How do you know what to work on next?

Enhance product success with a customer feedback portal

Relationships require communication. How else can we comprehend others’ wants and needs? This seems intuitive when discussing relationships with friends, partners, and coworkers, but it’s also essential to the relationship between brand and consumer.

When a company ignores clients’ concerns, those clients will take their business elsewhere. However, seeking customer feedback through one-on-one chats isn’t practical. A more convenient solution is inviting direct client communication via a customer feedback portal.

Here’s everything you need to know about soliciting client commentary and the best ways to use it.

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is client-generated commentary describing their experience interacting with a product or service. This feedback could describe user experience, functionality, or overall quality.  

Clients are to provide feedback regarding a disappointing experience compared to a “normal” one. And companies should pay careful attention to negative comments, as this information is crucial for identifying pain points with the product. Once development teams realize something isn’t working, they can prioritize areas of improvement.

Companies can solicit feedback through a customer feedback portal – a mobile app, program widget, or website that captures clients’ insights and helps log product or service commentary. The portal can gather information through feedback forms, surveys, or a review platform like Userback or UseResponse.

Why is customer feedback important?

Companies need help to evolve their products and expand their market. Customer feedback bridges the divide between product developers and users. Here are five ways a brand can benefit:

1. Increased loyalty

To be successful, a company must retain clients. Increasing customer retention by just 5% produces . In other words, keeping loyal customers happy is more economical than attracting new ones.  

Soliciting and acting on customer feedback demonstrates that a company appreciates its clients’ business, promoting feelings of commitment that keep them coming back. 

2. Minimized bias

Development teams understandably form blinders regarding product development. After all, they’ve invested immense time and effort into a product’s success. Still, receiving negative feedback is helpful so businesses can identify pain points and improvements that would otherwise go unseen. 

3. Informed decision-making

Reviewing customer feedback confirms whether product development and evolution align with market demands. If changes are necessary, consumer reviews can point developers in the right direction. Management can use issue-tracking insights to develop strategies and allocate resources to support new ideas and upgrades, significantly impacting their client base.

4. Improved customer service

Studies show that excellent customer service drives brand loyalty. After a positive experience, are willing to make another purchase with the company. Help desk tickets are a fast and free source of feedback that can improve product and customer service practices. 

5. Optimized marketing

Feedback helps the marketing team understand their audience and the drivers behind purchase decisions. From this data, they can improve their promotional messaging to encourage future purchases. Client submissions may also identify new use cases, cross-selling or upselling opportunities, or untapped market segments primed for a targeted marketing campaign. 

Managing customer feedback with Strategic Roadmaps

Integrating a customer feedback portal with Tempo’s Strategic Roadmaps makes responding to and acting on client observations easier. The platform helps your organization perform the following tasks:

1. Gather feedback: When customers submit feedback through your portal, Strategic Roadmap records and stores their insights for the development team to access and analyze. 

2. Centralize insights: Bug reports, user experience feedback, and satisfaction surveys are linked to a specific product or feature, allowing the team to review and analyze user input that’s relevant to their focus areas. 

3. Inform stakeholders: By linking feedback to a specific product or feature, Strategic Roadmaps directs feedback to relevant stakeholders.

How to leverage customer feedback with Strategic Roadmaps

Once an organization gathers customer feedback, what should it do with the data? Companies can use client insights in numerous ways:

1. Close the feedback loop

There’s nothing worse than feeling ignored. Customers who send feedback to an organization expect a response. Create a workflow using Strategic Roadmaps to address their concerns by

• Responding to feedback within 24 hours

• Thanking the customer for their input

• Request suggestions to help improve the experience

• Find ways to implement the ideas

• Track recurring issues using real-time reporting

2. Establish priorities

Use Strategic Roadmaps’ functionality to identify areas of improvement the development team should address next. The platform incorporates team insights into its weighted prioritization model to ensure devs work on improving or developing the right features at the right time. 

3. Create or update the product roadmap

Analyze customer feedback for recurring themes and areas of improvement, then update the roadmap to illustrate and prioritize the company’s response to market concerns. 

4. Communicate insights

Use the roadmap to communicate short- and long-term plans for product evolution to management. 

Managing customer feedback with Strategic Roadmaps

Managing the insights generated by a feedback portal ensures your company achieves sales and customer satisfaction goals. Here’s how Tempo’s Strategic Roadmaps can help:

1. Solicit feedback

Request additional feedback from customer-facing employees (e.g., sales, success, and support teams) to back up user commentary. Then, input the data into the strategic roadmap to visualize it for the development group.

2. Gather data

Share the feedback portal URL with all stakeholders – not just users – to collect valuable insights from various perspectives. Strategic Roadmaps allows organizations to control which product areas users submit feedback for. 

3. Sort comments

Strategic Roadmaps sorts each piece of feedback according to product or feature. This functionality allows developers to review information relevant to their work. 

4. Connect feedback to the product backlog

Teams create product backlogs based on their analysis of feedback. This evaluation ensures developers prioritize work with the greatest value for clients.

5. Respond to customer feedback

Import the customer list into Strategic Roadmaps to track feedback origins and share the data with the product, sales, and support teams. Then, they can follow up with clients to assure them a solution is on the way.

Best ways to collect customer feedback online

Companies gather customer input in numerous ways beyond customer feedback portals. Some of the best online tools include:

1. In-app popups

Some digital products solicit feedback with popup windows that appear after users open the program a set number of times or spend a specific amount of time in the app. The popup may request the following information:

• A user rating out of five stars

• User impression of the product

• A product review to use for promotional purposes

Popups should never be intrusive. In fact, annoying UI could lead to negative reviews, so use them sparingly. 

2. In-app widgets

An in-app widget is an excellent way to increase engagement, making it easy for consumers to provide feedback. The user clicks a button to open the widget, writes down anything from first impressions to a detailed bug report, and then seamlessly returns to what they were doing. This added convenience lets companies collect actionable data in real time and use it to improve their product. 

3. Feedback surveys

Many online providers, like Survey Maker and Survicate, help organizations collect user feedback with customized surveys. Online surveys generate quantitative and qualitative data about customer satisfaction, sometimes incentivizing responses with a reward or giveaway.

Keep surveys short with a mix of open-ended questions and multiple-choice queries. Otherwise, you could tire out the respondent.

4. Review sites

Companies should monitor online review sites, as customers frequently use them to vent about bad experiences. Considering , ignoring negative commentary can significantly impact sales.   

5. Social media

Customers may also air their grievances on social media. Listening tools like Clarabridge or InMoment streamline moderation of social media channels, flagging high-priority messages for immediate action.

In addition to customer complaints, social media can aggregate input from happy customers. A company page can even ask audiences to vote for future feature development, increasing customers’ investment in the product.

Get more out of customer feedback with Strategic Roadmaps

Tempo’s makes it easy to maximize the impact of customer feedback, no matter the channel. The Idea Manager functionality allows teams to systematically prioritize features based on data from a feedback portal. Then, Jira-enabled Strategic Roadmap takes over, illustrating the product’s evolution for management so they know where development is heading next.