link that your customers or users can click to be redirected to the survey page. However, it is recommended to collect product feedback across the primary CX metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES.

To capture detailed, feature-specific feedback, it is best to go for in-app surveys.

Chapter 7

Feedback Strategies for Product Development Stages

Depending on what stage of product development you are at, you can use different product feedback surveys. Let’s understand each stage and its feedback requirements in detail.

Before Launch (Alpha Testing Stage)

Before the launch, the focus should be on eliminating all the possible challenges with the product that the user may come across. Here are the different use cases of product feedback surveys at this stage of product development:

1. Market Research: Market research surveys are exactly what you need to understand the market requirements and buying potential of your customers. With predictive analytics in terms of demand, market fit, competitiveness, etc., you can make important strategic changes before the product is rolled out.

To collect market research feedback you can use our readymade survey, Sean Ellis's Product Market Fit Survey, a questionnaire devised by Entrepreneur Sean Ellis himself to understand if your product or app is the right market fit. 

2. Feature Research: It’s always better to align the features with user requirements and usability expectations as early as possible. This way, you can minimize the number of iterations and give your users a near-perfect product right from the start.

So, for effective feature research, you can sample your target audiences as well as internal team members to understand how the product may be received once it’s launched. Both external and internal product feedback help you take a better development approach and create a product that your users would be excited to use.

3. Pricing Research: One of the most important factors, when you’re looking to sell your product or mobile app, is the value for money. Therefore, you can survey your target audience to capture app or SaaS product feedback in terms of:

• Satisfaction with the pricing strategy
• Product pricing compared to your competitors
• Ideal price for the product according to the users

4. Concept Testing: Feedback on the concept of the product helps in understanding whether the product is designed keeping in mind the outcomes expected. So, your product feedback questions at the development stage must include one or more questions on whether the product is correctly conceptualized to help users achieve their end goals.

Early Stage

Though you cannot use your SaaS survey software as an alternative to A/B testing usually done in the early stages of product release, you can definitely use it to get additional insights directly from your actual users.

Here’s what product feedback at an early stage can help you discover:

1. AHA Moments: Feedback at an early stage helps in understanding the users better in terms of behaviour, moments of friction, patterns of usability, etc. All this helps in understanding how your product or mobile app is being received, which further enables making changes early on.

For example, we discovered that most Promoters of our survey software brand had been using readymade survey templates. We capitalized on this information and enhanced the free template library to expand our customer base.

2. Early Product Adaptation: Product feedback surveys at an early stage after launch help in understanding if the users can adapt to the product. You can use the usability survey template in this case. 

Product Maturity Stage

The maturity stage of a product is all about making consistent efforts to align the product with users’ changing requirements and staying in demand. You can use product feedback surveys at the maturity stage to retain customers by measuring their feedback in terms of

1. Product Loyalty: Product feedback at the maturity stage helps you understand the general sentiment or loyalty to the brand as a whole using the Net Promoter Score surveys. You can send out NPS surveys at fixed intervals during the customer lifecycle and also use them to gauge loyalty based on certain aspects, for example, the customer service standards of the brand.

You can also measure where you stand in the market by using our competitive NPS survey template, which consists of questions to help brands understand their major competitors, their service quality compared to yours, and other factors that encourage users to recommend a competitor brand to others. This information further helps in taking measures that directly increase customer loyalty. 

2. Detailed Feature Feedback: You can use product surveys at the maturity stage to get feedback in terms of specific features or transactions. For example, in hotel management software, you can collect feedback on different features like Channel Manager, Booking Engine, Property Management System, etc., individually as they are used.

3. Product Roadmaps: Annual and half-yearly product feedback surveys help in understanding the overall satisfaction of users with the product. In this case, you can use the Customer Satisfaction Score CX metric to measure the overall satisfaction of users with the product or app and identify challenges that may be hindering product growth.

Chapter 9

Product Feedback Automation Checklist

Irrespective of the type of SaaS product or mobile app you are looking to sell, the success formula always boils down to this: Achieve more with less effort and time.
This is where the role of automation comes into play. Product feedback automation allows you to:

• Ensure consistent feedback collection
• Streamline task management
• Close the feedback loop
• Reduce customer churn

Zonka Feedback is designed keeping in mind the automation needs in terms of surveying users as well as closing the negative and positive feedback loop.

Here are some must-have automation features offered by Zonka Feedback that you must look for in your product feedback tool:

1. User Segmentation

Your product feedback software should allow making data analysis effortless. It must go beyond just feedback collection and cater to efficient feedback management. This ensures that you’re not just sitting on the feedback but using it methodically to further different business functions.

At the top of the feedback automation checklist, we have:

Auto Tagging: All the responses are tagged automatically, so you can understand customer feedback at a glance and be able to segment contacts based on responses without any manual work. 

Active Contact List: You can view the active contact list and create correctly targeted campaigns. For example, with access to a dedicated list of Promoters, you can efficiently run your referral marketing campaign.   

2. Website Intercept

An intercept survey is the most perfect way to capture in-the-moment feedback. It is shown to your mobile app or product users with specific interactions they have with it. For example, you can use an intercept survey to capture action-specific feedback like post-purchase feedback, sign-up feedback, post-event feedback, etc.

Here are the website or product intercept feedback survey features that you need to look for in your product feedback tool:

Popup Survey: Product or website popup surveys trigger automatically when a product user performs a pre-specified action. For example, if you have introduced a new app or software feature, you can have a popup survey trigger as soon as the user finishes using that feature. Similarly, you can collect feedback with intercept surveys in events like purchase, order placement, etc.

The users can share their feedback right within the popup window since popup surveys are usually short; they may consist of one or two questions – one with an emoji scale, star-rating scale, Likert scale, etc., and the other an open-ended question so users can share descriptive feedback.

Selective Targeting: Your product feedback software should be able to fetch you user data that is actually relevant and useful. For example, an online grocery app looking to offer a monthly subscription of select items’ delivery can target specifically the users that frequently order those items. It can insert a poll survey with the question “Would you be interested in a monthly subscription of ‘XYZ’ items?” within a popup survey and show it to frequent buyers the next time they add the pre-specified items to their cart.

You can create your target survey audience based on:

• Attributes like demographics, age, current plan, position, language, etc.
• The device, for example, mobile, tablet, Android, iOS, etc.
• Response tags, for example, dissatisfied users according to a previous survey
• Specific page visits or feature usage
• Source (target users only if they come from a pre-specified source)

Targeting N% of Users for A/B Testing: Your product feedback tool should allow randomly sampling users to conduct A/B testing. For example, if you’re looking to revamp your brand identity, you can survey a certain percentage of people, including internal team members as well as end users. You can collect product design feedback with questions like ‘which logo better represents [brand name]’?

3. Multichannel Feedback Triggers

Product feedback shouldn’t only be limited to running surveys within the product environment. Feedback automation should allow consistently surveying users across multiple channels so you can have a 360-degree view of customer insights.

To ensure this, here are the primary features we offer to generate multichannel responses as per user preference:

Feedback Widget: A product or website feedback widget is a piece of code added to your product that allows collecting feedback on specific pages and specific events. The feedback widget must include:

• Popover Survey: To collect event or action-specific feedback
• Feedback Button/Side Tab Survey: To collect continuous (24x7) or unsolicited feedback on or more pages
• Embedded Surveys: Dedicated page surveys or polls embedded into the product or mobile app page; for example thumbs up/thumbs down survey at the end of an article

Automated Email Surveys: Product feedback tools should ideally allow automating email surveys based on triggers, such as a customer service call, ticket resolution, subscription milestone, etc. Moreover, automated email in-signature surveys are also a must-have to collect feedback on every response to customer queries.

Automated SMS Surveys: Your product feedback tool must have an automated SMS survey feature so surveys via SMS can be triggered on certain actions, for example, query resolution or ticket closure.

Integrations: Your customer feedback tools must allow integration with communication channels so you can collect feedback in real-time feedback while the users are still on the app. Moreover, business tool integration renders several other benefits that you can better understand with these another set of must-have features:

• Live Chat Feedback - Live chat surveys allow collecting user feedback in the chat window. You can either pin a feedback survey to the chat window or trigger automatic surveys as soon as a chat ends. You can measure and calculate Customer Effort Score as well as agent performance.
• In-Meeting & Post-Meeting Feedback - Your survey tool should integrate with business communication software so you can also measure internal feedback in chat channels or meetings. For example, if you use Slack for internal communication, you can trigger surveys during and after meetings with Zonka Feedback integration. Let’s say all team members are required to vote during a meeting to come to a conclusion, you can add a survey to the meeting that all the participants can take directly in the Slack window.

4. Workflows

Before you decide on a product feedback tool, you must check if it enables efficiently closing the feedback loop while making the whole feedback management process more streamlined.

Here are the top workflow automation features that you absolutely need if you’re a feedback-driven company. 

Response-Based Actions: As the name suggests, you can respond to customer feedback based on what their responses are. And user feedback is mainly segmented into these two categories:

• Feature-Based Feedback - This is one of the interesting product feedback examples. Let’s say a user reports a bug in your product. The feedback from this user would automatically be shared with the developer or the team responsible. Similarly, if an e-commerce app receives feedback on the availability of certain products, the inventory personnel would be looped in. This ensures that users are offered quick resolutions and that the feedback loop is closed immediately so the customers don’t churn.
• Positive & Negative Feedback - A pre-specified action is performed automatically based on positive or negative feedback. For example, if some users give your product a 5-star rating, an automated survey would be triggered thanking them for their great feedback. Similarly, a negative rating from the customer would be followed by an apology email or a follow-up call from the support agent who can resolve the dissatisfied customer’s complaints.

Escalations for High-Value Clients: To ensure priority-based resolution, your product feedback survey tool must allow escalating feedback from high-value users or clients. This is an important survey feature that is critical for effective relationship management with your network of users.

Notification to Relevant Teams: User feedback, especially in the case of a product, can benefit several departments. Therefore, your product feedback tool should allow closing the feedback loop quickly by looping in the relevant teams or members right from the very beginning. This ensures that complaints or open tickets are not passed on from department to department but are instead assigned directly to personnel who can provide the correct resolutions.

For example, during Beta testing, if the user shares feedback on the product design or feature, the product manager must be notified so the feedback can be acted upon. Similarly, if the feedback is production-related, the customer retention or customer success team should be looped in.

5. Survey Throttling

One of the most important rules of surveying customers is to not overwhelm them with survey requests. Therefore, when you’re looking to collect product feedback, avoid sending too many survey requests to stop users from unsubscribing to your emails; you may even increase the response rate with this strategy.

But you shouldn’t have to worry about this because your product feedback tool should be able to take care of it.

Survey throttling in survey software ensures that the same user isn’t sent surveys more than once in the time period set by you. You can schedule the surveys to be sent quarterly, yearly, or on specific dates or events.

Tip: For transactions or interactions within the app or product like chat with a support agent, purchase, subscription renewal, etc., you can use quick in-app surveys, to get fresh in-the-moment feedback. And for overall feedback on the brand or to gauge the loyalty of customers, you can send CSAT and NPS surveys at fixed intervals during the customer lifecycle.

6. Integrations

This has to be one of the most important prerequisites of investing in product feedback software. Integrations are your best friend whether you want to create a comprehensive feedback system, automate tasks, centralize feedback data, or improve customer service experience.

So, make sure that your survey tool seamlessly integrates with your business tools like CRMs, communication tools, marketing tools, etc. We have talked about survey tool integration with some examples below.

A. CRMs

The purpose of integrating your product feedback tool with your CRM is to centralize feedback data in one place so that it is more accessible and actionable. Not only does this make the product manager’s life easier, but it ties together the entire system so user feedback can render company-wise enhancement while also ensuring an enhanced product.

Let’s understand how product feedback works in integration with the most popular CRMs.

Salesforce: Salesforce integration with a survey tool requires you to set up feedback mapping so that all the survey scores and responses are synced back to the CRM. You can identify a good product feedback tool by how easily you can set this up and get started. And it doesn’t end at feedback syncing; you can optimize feedback management so user data is worth its weight in gold!

Here’s what you can do with Salesforce surveys and centralized customer data in Salesforce:

• Create workflows so repetitive tasks are automatically taken care of while you focus on improving customer experiences
• Segment contacts based on response and set trigger-based actions so you can survey the right customers at the right time
• Create automatic tasks based on incoming responses and set up alerts or real-time notifications for team members
• View actionable reports with in-depth analysis, trends, and data comparison, all through a single dashboard
• Send automatic follow-up or response emails to close the product feedback loop with users
• Set up automatic actions like creating a new contact

All of this helps create a user data inventory that can help you build personalized experiences. For example, with a preference survey, your app or product users can share what they are using your SaaS tool for. You can then use this information to create audience sets and specific marketing campaigns to run relevant ads and send the right recommendations.

HubSpot: Just like Salesforce integration, you can also sync back and manage user data in HubSpot with product feedback integration. You can choose which responses need to be synced and when the data sync must trigger. HubSpot integration gives you complete control of data without the stress of handling each field and file manually which can suck the life out of the whole feedback strategy.

You should also be able to create new contacts automatically, edit mappings whenever you want, and give data access to other team members.

Pipedrive: If your focus is sales and you use Pipedrive, you can measure user feedback at every touchpoint of the sales cycle with survey software integration. A reliable product feedback tool should allow you to send personalized surveys and automated follow-ups once you edit or change customer data in Pipedrive. For example, if you close or renew a user’s subscription, a feedback survey should automatically be sent to them to measure their recent experience. Similarly, you can set a survey to be sent to all the new contacts as soon as they are added to Pipedrive.

Some of the other fantastic things that you can do with the integration of survey software with Pipedrive include:

• Syncing all or selected responses back to Pipedrive based on pre-defined triggers
• Creating new deals in Pipedrive automatically based on survey responses
• Scheduling surveys strategically to prevent survey throttling
• Sending surveys based on deal status

ActiveCampaign: A survey tool with ActiveCampaign CRM can do wonderful things as we discussed above. Not only can you centralize feedback data, but you can define actions to put feedback to great use. You can automatically create new contacts, sync user responses with those contacts, automate ActiveCampaign emails and follow-up surveys, and a lot more.

B. Helpdesks

Product feedback tools’ integration with helpdesks is highly important in this checklist because customer service excellence is something that can make and even break your brand. Look at it this way. A user shares feedback about how your app keeps freezing and the product feedback tool automatically creates a ticket based on this response so the issue is worked upon instead of being added to the pile of complaints.

Survey software integration with your helpdesk software streamlines all customer feedback and complaints so you can efficiently use data and take customer service experiences a notch higher.

Here are some super important helpdesk tools that your feedback tool should integrate with:

Zendesk: Helpdesk software like Zendesk must be easily integrated with your survey tool if you place a high value on customer service and experience. With this integration, you can add or embed surveys directly into your Zendesk emails for customers. For example, if you’re responding to a customer query, you can add a survey in your email signature so the users can rate the response they received. Or, if you wish to measure customer satisfaction in Zendesk, you can set feedback surveys to be sent at fixed intervals or events like the closure of a longstanding issue.

In addition, you can do other things like:

• Automatically trigger a product feedback survey request after a ticket is closed
• Automatically sync survey responses or scores back to Zendesk
• Create tickets automatically based on survey responses or feedback score

Intercom: Most businesses use Intercom today for customer communication in the product or in the mobile app, which makes Intercom integration a must-have in popular and reliable product feedback tools.

With this integration, you can pin a survey to the chat window, automatically trigger a survey in the chat as soon as it ends, and also collect individual agent scores to measure internal performance. Chatbots and live chat surveys are primarily used for measuring CES in Intercom since it provides quick insight into the effort users had to make in getting an issue resolved.

Moreover, your agents can see survey responses in the inbox so the next time they are talking to a customer, they know what their previous experiences have been like and offer resolutions accordingly and quickly.

Freshdesk: By connecting your Freshdesk and survey tool accounts, you can automate email and SMS surveys to your app or product users when a ticket is closed – just like what you can do with other helpdesk software. You can also set triggers to correctly time the surveys, for example, you can set how long after a ticket is closed that you want to send a feedback form.

In addition to triggering surveys automatically, your product feedback tool should also create new tickets based on the incoming responses. For example, if it is a Detractor a ticket will be created automatically.

HelpScout: If you primarily use email for customer communication, you can integrate your HelpScout software with your product feedback tool. This way, you can send your survey in your customer emails and also embed them into your email signature so customers can share feedback right within the email body.
This can get you a higher response rate and super useful responses coming from fresh service experiences.

C. Marketing

We have talked a little about the use of a product feedback tool in marketing above. Let’s talk about its role in detail here.

Let’s say you have an eCommerce app where you run surveys to understand customers’ preferences, for example, sportswear, kids' wear, etc. Now all this feedback, when synced back to your marketing tool, creates a huge data inventory about your customers with insights that can help you create the most targeted marketing campaigns.

You can create unique user personas to send newsletters and marketing emails that hit the sweet spot and increase conversions.

Two of the primarily used marketing tools that your feedback software must be integrated with include:

Mailchimp: The survey tool and Mailchimp integration enables you to:

• Automate adding respondents as contacts to the contact or audience lists
• Create audiences based on responses using filters and conditions

If the response of a user matches the conditions you have set, it will automatically start adding to Mailchimp. This means you can cut out the manual work and focus on improving marketing efforts where human intervention is required.

AirTable: If you’re using a super-flexible database like AirTable to connect your information and create workflows, integration with a survey tool makes your job even easier. You can send user survey feedback and responses automatically to tables and consolidate all of them in a single view. This way you can have everything in your AirTable account which can prevent a whole lot of back and forth.

You can also:

• Send new Survey Responses to multiple bases
• Map questions in the survey to specific table fields

D. Collaboration Tools

For internal communication and collaboration, integration with a survey tool is super important for product or SaaS-based companies. Let’s understand with the examples of top collaboration tools:

Slack: With feedback tool integration, you can send surveys to your team members and in meeting that they can take within the Slack window. Moreover, whenever you receive responses to your surveys, you can forward them to others on Slack so the relevant personnel can take action.

Moreover, this is also great for internal product feedback. Let’s say you add a new feature to your photo editing app. You can ask the internal members to try out the feature and then collect their detailed feedback with Slack surveys.

Webex: You can make your meetings interesting and much more engaging with Webex surveys with simple integration. For example, if you’re rebranding and want feedback from the team on the logo design options, you can quickly trigger an in-meeting poll survey and the participants can quickly share their preferences.

Similarly, you can conduct quizzes, collect ideas, etc. And the best part is that you can analyze all the feedback in real-time.

Zoom: Just like in Webex, you can collect feedback in meetings from customers and internal team members alike. For example, a SaaS product user in a product setup meeting with the customer support professional can share feedback via a survey that would be triggered automatically after the meeting.

Google Sheets: Google sheets are popular irrespective of the size of the company. And imagine how amazing it would be to save hours of feedback entry in your sheets. With a simple integration with a survey tool, you can make feedback management hassle-free.
You can also filter, sort, and analyze survey feedback before collaborating with your team.

E. Automation Software

Automation tools like Zapier, Make, Integrately, etc., when integrated with a product feedback tool, can make feedback management a breeze. All the data would be automatically synced so your tools like Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk, etc. can perform the correct action.

• If you use Zapier, you can practically hook any of your business tools with a product management tool that supports Zapier integration.
• If you happen to use Integrately, you can integrate the survey tool with a single click, provided the tool supports Integrately.
• Make sure your product tool supports Make (Integromat) if you use this platform for integrations.

Integration of your product tool with these software ensures that all the data syncs back to other apps or services that you may be using.