Customer Feedback Loops — The Biggest Contributor to A Successful Product

When a product is released into the market, success depends on how well the product solves the users’ pain points.

The product manager’s responsibility is to improve the product by identifying such use cases. Integrating continuous customer feedback loops is very powerful for understanding real-time user experiences and quickly improving your product.

Why is customer feedback looping so critical?

Allowing customers to share feedback makes them feel that they are heard and valued.

A customer feedback loop is a process that allows the product teams to track the customers’ experiences. Having built-in customer feedback loops within the product makes the overall tracking process simpler, faster, and inexpensive. The customer success and support teams can suggest quick tips for the user’s issues more efficiently and understand the churn rate in a better way. The parameters like–reasons for cancellation, feedback comments, and help center ratings, are some of the important ones.

Information about known product limitations and frequently asked questions should be documented and made available to the users in dedicated places like–the help center, tutorials, and so on.

Track all this abstract information in a concrete and scalable way.

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)–tells you how happy your customers are with the overall performance of your product.
2. Customer Effort Score (CES)–helps you to identify how easy it is for your customers to navigate within your product/ application. This mainly focuses on ease of use.
3. Net Promoter Score (NPS)–is a survey that gathers information about how the customers feel while using your product. Depending on this score, you can divide the users into 3 categories: Detractors, Passives, and Promotors.

Promotors are the users who are highly satisfied with your product and are willing to be your beta testers, contribute to the improvements and are willing to recommend and promote your product.

A smart product manager knows how to leverage their promotors in the right way and foster overall product success.

How to implement the customer feedback loop process?

Setting up a process for looping customer feedback is critical. Here are some useful steps that help you to get started.

1. Track the information
   Gather all the required data and turn it into important and scalable information.
2. Learn from the pattern
   Make the best use of the information to answer imperative questions that can give you explicit performance indices.
3. Get your action points ready
   Let all this scalable information contribute to your actions. Collaborate with the required stakeholders and sort out the challenges and complexities.

This way, you turn abstract insights into measurable actions. Closing the customer feedback loop in this way improves the product, and increases customer satisfaction and customer retention.

How to implement the customer feedback loop process?

• → Acting on the feedback
• → Achieving the desired improvement in the product
• → Communicating the updates and the next steps to your users

Processing feedback loops efficiently is a perfect win-win instance both for the customer as well as for the product itself.

The product managers get to collect the feedback and show their loyalty while the customer feels that he is heard and taken care of.

Some best practices

1. Accept that your product comes with certain known limitations. They need to be explicitly documented. This saves a lot of time for everyone.
2. When a certain reported bug is fixed, let the world know that it is fixed. Better reach out to the person who reported the bug and inform them that it is fixed. Even better is to get confirmation that it is working as it should.
3. The user usually comes with a concern and rarely with a bug.
   He is not a product specialist. Just explain to him the way how it has to be done on the platform. Provide necessary information and direct him to relevant help center articles or tutorials.
4. Feedback looping has to be an ongoing process throughout the product life cycle.
5. Product marketing is a vital part.
   Send out product updates frequently. Let the users know what features to expect. Not everyone needs all the information. Segregate your users and channel the information properly.

Don’t find customers for your products. Find products for your customers, says Seth Godin

Do you have more techniques for implementing customer feedback loops? Share them in the comments along with your thoughts and best practices.