Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to get product feedback without having to ask your customers directly. In this article, we’ll explore some of the most popular methods for getting customer feedback and tell you how to set up a system for collecting it.

What is product feedback?

Simply put, product feedback is the information collected from customers about their experiences with your products. It can be anything from general observations (like “this product is great!”) to detailed suggestions for improvements (like “the instructions could be clearer”).

There are also lots of ways that you can collect product feedback. Some of these include online surveys and customer panels, but we’ll get into this a little more below.

Why is product feedback important?

Product feedback allows you to create better customer experiences, which is essential to improving relationships and increasing retention rates.

But how do they help you create better experiences?

Well, they can provide feedback on:

• How customers use your products
• What frictions stop customers from having a positive experience
• How your product could be improved
• What features are missing
• Value for money
• Ease of use

But, we’re only just scratching the surface.

What are the different types of product feedback?

There are a few different types of product feedback that you can collect from your customers. 

1. General observations: These are comments that don’t specifically refer to the functionality or usability of your product. For example, a customer might say “this product is great” or “I love this app!”

2. Compliments: Compliments are comments that compliment your product in some way. For example, “this product is brilliant” or “that interface is genius!”

3. Suggestions for improvements: These are suggestions for changes to the functionality or usability of your product. For example, “I think it would be helpful if the instructions were a bit clearer” or “I didn’t like how the menu bar was positioned – could you change it?”

4. Opinions about your product: These are comments that directly refer to the functionality or usability of your product. For example, “this product is crap” or “I don’t like how this works.”

How do I get product feedback?

There are a few different ways that you can gather customer feedback for your products. However you deice to go about collecting feedback, you’ll want to ensure you collect the names and email addresses of customers who respond.

This will give you the opportunity to reach out once you’ve implemented changes and strengthen your relationship with them.

1. Surveys

Surveys are a great way to collect general observations, compliments, and suggestions for improvements from your customers. The best thing about surveys is their versatility in how you can collect feedback:

• Email surveys
• Embedded on your website
• Popup in app or in product
• Targeting survey panels
• QR codes

There’s also magic in the kinds of surveys you can use to collect product feedback:

Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys allow you to measure customer loyalty, but are also a space where you can ask for comments or recommendations for products.

There are also broader customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, where you have room to ask for much more in-depth feedback.

Another example would be customer effort score (CES) surveys, which ask customers how difficult it was to complete different tasks in relation to your products, websites, or support.

You’ll need to think carefully about the kind of surveys you create, as there can be adverse effects. Long surveys can cause survey fatigue, which can negatively impact your relationships with customers.

2. Focus groups and interviews

Focus groups allow for more controlled and personalized research scenario, as you’re feedback comes from a smaller group of subjects. You can find focus groups using online resources, or you can contact local businesses and ask if they would be willing to participate in a focus group.

Of course, you could also use a survey panel (as mentioned above) to target respondents around the world and collect honest and insightful feedback.

3. Customer testimonials

The benefits of customer testimonials are two-fold. Firstly, you can collect positive product feedback that lets you know you’re on the right track.

Secondly, customer testimonials are a powerful marketing tool that act as social proof to prospects and leads.

If you’re not sure where to start, here are a few ways you can collect customer testimonials:

• Check your support tickets for positive experiences.
• Ask your longest serving customers.
• Take a look at review sites like Yelp, G2, and Capterra.
• Use NPS surveys to identify your advocates.

4. Forums

Forums give you access to a much larger community of people who may have had experience with your product. If you have a forum set up for your customers, this is the best place to start when collecting product feedback.

But don’t fret if you don’t have your own forum, there are plenty of general communities you can go to.

Forum sites like Reddit and Quora have an abundance of users who are passionate about a variety of topics. Simply search your product or brand name, or start a thread asking for feedback.

5. Customer support

We’ve already mentioned your customer support system as a resource for collecting customer testimonials, but it’s also an accessible source of product feedback.

There are a few ways you can go about this.

Firstly, ask your customer support team to share product feedback surveys with customers willing to contribute by email or in a live chat.

Secondly, take a look at the most asked questions or common complaints in your help desk software. We use HelpScout, which gives an overview of the above and also what our most searched for and read help docs are.

You can then conclude what about your product needs to be addressed to improve customer experiences.

6. Customer reviews

Similarly to testimonials, customer reviews are another excellent source of customer feedback. They can provide less detail, but often include both the Pros and Cons on a customer’s experience.

You can find customer reviews on websites like Yelp and Google, or you can contact local businesses and ask if they would be willing to contribute customer reviews.

Try getting in touch with customers who’ve left a review on these third-party sites for more information (and to try improve their experience).

7. Social media

You’ll have a whole host of customers who follow you on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to tap into. If you only have a single question to ask, post that to your social profile and wait for feedback to roll in.

If you have more than one question, we’d recommend creating a product feedback survey and then sharing the link with your followers. This will make it easier to collect and store all the answers to your questions in one place.

8. Involve your team

Product feedback doesn’t just have to come from customers, your team members will also have valuable comments about your products.

You could do this as part of a team meeting, or simply create a survey and share it with team members by email or with QR codes placed around the office.

Now that you know how to get product feedback, it’s time to set up your system for collecting it. Here are four steps that will help you get started:

When can you collect product feedback?

Products and services are now so diverse that product feedback can apply to a lot of things.

1. Post-purchase

Collecting feedback after a customer has made a first-time purchase of renewal can give you essential insight into why they’ve chosen your product (or why they’ve chosen to stay).

This is the time where these reasons will be strongest in their mind, and you’ll want to take advantaged of that.

2. End of free trial

During the trial phase, leads will be looking at every feature and tool you have on offer and putting them under the microscope.

Asking for feedback at the end of a free trial will give you an understanding of what factors into their decision making.

3. Cancellation

We don’t need to tell you that it’s important to know why is customer is leaving. When they cancel a subscription or they don’t show interest in a product that’s perfect for them, you need to find out what’s happened.

4. Abandoned carts

Abandoned carts are a fantastic way of identifying key frictions with customers, those final thoughts that stop them from making a purchase.

Gathering product feedback at this milestone allows you to remove that friction and convert more leads into customers.

5. After onboarding

Similarly to free trials, customer onboarding allows leads to critically analyze your product before making a decision. The best thing about the is that your customer support or onboarding agent can ask for feedback at the tail end of the session.

6. Feature satisfaction

You should be collecting product feedback on your current features, and especially in the days following the deployment of a new feature.

Doing so will give you an idea of how these features are being used and whether there is a enough information available on them.

7. Feature requests

These are a huge indicator for what your customers think is missing from your product, and so naturally should be taken seriously.

However, they’re also a sign that your customers want to stick around. Think about it, they could easily find a competitor who already offers that feature.

So make sure to thank them for their suggestion and deliver on it as soon as possible.

8. Product usability

This is a extremely important factor for ensuring good customer experiences. You can ask customers for this feedback at anytime with a user experience survey.

Just don’t wait too long to ask, you want your product to be fresh in their mind when giving feedback.

How to analyze product feedback

Once you’ve collected product feedback, it’ll be time to analyze all your data. This involves tracking which products receive the most compliments, suggestions for improvements, and opinions about your product.

This information can help you to improve your products and increase customer engagement.

1. Look at the data

The first step is to look at the data. This means taking all of the information that you’ve gathered and compiling it into a report. You’ll want to look at things like:

• How many people gave feedback?
• What percentage of feedback was positive/ negative.
• What was the most common issue that customers raised?
• Where do your customers feel your strongest points are?
• What makes your product stand out from your competitors?
• What distribution method collected the most feedback? (e.g., email, web form, customer support)

2. Look for patterns and trends

Once you have all of the data in front of you, it’s worth looking for patterns and trends. This will help you understand where your weaknesses are and how you can improve them.

This is easy to achieve with quantitative data, as you can use filters and comparisons to create these views.

If you’ve asked open-ended questions, you’ll need to find a create way of analyzing qualitative feedback.

3. Decide on a strategy

After you’ve analyzed the data and found patterns and trends, it’s time to come up with a strategy. This will involve figuring out what you need to do in order to improve your product.

It’s important to open a line of communication with the customers who gave you feedback. Let them know they’ve been heard and you’re working on the improvements they’ve recommended.

4. Implement the strategy

Once you’ve come up with a strategy, it’s time to implement it. This means taking all of the data that you’ve gathered and putting it into practice. You’ll want to make sure that you’re doing everything possible to improve your product.

Wrapping up

Gathering product feedback is an important part of your product development process. By analyzing all of the data that you’ve collected, you’ll be able to improve your product and increase customer engagement.

The post How to Get Product Feedback appeared first on Shout.com.

• What is a customer testimonial?
  • What is the difference between reviews and testimonials?
  • Why are customer testimonials powerful?
  • What makes a good customer testimonial?
• How to get customer testimonials
  • 1. Create a survey to collect customer testimonials
  • 2. Use customer support
  • 3. Search on social media
  • 4. Send an email campaign
  • 5. Ask for customer testimonials on your website
  • 6. Check your blog for relevant comments
  • 7. Swap testimonials with other businesses
  • 8. Offer something in exchange for a customer testimonial
• Wrapping up

Customer testimonials are a great way to show prospective customers what others have said about your product or service.

What is a customer testimonial?

A customer testimonial is a detailed endorsement of your products or services that help potential customers make buying decisions.

Testimonials are often written in a Q&A format to allow prospects to scan through and find the answers to their own questions. Some of the most frequently asked questions for testimonials are:

• Why did you choose our product or service?
• What was life like before you purchased?
• What is life like after you purchased?
• What problems have been solved by purchasing our product or service?

Additionally, you can record customers and share video testimonials as well.

Whether you’re a business owner or a marketer, you should seek out opportunities to collect testimonials from happy customers. It’s important to note that you can’t use a testimonial as promotional material without permission from that customer.

What is the difference between reviews and testimonials?

Whilst testimonials are similar to online reviews, there is a notable difference between the two. Customer reviews are often opinions or experiences, shared on third-party review sites.

Whereas testimonials are an in-depth account of how a product or service has benefited the person writing it. These testimonials are then written up as copy and posted somewhere for people to find.

Why are customer testimonials powerful?

When launching a new website or marketing a product, it’s essential to show prospects that you are is loved by people like them.

Testimonials act as social proof, offering real insight into the tangible benefits of choosing you. They’re especially good for customers who only need a little nudge to make a purchase.

These are people who’ve already read through your sales copy, compared you to other businesses, and evaluated your pricing. All they need is confirmation from people who were in the same boat as them to take the plunge.

What makes a good customer testimonial?

For customer testimonials to be effective tools for converting leads, they should meet these criteria.

They’re genuine

Because testimonials are endorsements of your product or service, they have to be written by real people with real experience. Not only are fake testimonials unethical, but people will see right through them. It’s not difficult for a potential customer to look people up on LinkedIn and check the testimonial is genuine.

They’re positive

For a testimonial to work in your favor they have to put your business in a positive light. This is where finding people to give testimonials is really important, as not everyone is going to give glowing feedback. You want to find your most loyal customers or those you’ve had the most positive experiences with when providing support. We’ll get more into this a little further down.

They’re positive

Testimonials aren’t fluff pieces, they’re detailed accounts of how your product or service has directly benefited other customers. They’re your customer success stories.

You have to ensure you’re asking specific questions about customer experiences that will convince others to pull the trigger and make a purchase. Remember, that the aim here is to increase sales.

How to get customer testimonials

To get started, make a list of all your owned properties you can use to reach out to customers. These are things like:

• Social media profiles
• Customer support system
• Websites
• Email lists
• Blogs and forums

This is where your communities are, and where you’ll find those willing to give you an endorsement.

Now, let’s get stuck into the best way to get customer testimonials.

1. Create a survey to collect customer testimonials

Surveys are the most effective tool for collecting feedback, including customer testimonials.

You only need to write survey questions that address your customer’s experience, and they can provide specific and truthful feedback.

And as you’ll likely be writing up your testimonial in a Q&A format, half the work is already done for you.

The major benefit of this is that all your responses will be stored in a single place, allowing for easy access and analysis.

Using a tool like Shout, you can fully customize your surveys and share them wherever your audience may be. Here are a few examples:

• Send surveys to your customer email lists.
• Share surveys on social media.
• Include links in your customer support emails.
• Embed surveys on your website.
• Trigger surveys as pop-ups or slideouts.

With Shout’s CRM, you can even target your most loyal or most engaged customers and ask them for a testimonial directly.

All you’d need to do is filter your contacts by previous feedback (e.g., an NPS survey) or by the number of emails they’ve opened.

Piece of cake.

2. Use customer support

Customer support channels present a few creative ways you can get customer testimonials.

Firstly, they put you in touch with those who use your product or service most often, meaning these customers have already got the know-how. Secondly, providing good customer service builds loyalty, which qualifies these customers to give you positive feedback.

But you have to avoid sending blanket requests for testimonials. It’s rare a customer has submitted a support ticket with a wholly positive experience.

Be sure to resolve their issue first, providing excellent support along the way, and then ask for a testimonial. In doing so, they’ll feel you’ve already gone above and beyond for them, and won’t feel put out when you ask for something in return.

3. Search on social media

It’s likely that you’ll already be tracking brand mentions on social media to stay up to date on the public opinion of your business.

This presents a unique opportunity to get in touch with people who have positive things to say about your product or service.

They’re already advocating for your business, and so will be more willing to spend the time to do this for you.

If you’re not already tracking your brand mentions, all you’d need to do is search your brand name on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Then find the more positive comments and reach out.

It’s as simple as that.

4. Send an email campaign

Let’s not forget about one of your most important resources, your email subscribers. These are people who have agreed to be contacted by you and are more likely to want to provide feedback.

But again, you don’t want to send out a blanket request to every contact on your email list. This will likely be jarring for them, especially if they haven’t heard from you in a while.

Instead, you want to time these requests with a recent interaction or milestone in the customer journey. Here are a few suggestions:

• After a first-time purchase
• Subscribed to software for 6 months
• An account logged into 10 times

Remember, you’ll only want to ask for a testimonial after a positive interaction.

The only downside to this method is that you’ll be collecting customer testimonials in bulk via email. That’s a lot of text that may be formatted in a wide variety of ways being sent to a general inbox.

We’d recommend creating a survey and sending this by email invitation. This allows you to reach your contacts in the same efficient manner but also ensures that responses are optimized to suit your needs.

Not only can you receive email notifications each time a testimonial is submitted, but you can also filter and compare testimonials.

5. Ask for customer testimonials on your website

Websites are where the majority of customers will go to get new information about your products or services. These methods are more passive than what we’ve discussed so far, but can still be a great source of testimonials.

Embed a form on your website

Much like surveys, forms allow you to ask for testimonials in a more structured way. With tools like Shout, you build forms and embed them on your website (without slowing down your page speed).

Use pop-ups to collect testimonials

Another viable way of collecting testimonials on your website is to have it pop up for visitors. This could be on a specific page or after they spend a certain amount of time on your site.

Add notifications to your website

Notifications are similar to pop-ups, but they tend to be a little more discreet. As you’re asking for feedback, it’s probably best to do so in a way that causes less friction on the page.

6. Check your blog for relevant comments

The comment section of your blog can also be a treasure trove for customer testimonials. Of course, not all comments are going to be the best fit. But, this is an excellent way of finding testimonials without having to perform outreach.

This also allows you to link back to the content the comment was left on. Which may encourage potential customers to read the content your customers were such a big fan of.

You can’t rely on readers to leave comments without prompting, so you may want to round off your post with a little call to action. Something along the lines of: ” Have any of these tips helped you? If so, let us know in the comments.”

Even if the comment itself isn’t of use, it might be worth reaching out to the person who left it. As they’ve provided positive feedback before, they may be willing to do so again.

7. Swap testimonials with other businesses

Swapping testimonials with other businesses can be a great way of getting a wider range of opinions. This can be done by posting a request on social media or in that business’s blog comments, or even by contacting them directly.

These are especially useful if you’re a B2B business. Where your potential customers want to see that your product or service works well for other businesses.

In this case, you might want to consider creating a case study instead.

The best way to approach this is to write a testimonial for someone else, let them know about it, and ask them to do the same for you.

Be sure that testimonials are genuine on both ends. It’s essential that you both have experience in each other’s products or services for them to to be useful.

8. Offer something in exchange for a customer testimonial

Just like when you use lead magnets to convert leads, you can offer something to encourage customers to write a testimonial. If you’re a SaaS company, you could consider extending the subscriptions free of charge for customers who submit testimonials.

Offering discount coupons is something that would work for any business model.

If you’re running a blog, consider offering exclusive content to your most loyal readers.

Wrapping up

Testimonials are essential to building customer trust, especially if you share them in the right places. Here are a few suggestions of where to post them:

• Publish direct quotes on your website
• Write testimonials up as blog posts
• Build customer testimonial landing pages
• Embed social media testimonials on your website
• Create case studies
• Record a video testimonial

Remember, you must ask customer to user their testimonials. They may be more than happy to give you feedback, but not want their personal information shared online.

Hopefully, this all helps you collect customer testimonials. Get in touch if any of our tips worked for you, or if you have anything to add to the list.

The post How To Get Customer Testimonials For Your Business appeared first on Shout.com.