How to Improve Your Software With Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is invaluable. It enables any business to grow by satisfying its most important ally — the customer. It then becomes easier for companies to understand customers’ wants, expectations and dissatisfaction. A recent Salesforce report reveals that 89 percent of business customers expect businesses to understand their needs and expectations. By aligning their products to this feedback, companies will be better placed to improve product experience and manage customer experience. In this article, we will discover the best ways of gathering customer feedback and then what to do with it. Let’s get started.

How to Gather Customer Feedback

So, how do you gather customer feedback to enhance your software products? Here are some proven ways of doing it.

• Customer Support Feedback

Your customer support team interacts with your customers more often. Provide them a channel to organise this feedback & group it into multiple themes. Even if the feedback is coming unstructured (like a chat support channel), set up a process to get it into the system.

• Transactional Emails

You can also take advantage of product upgrades and sign ups to gather customer feedback. This gathering is possible through transactional emails that arise from your team’s interactions with users. You can use them to foster stronger interactions with customers and keep them closer to the company. They are best used to collect feedback when you want to gain timely insight into what your customers feel without shooting excess questions at them.

• Reporting Bugs & Feature Requests

Also, you can use bug-reporting or fixing opportunities to gather user feedback. Structure your approach by using a help desk software. Use product roadmap to gather customer interest (via votes & comments). There are plenty of product roadmap & customer feedback softwares out there.

• Phone Calls

Also, if you are providing support over telephone, it can be a resourceful channel for customer feedback. Calls are generally useful since they have a personal touch. The emotion behind the voice will be immediately palpable to your support team. Reaching out to customers is also a possibility. However, you have to know the best timing for such calls. For instance, numerous studies show that customers are more responsive to such calls between 8 am and 8 am. Alternatively, you can reach them between 4 pm and 5 pm.
Moreover, this method works well if you are dealing with users who understand your area of operation well, and hence, can give you actionable feedback. Also, use it when targeting a few people at a given time.

• Cancellation Surveys

This last method is the most dreaded because it’s painful to watch your customer stop using your products. This cancellation is even more bitter when they do so to embrace your competitor. However, these are great opportunities to learn, correct, and improve. You can take advantage of cancellations and ask them to tell you what they want you to change or improve.

What You Can Do With Customer Feedback

So, what can you do with your customer feedback? Here are ways you can use it profitably irrespective of whether it’s positive or negative.

• Product Improvement

First, listening to and acting on customer feedback enables you to see those features of your software that require improvement. It lets you understand weaknesses and eliminate them while consolidating its strengths.

• Enhanced Customer Involvement and Appreciation

Your customer is your number one ally in the fight to win in the marketplace. Therefore, make them know and feel that they are involved in the process. Also, they should feel they’re important. Unfortunately, most software developers assume that displaying catchy and clever clichés will makes customer a part of their endeavors. However, people can sense when someone genuinely appreciates them. Asking your customers for feedback and then using it to improve their experience makes them feel you appreciate them.

• Retained Patronage

Lastly, feedback helps to retain happy customers. Remember, a customer who patronizes your products is most likely to refer them to their families and friends.

There you go. We’ve just touched the process of getting started on gathering, analysing & implementing customer suggestions in your software. The ball is in your court to use it advantageously to catapult your software solutions to the peak.