A better way to gather real-time user feedback
High-performing technology teams thrive off of user suggestions, feature requests, complaints, and bug reports, yet the standard approaches to gathering this customer-focused evidence have their own sets of challenges. At Petal, we built a new way to gather this feedback that overcomes these challenges and is modular and reusable.
Some common channels for gathering user feedback include net promoter score (NPS), satisfaction surveys, and app store reviews. These are all crucial sources of data but tend to come days later, removed from the user’s real-time experience with the product, ask broad, generic questions, or are hard to categorize and measure. These characteristics make it difficult to glean insights that enable our teams to focus on the right problems and to truly know if the actions being taken are solving customer problems.
Another popular channel is the customer support log. Reviewing support tickets gets us much closer to the real problems that users are facing, and drawing out themes from these logs is extremely important for product teams. At Petal, we work very closely with the Operations team to disseminate what they are hearing from customers, first-hand, across the company. While effective, the downside to this approach is that the Operations team’s efficiency in taking calls and responding to customers can be negatively impacted by the time required to read through, categorize, and report on every small feature request or complaint about the app. When users want to suggest a change, reaching out to customer support through the “help” button seems like the easiest way to express their view.
This year, we challenged ourselves to build a more efficient user feedback flow to get us first-hand, measurable, contextual, and actionable information. With this in-hand, we can get a much deeper understanding of the user’s satisfaction with the product while reducing the burden on the Operations team.
The Feedback Module
So here’s what we’ve built: a reusable feedback module that can be added to any page or flow in our app. By clicking it, users are able to provide immediate feedback about what they’re trying to do and how they think we could improve it.
In each click, users are prompted to submit a 5-scale score, followed by a text field to explain why.
With this data, we can now look objectively at how our pages and features are being evaluated by our users, and prioritize which ones need more work. Below is a screenshot of the dashboard that is derived from the customer data:
Because the call-to-action is more contextual than an after-the-fact survey, individual messages become much, much more specific and actionable. Here are two side-by-side examples of customer feedback — one from the App store that is general and non-specific; and another from our new feedback module that gives us more clarity on what we need to change:
By looking at and communicating the impact of product design objectively, we’ve been able to more effectively make the case for new features and changes, directly impacting company-wide objectives. A recent example is applying our quantitative rating system to set the goal to improve our Payments page:
And finally, by iterating on the product based on customer feedback, we’re able to accurately celebrate that we’re building something people love more every day. And, after all, isn’t that the highest accolade that a product team can strive for?
