How important is customer feedback for the improvement of a product?
Elena Cirera
68 replies
Replies
Bogomil Shopov - Бого@bogomep
Threat Modeling e-book
I really hope you are kidding by asking a question like that or you want some upvotes:) It's the same as asking how important is the air to the human begins :)
Share
It depends on your level of experience and stubbornness to see through your plans. Blindly following customer feedback can get you into a lot of trouble.
ProProfs Help Desk 2.0
Honestly, that’s one of the most important aspects of building your product ahead. Customer feedback allows you to understand what expectations your customer have and make improvements to your product accordingly.
They say that nobody is a better critique of your product than an upset customer. By capturing customer feedback, you can see what you are doing right with your products and identify which areas need improvement. In addition to product feedback, you must strive to take customer feedback about your employees. We use ProProfs Help Desk (https://www.proprofsdesk.com/) to allow customers to instantly rate their support interactions via CSAT surveys.
Research AI
Very important but don't change the whole trajectory of your app just because of one negative review.
@mavlonbek_muratov Few negative reviews are ok, but a lot can change.
The Founder Library
It's entirely dependent on your feedback loop. It's highly valuable if your gauging feedback for product development purposes but don't fall in the trap of listening too much. It's a fine line because if you build what your user's want your meeting their needs but need to keep the business needs as a first priority.
Price2Spy
I would say it's crucial.
It's basically guaranteed that your customers will find out something about your product that you haven't been aware of.
I think that launching my latest project (BotMeNot) in beta and asking users to provide feedback has given me so many ideas on what I can work on.
The bottom line is, you're making your product not for yourself, but for your customers.
@price2spy There are so many products in the market that were made for different use, but customers have found many other uses for those products. It is always good to find the customers' benefits, in return, they will give your profit.
Price2Spy
@elena_cirera Agreed!
FromNotion
Elena, it’s very important. The fastest way to learn is to talk to customers. Not releasing code, or collecting analytics, but talking to people.
Customer feedback is the best way to understand customers' pain points and start conversations with them.
Customer feedback is one of the best kinds of user researches.
@shashcoffe Indeed, it is.
I guess when you asked for an opinion on a product or experience, your customers feel valued and treated almost as a part of the creative team. By asking your customers to provide feedback you make them believe that their opinion is truly valued.
@gor_alexanian Yes, asking your customers for feedback improves their involvement in your product.
Adadot
Probably the most important thing. However, customers are great for problem definition. Not so much for creating solutions. Therefore take suggestions with a pinch of salt and more importantly try to understand the need that is driving them in the first place.
The first step is to identify what needs improved on the product and what is resonating. Customer feedback is very important to get an understanding of this – what is frustrating to customers, what is loved, and what is desired.
You can also look at product analytics to determine feature adoption and funnel progression to determine what's sticky and where users drop off but it's not going to get you the context behind the data or the "why".
With anything that is prioritized, it's important that you're solving a critical need for the end user and that it's validated by the customer. Without customer feedback and a good understanding of the "why" a lot of assumptions are made and you can end up spending a lot of time and energy on features that go unused.
Additionally, as others have pointed out, establishing the feedback loop with customer makes them feel heard and can improve satisfaction, loyalty, and retention when you deliver on their feedback.
A lot of the world's top customer and product-centric companies not only have great systems for collecting and prioritizing customer feedback for product improvement but have also built strong cultures and processes that make the customer a stakeholder in all company decisions.
@maxwell_folley Thanks for your detailed comment.
#CUSTOMER IS KING
Customer feedback is fundamental for any Product. PM/CEO should listen to their customers "ASK". But, I have seen even a good PM miss these points. In a journey of creating innovative products and disruptive ideas, companies forgot to consider this basic fundamental.
I am building products for INDIA and I believe there are two types of PM's exist, first is learned through Top schools and the second is learning through experience. yesterday, I had a meeting with a founder, running an e-commerce business, and he had some 1K downloads, but the reviews and bounce rate was pathetic, I asked him, how much time, he spends while talking with customers, he says hardly an hour in a month. Now, that's the reason, why is not able to understand the customer pain and needs, he himself is not talking with customers, how he can expect from any of his teammates.
Now, I take a local uber ride, to my home, that person has decorated his car, so well, he has Carvaan(radio), fan, chess, and Sudoku as well. Curiously, I asked him, why he has spent so much on his car decor, he said it's because customers get bored while traveling, thus I want to keep them engaged and provide them great customer experience.
#customer feedback most Important
That's probably the single most important thing in developing and deciding the roadmap of the product other than competition analysis and some vivid imagination
Firmbee
As customers are the one's that will use our product, it's the most important thing, for sure.
And it's good to take this into account when launching a new product/startup. What do I mean? You can launch a beta version or even MVP, give it for free and wait a year or two to gather feedback before launching the fee-based version. The positive side effect is that your free beta users very often become paid users.
@piotr_pawlowski Your approach is slow and steady but excellent to build a long-term customer relationship.
Firmbee
@elena_cirera that's true. If it's not a project tha needs to be launched ASAP, then giving it some time will only come with profits.
Notesally 2.0
It is the most important actually. Because we need to develop the product as per the customer needs.
Hey Elena!
From what I have seen and experienced, I feel that customer feedback is of utmost importance when building or improving your product.
Why do we build products or startups in the first place? Isn't it because we want to provide a solution for a problem that the masses face, correct?
Hence I feel that feedback from the users that are actually using your product is very essential when making decisions and would definitely need to play a major role in your product life cycle and evolution.
It's everything to me. I'm happy to be like a boat where the wind is customer. Whatever direction the wind is stronger I go that way.
Obviously I'm doing a certain thing and e.g. I won't start selling nappies in my SaaS but I have absolutely no conservation regarding where the business should go as long as there is strong demand.
Plus we keep building and always give new ways to the customer so that way we follow our long term plans too.
In my experience, counter to what most people may think, B2B companies (especially those that target the enterprise) tend to put more emphasis on getting customer feedback and working closely with customers to figure out what to build or change. In fact a very experienced and successful founder once told me that he'd much rather start an enterprise B2B company than a B2C company because usually you can get the best (actionable) feedback from customers and translate that to revenue growth when your customer is a business. This may be why consumer products have a reputation of being extremely difficult—even if your customers are giving you feedback, they're almost never going to take the time to sit down with you and allow you to really dig in and find out from them how they want to use the product and the problems you can solve for them.
Content Quality Score(E-E-A-T)
Customer feedback can help you refine your product. And if your customer happy, they can reference your product to other customers.
@zhitao_yan Indeed, customer feedback helps refine the product, and an organization can win customers with customers.