6 Reasons how in-app feedback helps you build a great product

Roshni Prabhakar
Hellonext Feedback Board
5 min readDec 19, 2018

In the era where most of the work is done with the assistance of an app, Building the right product isn’t a cake walk. To make the time and effort put in the development of each feature worthwhile, it is important to analyze how well you match your customer requirements to the customer experience.

While there are several methods we can use to evaluate how well we satisfy user needs, one of the effective ones is to ask the users themselves about their experience with the product. This can easily be done by incorporating an In-app feedback tool that helps you get closer to achieve developing a product your users wanted in a simple yet effective manner.

What’s special in in-app feedback:

Installing and uninstalling apps are done in the blink of an eye now, you need to deliver great customer experience to reduce the customer churn and increase the overall user satisfaction your app.

Often, by the time users give feedback, they would’ve forgotten half of the concerns and where they wanted improvement. This is easily solved when you use in-app feedback, you constantly get ideas to optimize the product’s customer experience. But it doesn’t stop there, an in-app feedback tool also helps with identifying bugs much easier in case the report from the users isn’t clear. It makes debugging straightforward and manageable.

By consistently doing this, you deliver a smooth user experience which results in brand loyalty and user satisfaction.

Here are the top 6 reasons why you should consider implementing an in-app feedback tool in your product.

More connected with your customers:

In-app feedback is an easy way to interact more with your customers as using and giving feedback occurs in the same place. Empathy is the key to understanding user needs. When you interact more with your customers, you recognize their perspective and their needs better. When you understand them better you build products or features your customers love.

Customer engagement benefits you in different ways for your development. When you value your customers they contribute more in return. They spend more time, money and they might even become your brand promoters taking the adoption of your product to a higher level. Engaged customers stay loyal and will try to maintain a long-term relationship with your brand.

63% of marketers agree customer engagement helps in renewals, repeat purchases, and retention (source). 81% of companies say social customer service strategy is integrated into the overall social strategy of the organization (Source). Engagement is driven by price (81%), quality (80%) and convenience (55%), loyalty is about likability (86%) and trust (83%)(Source). Customer service interactions over Twitter have increased 250% in the last two years(Source).

So engagement with your customers strengthens connectivity and helps you decide the next step of your product development. Ultimately you make your customers happy and greatly satisfied by being attentive, taking responsibility for their feedback, accomplishing them, preventing misunderstandings, avoiding excuses and so on. Gaining a moral value is more valuable than gaining revenue and this happens when you make your customers happy.

While what user problem the product solves is completely up to you initially, this changes as the time passes. We know that there are several stages to the product from innovators to the late majority, as the product moves through this stages, the user needs also evolve. If the company doesn’t keep with these needs, the user loyalty reduces and more users look for alternatives.

A good example of what happens if we failed to keep up with the user needs would be a windows phone, Windows which ranks the highest in the world PC market failed to make a mark in the mobile industry mainly because of their ignorance to user requirements. It had few apps, a low level of user-friendliness and intuitiveness. for instance, an Instagram app. Many features were not able to be operated in windows phone like it was operated in an android phone. Even app developers started to abandon windows due to the inability to generate revenues using windows mobile platform. Windows would have been a success if it had concentrated more on users.

Constantly evaluate your app performance:

Consistency becomes a critical factor in the long run. Consistently delivering quality service to your customers can be done effectively by working on their feedback as frequently as possible. When you use in-app feedback, you get feedback for the existing performance of the app routinely so that you can fix bugs and enhance the product. You can have regular meetings with your support team to know about customer’s ideas and implement them in the upcoming features. A Forrester research concentrated on the relationship between the user interface and the customer experience indicated that a better UX design returns over 400% in conversion rates. This just reinforces how important focusing on the feedback from the user is. This way you can launch your product or feature as a better one and deliver a smooth user experience.

Build robust public product roadmap:

Companies are at a huge advantage when they have public roadmaps for their users to see. It is a great way of engaging users as well as keep them updated about the planned features. A big benefit of collecting in-app feedback is that you can effectively build product roadmaps. When you make your product roadmaps public, you share the outline of your upcoming developments. This allows your customers to give scalable feedback so that you can alter your development plans according to customer feedback and structure workflows. Customers love transparency and when you give freedom to their voice, you get to know what resonates more among people. This way you can build great products and captivate a large customer base.

In-app feedback also helps in giving you enough information required for prioritizing product roadmap. You can use techniques like touch heatmaps and upvotes to know which features are highly valued by customers. This equips you to meet customer requirements and helps you deliver a meaningful customer experience.

These six reasons show how an in-app feedback system significantly help you build a great product. After collecting feedback, effectively analyzing, evaluating, prioritizing and making meaningful changes and adding useful features will only make your app great and successful.

--

--