How to Manage Customer Feedback for Your Product

Apart from gathering all the customer feedback using feature voting tool, managing it effectively has been a daunting question still a lot of product managers struggle to answer. When I was going through some product management forums and Quora, I could see plenty of PM's raised this question. This article deals with some of the practical tips for managing customer feedback within product management teams. Read on.

“How are you managing feedback? Aren’t you bored using spreadsheets?”

Long before, when I requested the support team to describe the experience of spreadsheets, they said it was very complex to provide the right data to the product manager. It is such hard work to rummage all over the spreadsheet dump and understand which they should convey! So obviously, a spreadsheet is not a good idea to manage customer feedback. Luckily, there is some other better way to do this, like with some dedicated customer feedback tool available in the market.

Pro tip: You can get that one feedback tool that suits you to give your best. With the help of this article.

Now, I’d like to clear some pieces of information that would help with better product management.

Customer Feedback vs. Feature Requests

Sometimes, you might be confused about “customer feedback” and “feature request.” This is your chance to change the conversation. Customer feedback will clearly state “how you might improve your product and what your customers are struggling with while using your product.”

A “ feature request” states “how you will have to work on every item that comes in, and what are the features that your customers love to see in your product.”

Feedback provides you with more flexibility in handling the product development. Whether it’s positive or negative feedback, your product team should take care of this and manage this customer feedback and handle things accordingly.

The exact concept of “Gathering” and “Tracking”

I’d like to clear the concept of gathering and tracking. Gathering feedback is the process of collecting meaningful feedback that helps in your product improvement. To get that, you should rummage for as many tools as possible without an ant limit. Whether through social media, email, forums conversations, or your various customer-support teams’ channels. This makes it simpler for people to want to engage with you, or you can utilize the feedback tool, which collects all the feedback from resources and helps you gather all those in a single place.

Tracking feedback is another step of the process, and it is the most crucial part, helping you determine how things change your product backlog and prioritize each feedback.

For this, we built and used Hellonext. Why? Because customer feedback is what helps evaluate your product backlog, so having it in a different tool makes absolutely no sense. You need to know all the qualitative and quantitative aspects of it.

How to respond to the customer feedback

Starting with a ‘thank you’ will give a positive vibe to the customer who reads it. But for every piece that comes in, we should always ensure the person handling knows how to respond, that is, always asking why.

• Why did they request this feature, and how is it crucial for them?
• How might it solve their issues and be useful for their job?
• Whether it is worth building?

This is ideal in two ways:

• It trains our team members to know what the product needs and how the product works.
• It lets the user know we’re genuinely building the feature that the customer needs and coming up with the solutions for the issues they’re struggling with.

Post-execution works

This is extremely crucial as it closes the feedback loop. Just responding and showing gratitude with “thanks” isn’t where it ends. You then want to get back to the user and complete the feedback loop once the idea is executed.

This will provide you with the chance to bring back the customer churns but also improve loyalty. Organizing your customer feedback in a dedicated system (not a spreadsheet) that helps you understand where the feedback came from, why, and how it will create an impact on your product backlog is not just making things simpler for yourself but also your entire product team.

Your customer-support teams will become simple when collaborating with your customers, you’ll have a better way of understanding and prioritizing feedback, and you’ll keep on thriving as the best product.

To get more insights about how you can do this effectively with the best product feedback tool, one of our product experts book a demo here. Learn how Hellonext can help you overcome your problems.