What can product feedback do for a product team?

Collating and addressing user feedback on the product is a significant, albeit overlooked, part of any product management role. Product feedback and user reviews can be a game-changer for product teams and by taking the time to listen to what customers have to say, you can gain valuable insights that can help you improve your product and better serve your target audience.

 Whether it's identifying areas for improvement, coming up with new and exciting features, or just getting a better understanding of your customers' needs and preferences, customer feedback is like a roadmap that can guide you on the path to success. However, product feedback and user reviews are usually scattered across platforms. This often makes it difficult for product managers to make the best use of all the product feedback they might receive.

As we look into how to bridge this gap in the upcoming blogs, let us delve further into how product feedback can come in handy for product teams:

 

1. Low feature modification risk and new feature ideas:

Customer feedback gives product managers important insights related to the problems customers are facing with the existing features, the new features customers are expecting, potential bugs, UI/UX related issues. Most of these issues can be identified early in the pipeline through customer feedback, making the solutions low risk and low cost. 

Product managers can seldom continuously innovate and develop new features out of thin air. They need to understand which features will help their customers better. Product managers often generate feature requests from customer feedback. Customer feedback can help in developing new features by helping PMs understand what exactly customers are expecting. Developing and introducing these new features becomes a low-risk process, since there is no worry as to how these new features will be perceived by customers as the feature requests are generated from customer feedback.
 

2. Understanding customer pain points:

One of the most important reasons why product managers should pay close attention to customer feedback is because it helps them understand their customers better. Customer feedback provides important insights on the problems customers are facing with the product, if these problems are not rectified time to time, customer churn rate increases, and the product loses goodwill. Product managers should constantly analyze customer feedback to understand customer pain points and incrementally develop their product according to customer needs.
 

3. Prioritizing feature requests:

Product managers receive a large number of feature requests from customer reviews, but it is not feasible to implement all of them due to budget, time, and resource allocation constraints. Thus, it is extremely important to prioritize these feature requests to implement the best ones. Feature requests can be prioritized based on a few factors:
 

In demand features

Understand which features are in more demand by the customers, to do this we can rank the feature requests based on the number of customers that requested them and implement the ones with the highest rating. This would result in companies implementing the best features according to the customers amongst the ones available.

In-depth competitor analysis:

We can perform a thorough competitor analysis to understand which features our competitors are implementing. We can also go through customer reviews of competitors to understand how users are perceiving these features and if it is viable for us to implement said feature.
 

4. Customer Satisfaction:  

When product managers understand customer pain points from feedback and try to relieve them, it leads to customer satisfaction. Customer feedback can be measured and is of two types:

- Qualitative feedback:

Customer reviews, conversations with customers, feedback on social media through posts and stories, all of these come under qualitative customer feedback. It is when customers verbally give feedback.

- Quantitative feedback:

This type of feedback can be used to numerically measure customer satisfaction. One such important metric is NPS.

 

Img source - Survicate

 

5. Informed decision making: 

Customer reviews help product managers make informed decisions about their product. These decisions include bug fixing, feature request prioritization, new feature implementation, UI/UX modifications, rectifying service-related issues etc. Customer feedback not only helps product managers but also other customers, customers can make informed decisions by reading other customers' experiences with the product. Displaying customer reviews in key locations reinforces trust in new customers, improves the credibility of the product and helps in making the buying decision.

 

Conclusion

Customer feedback is incredibly important for product managers to closely understand their customers and their pain points. The opportunity cost of not considering insights from customer feedback is too high, it leads to high customer churn rate and a drastic increase in the competitors market share. Customer feedback helps product managers to make low risk feature modifications, to generate and implement new feature and product ideas, to understand customer pain points better, to prioritize the multitude of feature requests they receive, to gauge customer satisfaction by analyzing both qualitative and quantitative customer feedback and finally to make informed decisions.

Analyzing customer feedback helps product managers bring the company closer to customer centricity. With the technology available today product managers can leverage AI and ML based SaaS platforms to collect, structure and analyze customer feedback with ease and in very little time. Product managers can use these tools to generate meaningful insights from customer reviews and understand the user sentiment better. They can later organize this data and generate reports to share with multiple silos of the organization.