5 Great Ways to Get Customer Feedback

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You have a product (or two or three). You have customers (good for you!). You even have users (cool!). Now you want to get some feedback from your customers and users so that you can make sure you have some good field data to help with ongoing feature prioritization.

But where to start?

Do not despair. This post will provide some tried and true techniques for getting customer feedback. And I guarantee you’ll have fun in the process!

Leverage Support

Your support staff talks to customers all day long. They have a good grasp on where users are getting stuck, what features would help users get their work done more easily, and what’s broken. Develop a feedback mechanism between customer support and product management that works for you. It might be as informal as a weekly walk-by or as sophisticated as a ticketing system where items are logged, reviewed, and added to the backlog as appropriate.

Do remember that the customer/user sample that calls customer support is not necessarily representative of the population as a whole. Use this information as one of your inputs, not the only one.

Visit Your Customers

There is no better way to know what is going on with individual customers/users than to visit them in their “natural habitat.” Not only will you understand how they are using your product, you will also learn how they are not using certain features (”I didn’t know you could do that…”), and discover creative workarounds. 

Your primary objective when you visit a customer is to listen and observe. Listen to their internal business strategies and think about how you can help. Observe users as they navigate through your product to complete daily tasks and note where they stumble. One afternoon with a customer will provide you more information than you get in a month sitting in your office.    

Create a Customer Council

This sounds hard and like a lot of work, right? It’s not. All you need is 5-10 customers, a half day four times per year, a phone, and application sharing software. The purpose of the customer council is twofold. First, it communicates to your customer base that you care about customer feedback and value their input. Second, it is a great opportunity for you to vet new ideas, priorities, and meet cool people.

Here are some ideas for what yo might cover customer council meeting:

• Feedback on the latest release.
• Listen to customer speak about current business problems that you may be able to solve.
• Upcoming priorities (let council vote on some portion of an upcoming release).
• New feature ideas + feedback.

Focus less on hefty PowerPoint presentations and more on lively discussion. Treat this group right and they will become your cheerleading squad.

Online Feedback Form

Feedback is most fresh in users’ minds when they are actually in the process of using your product. Why not provide them with a way right in the product to provide feedback? A simple feedback form can be added to your product in a small amount of time (I don’t care what your dev team tells you) and is a great way to get instantaneous feedback. Take some time upfront to make sure you are asking good questions and make sure to provide a text box for free-form comments.

Don’t Forget the Survey

As you talk individually with customers and other stakeholders, you will note down ideas for features and eventually put them in a product backlog or requirements document for prioritization. The problem is, you don’t know if the person you talked to is the only one who wants the feature or if 100 other customers would find it valuable as well. This is where the survey comes in. While individual customer interviews are referred to as “qualitative” research, surveys fall into the “quantitative” research category. Time to validate those priorities!

Setting up good surveys is a whole topic in itself, so I won’t get into the details here. Bottom line: make sure that the questions and options make sense. Also, make sure you can aggregate the results in some meaningful way. Finally, have a colleague review your survey before you send the link out to 10,000 customers.

You’re all set!

One more thing: Don’t forget that you should talk to potential customers as well. This is the best way to ensure that your product will grow and prosper in an ever-evolving marketplace. Several of the above approaches will also work for potential customer research.