What is user feedback

“The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.” – Steven Levitt

The user is the most indispensable entity for any business. Moreover, learning what your users want is important for your business’s growth. And the only way to do that is to master the art of user feedback. How to collect user feedback? How to analyze it? are some questions we have to answer before we can make the most of user feedback.

So, today we will do just that! Let’s answer some of the most pressing questions related to user feedback.

What is user feedback?

User feedback refers to the opinions, comments, and suggestions of the users of a product.

Feedback helps a business identify problem areas, address issues, and make informed decisions. Further, user feedback can be both positive and negative. Thus, it provides valuable information on what works well and what we need to change.

Why is user feedback important?

Be it any business, it is necessary to collect user feedback. And we have more than a few reasons to share with you.

Customer-Centric approach

User feedback puts your users at the center of all your strategies. It assists businesses to understand their target audience. Moreover, businesses can understand their users’ pain points. And so, businesses can make products tailored to user expectations.

Product improvement

Creating and launching a product is only the first step. There are many iterations and changes that transform the product. And user feedback is instrumental in all these changes. Feedback helps a business get closer to perfecting the product for its users.

Furthermore, feedback helps with prioritizing changes, fixing bugs, feature additions, and much more. It helps in bringing your product into the real world which helps in solving real-time issues.

Enhancing user experience

Practicing active listening to users’ opinions helps optimize the user experience. Further, adapting feedback makes the product intuitive. And the more easy and enjoyable the process is, the more user retention.

Innovation

Feedback has two roles here. The first is to help in idea generation. Users can contribute by suggesting useful features and changes.

And the second is streamlining the innovation process. The development team will have several ideas on their plate. But it is near impossible to execute them at once. But, that’s where feedback helps a business in prioritizing innovation. Thus, businesses can choose what to do first based on the impact it will have on users. 

Building trust

For a successful business, long-lasting user relationships are crucial. And for that, trust is essential.

When users see that businesses value and act on their feedback, it fosters trust. This means user feedback is the key to happy customers. And happy customers become the biggest brand advocates promoting organic growth.

What is the best way to collect user feedback?

Now that we have covered the importance of user feedback, let’s hop into how to collect user feedback.

Surveys

You can create survey forms to gauge user experience and understand problem areas.

Objective questions are helpful to collect data about a specific feature or part of the user journey. Whereas, subjective questions leave room for open-ended answers. This helps with gaining extra insights into the user persona.

In-app or website feedback forms

You can opt to collect feedback after a specific action on the website or application. It can provide fresh and to-the-point data related to a specific point in the user journey. This type of feedback helps a business perfect user experience, one part at a time.

Interviews and focus groups

If your aim is to gain a broad understanding of your target audience, this is helpful. This type of feedback will give you insights into the topic of your questionnaire.

Furthermore, it will also help you collect non-verbal cues, extra insights, etc.

Moreover, interviews and focus groups will help in understanding complex aspects of development.

Social media listening

You can track social media channels to understand what people say about your brand. Social media listening tools help track user sentiments and feedback on public forums.

User feedback tools

Specialized tools like Feedback help in collecting feedback in various forms. You can collect text and video feedback with Feedspace. Further, you can use it to collect user feedback for various purposes.

Website analytics

You can analyze website data like user behavior, navigation patterns, conversion rates, etc.

This provides data-driven answers to users’ needs. Moreover, it increases traffic and engagement and provides a better experience.

All these various methods serve a unique purpose for collecting feedback. Thus, there is no way to choose the right way to collect user feedback. But, finding the best method for you by considering your needs gives a better outcome.

How to ask users for feedback?

There is no ‘one shoe fits all’ solution to this answer. But, there are some guidelines for effective feedback collection.

Clear objectives

Make sure that you are clear on the purpose of the feedback campaign. Is it to understand the performance of a specific feature? Or is it to gain an in-depth understanding of the users’ requirements?

Deciding the end goal to collect user feedback, helps in creating clear questions. The more precise the questionnaire, the more beneficial the feedback will be.

Timing

Feedback helps a business refine its process. Hence, the more authentic response we receive, the better. When you ask for feedback, affects how accurate the feedback is. If we ask users for feedback after a long time, they may not be able to recall the exact experience.

Moreover, if they don’t remember the scenario well, they won’t be able to give proper feedback. And this makes the feedback campaign less effective.

Hence, ask for feedback as soon as your users have completed the task in question. 

Suitable feedback method

For some situations a simple binary feedback system is suitable. Whereas, other scenarios may call for a multiple rating. Or for some situations, video feedback is more appropriate.

Find out which way to collect user feedback is most suitable to your objectives. A proper way to collect feedback can increase the quantity and quality of the responses.

Keep it short

Our users have their own busy lives. If your feedback form contains 20 questions, there is a chance you will receive fewer answers.

Furthermore, long forms can affect the authenticity of the responses. Hence, prioritize your requirements before framing questions. It will help businesses create crisp feedback campaigns.

Make it clear

Your users should not have to sit beside a dictionary to answer your questions. Thus, to collect user feedback that is authentic, we need to keep the questions simple. Technical jargon or complicated sentence structures can confuse users. Thus, try to keep it as simple as possible.

If your questions do not take up a lot of mental space, you can receive more responses. And thus, you have an adequate data set to draw conclusions from the feedback.

Personalize it

Feedback helps a business in growing. But at the same time, it can get tedious for users to keep answering these questions. It is tiring for our users to go through the same drill again.

Adding a touch of personalization breaks the rut. Further, it increases the quality of responses. Adding a human touch to your feedback campaigns helps in resonating with your users.

Follow-up

Only collecting feedback is not enough. Our users need to know how their feedback helps a business. We need to let them know that you are paying attention to their opinions.

So, the journey of feedback collection does not end with receiving a response. It is crucial to acknowledge the feedback we receive. Furthermore, we can inform our users about the steps we’ve taken to use their feedback.

How to collect user feedback and analyze it?

In this blog, we have discussed the various feedback collection methods. But, we need to also find out how to execute these methods.

There are various tools that can help us increase the efficiency of the feedback process. Tools like Feedspace, SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, etc. can help us collect and manage feedback.

Feedspace provides a set of features that enables you to collect user feedback in many ways.

Text Feed feature:

With Feedspace’s text feed feature, you can collect binary and subjective responses. Moreover, you can also embed the feature in your website. This type of feedback helps a business get direct answers from its users. You can also conduct surveys by sharing links to the text feed you have created.

Video Feed feature:

Feedspace’s video feed feature enables businesses to collect video responses. This means you won’t have to look for different tools for various types of feedback. You can use this to collect responses for video interviews, collect testimonials, etc.

You can also promote this video content on social media and your website to build trust.

Analyzing feedback

There are various tools that can help you decode the feedback you receive. You can track positive and negative binary responses you receive on the dashboard. Moreover, you can also get sentiment analysis for the text responses you receive.

This can help you gain a better understanding of the users’ needs. Furthermore, it makes it easier for you to create an action plan for the videos you receive.

How can user feedback help a business?

There are various aspects of a business where the user perspective is crucial. And that’s what we will see here. Here’s how user feedback can help a business.

 Risk mitigation

While deciding the upcoming changes, feature additions, etc., we analyze risks. Now, understanding the user mindset during risk analysis is helpful for us.

Before making changes to the product, businesses can collect user feedback about it. This will tell them the opinions of the users on potential changes. And now, businesses can analyze risk with real-time user data in hand. 

Data-driven decisions

For any product, there are various unavoidable and important decisions businesses make. Be it bug fixing, feature additions, finalizing product roadmaps, etc., there are more than a few ways to choose from to do it. And with user feedback, you can include your users in the decision-making process. This way, you will have user-generated data to back your decisions.

Marketing

User feedback can tell you how to pitch your product well too. Feedback helps a business identify users’ pain points and also what they like. And businesses can develop a marketing strategy revolving around these aspects. It can help businesses appeal to their target audience.

Customer satisfaction

It is one of the core pillars of a successful business. When it comes to customer satisfaction, there is only one person you should listen to. And that is your user. User feedback also helps to measure customer satisfaction. To make the experience amazing for our users, we need to ask them how.

In conclusion

Business development is incomplete without user feedback. The process of collecting, analyzing, and executing user feedback comes with its challenges. Some of the challenges can be insufficient data, false data, unactionable data, etc.

But, refining and streamlining the process per your needs helps overcome these challenges. Furthermore, asking the right questions helps in getting better and more usable responses.

The entire process can seem long and futile, but it rewards us in spades should we do it well.