How to Act on Product Feedback
Collecting, analyzing and prioritizing insights are an important part of feedback management. However, even the best feedback will not add value if you don’t act on it.
Asking your customers for their opinion on your product is a cornerstone of Product Management. But what happens after you have asked them? What do you do with all the collected product feedback? It is one thing (and not a small one) to analyze all the valuable insights, but how do you act on product feedback?
Here are the most important things to keep in mind when acting on feedback. After all, feedback is only as good as the actions you derive from it.
Share the Feedback
Regardless of how many people were involved in the process so far, it is now time to share it with all the relevant parties. Of course, this includes the whole product team. But also for the Customer Support team and Marketing and Sales departments, this information will be relevant.
Sharing it can be done either via email, Slack, or any other official way of communication in your company.
You can share feedback in real-time. However, we recommend sending it out summarized in set intervals, such as daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on the amount of feedback.
Derive Actionable Tasks
When your customers give you feedback on your product, they expect you to do something with it. Especially if you actively asked for it.
Take the categorized and analyzed feedback to your team. Regularly scheduled meetings are a suitable form for that. The meetings can either focus solely on feedback management, or the topic can be integrated into other regularly occurring meetings.
Discuss the feedback with your team. Show what your customers have to say about your product, discuss what you can do to improve it, and add it to your product roadmap. Whether it is a new feature, a bug report, or a feature update or improvement, you now have the data to back up your decisions and prioritizations and, therefore, can build a product that your customers will love to use.
Communicate the Roadmap
The feedback you receive will unlikely always require the same expenditure of time or workload. Sometimes you will have a solution for your customers right away. While other times it will take some time to integrate it into your product plans.
Either way, it is important to let your customers know that you have received their feedback and are looking into it. When you decide to act on feedback let the feedbackers know you do. Also, give them an approximate time frame and update them on your progress status.
The most transparent way to do this is by creating a roadmap. This doesn’t have to be a super fancy, well-designed document. It, of course, can be, but in most cases, a simple table that is divided into “planned”, “in progress”, and “done” is sufficient for your customers to know where they stand.
If you are using a product feedback tool, you will already have a roadmap integrated into it that automatically includes feedback in the roadmap according to the status you set. The tool covers your entire communication regarding feedback with your customers.
If you are not using feedback software, you can provide the roadmap to your customers on your website, changelog, or any other platform that is easy to access for them.
Conclusion
Take your time when choosing the right feedback method. Make sure the timing is right. Talk to other departments like support and development so that the feedback you’ve painstakingly collected doesn’t get left behind somewhere.
All data must be stored and analyzed in a central location. It is the only way to ensure that you don’t miss valuable feedback. That way, you can ensure that you and your team develop a product that meets your customers’ needs and that they love to use.
Even though it can seem overwhelming at first, collecting customer feedback is an important part of your product improvement process. By asking for feedback proactively or supplying your customers with a feedback page, your business will increase your customer satisfaction.
Besides preventing churn and engaging customers, it helps you to prioritize internally. Remember that product feedback requires a continuous process to improve your product in the long run.
