Many businesses collect customer feedback, but collecting it is just the first step. You also need a system in place to analyze, categorize, and respond to feedback. Otherwise, feedback won’t help you improve your product and reduce customer churn.
We asked fourteen experts how they manage customer feedback analysis and compiled a list of their responses and compiled them all into this comprehensive guide, just for you. But before we get too granular, let’s first take a closer look at the topic of customer feedback analysis — also referred to as customer feedback sentiment analysis — and why it should be a top priority for any SaaS business.
What Is Customer Feedback Analysis?
Customer feedback analysis is the process of reviewing feedback from individual users, as well as looking for larger trends.This process should also include a way to tag or categorize feedback, so that customer service teams can easily sort feedback and spot important trends.
Why Is Customer Feedback Analysis Important?
If you want to know who your brand loyalists are, who wishes your software had more features, and who is ambivalent about your product, you need to collect and analyze feedback.
Happy customers can bring you new business in the form of referrals, whereas unhappy customers can increase churn. Ongoing customer sentiment analysis can help you resolve problems before they result in lost customers, along with showing you how your SaaS product could be improved.
Reactive vs Proactive Feedback: What’s the Difference?
Customer feedback falls into one of two categories: reactive and proactive. These are the primary differences between the two:
Reactive Feedback
This type of feedback is unsolicited and may include feature requests, social media posts, or reviews on third-party websites. Generally, this type of feedback is either positive or negative, as ambivalent users are unlikely to review or mention a product.
Proactive Feedback
When you reach out to users and ask for their opinions, any responses you receive are proactive feedback. Popular methods of collecting proactive feedback include live chat, in-app surveys, and focus groups.
What Is a Customer Feedback Loop?
A customer feedback loop is a repeatable process consisting of six steps:
- Collect — Gather proactive and reactive feedback.
- Consolidate — Store feedback in a centralized platform.
- Organize — Sort feedback by type, customer profile, sentiment, and other factors.
- Prioritize — Determine which feedback requires action, and when.
- Act — Take action on priority feedback (such as adding a commonly requested feature).
- Follow up — Get proactive feedback about your actions.
For SaaS companies with ongoing customers, this process doesn’t end with step 6 — it repeats throughout the customer lifecycle.
Challenges in Analyzing Customer Feedback
Customer feedback can be difficult to analyze based on its volume, method of delivery, and internal workloads. The main challenges in analyzing customer feedback are:
Multiple feedback channels
When feedback is delivered via email, social media, Google reviews, and other channels, your customer service team may have difficulty keeping up with it.
Feedback quality
Occasionally, feedback is too vague to be actionable. For example, some customers are able to explain that they’re dissatisfied, but they may fail to state why, or what additional functionality they’d like to see in a SaaS product.
Inability to sort feedback by customer type
You probably want to know whether a negative review came from an enterprise-level customer that’s been using your product for years. However, the challenge with multiple feedback channels is that businesses may be unable to integrate feedback with their CRM, which in turn makes it difficult to sort feedback by customer type.
No process in place
A support ticketing system is not sufficient for managing all the various types of feedback a business receives. Without a process in place, valuable customer feedback may be overlooked.
Common Mistakes When Soliciting Feedback
The way businesses ask for feedback has an impact on feedback quality. Following are some common mistakes when requesting feedback:
Limiting feedback requests to specific features
Individuals may use the same SaaS product in different ways, so questions that are too narrow may be irrelevant to certain users.
Not providing a template for responses
When asking for feedback, you may want to ask customers to choose between a predefined list of options — such as a rating of 1 to 5 stars — to ensure you’re getting feedback that you can compare and analyze. Asking open-ended questions, like, “How would you rate our software,” could result in single-word responses, as well as longer responses that can’t be easily categorized.
Failing to personalize requests
Loyal customers expect some degree of personalization, so address them by name when asking for feedback, and make sure the questions you ask are relevant to how they’ve been using your product.
Sending long surveys
Be respectful of your customers’ time — avoid long surveys. Instead, ask for smaller bits of feedback incrementally.
Best Practices for Customer Feedback Analysis
So now that we’ve covered mistakes to avoid, let’s look at some best practices for customer feedback analysis.
Use one platform to track all feedback
With all of your customer feedback in one platform, you can “crunch the numbers” in several ways, spot trends, and see where to focus your efforts. Look for a customer feedback analysis tool that can pull feedback from multiple channels.
Sort and categorize feedback
Sort feedback as you receive it — by customer type, by topic, and by channel, at a minimum.
Look at “neutral” feedback
Neutral feedback has value. It can help you identify product features that need improvement and reveal when customers aren’t truly engaged with your product.
Look for trends
Feedback may reveal that your software needs a new feature, or that the latest version is buggy. As you sort your feedback, common feature requests and user trends should be easy to detect.
Seek in-app feedback
In-app feedback requests let you gather input from users in real-time. As you roll out new features, consider notifying users within the app and getting some high-level feedback.
Work on your timing
It’s important to ask for the right feedback at the right time. For example, you wouldn’t want to ask a new user to rate your support ticket system, but you might want their feedback on the onboarding process.
Ask users to prioritize requests
When users have more than one request, ask them to define the priority of each. It reduces pressure on your team and encourages customers to think strategically about requests.
Analyze the business impact of requests
With the right user relationship management software, you can calculate how the development of specific feature requests would impact your recurring revenue.
Involve your most engaged customers
Ask your most engaged customers to participate in beta-testing new features, or invite them to be part of a customer advisory panel. Loyal customers appreciate being asked for their opinions and may enjoy the opportunity to help you fine-tune your product.
And Now … The Experts!
Now that we’ve covered the reasons you should prioritize customer feedback analysis and shared some strategies on how to do that, it’s time to look at our expert responses. We hope you find this wisdom useful as you look to improve your processes.
Celine Vincent
Before the start of every development cycle, our Product Managers go through Productboard, a platform where we gather all customer insights and feedback. On top of that, we conduct customer interviews to dig deeper and understand current and future needs in the market. We also survey our customers and end users at scale to get the complete picture. All of this gives us a good insight into what our customers need to be successful.
The other important piece of information we use to optimise our product and service, is anonymous usage data from Happeo where we identify trends, paths, gaps and a deeper understanding of how end users consume content on our platform.
The combination of all of the above, gives us the full picture on how and when features should be shaped and implemented.
Tommy Landry
We use an open discussion format to get feedback, on a case-by-case basis. With such a high touch service offering, it's important to get not only feedback but to also read sentiments based on the verbal delivery. So we aim to do a postmortem conversation at the end of projects and time-limited work.
For ongoing services like campaigns, we aim to compare notes actively on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. This way, we not only benchmark our performance, but we are able to build stronger customer relationships that thrive.
Roxy Koranda
Our team has found major value in analyzing customer feedback by conducting usability testing. Customers have a notably different perspective of a product than the people who created it, so our team continually checks in with our customers to see how well they’re understanding changes we’ve made to Brandfolder.
Often paired with open-ended customer feedback discussions, usability testing involves our customers sharing their screens and performing a series of pre-defined tasks. While they navigate through Brandfolder, we encourage them to share their thoughts aloud. We take note of any issues they're having with a task, such as a difficulty finding an element, confusion around terminology, or unexpected system responses and interactions.
To analyze the results of usability testing, we rate how crucial each task is and how disruptive each issue is. We then multiply those by the number of affected users to produce an urgency rating that helps us determine which issues should be tackled first. We find that watching our customers interact with our product gives us a more vivid understanding of how our customers use Brandfolder. It also uncovers opportunities to improve the user experience.
Jonathan Moss
We have a feedback mechanism in our app that indicates a customer's satisfaction and also provides an opportunity for qualitative input about how we can improve their experience.
We also do ongoing discovery interviews with customers in order to glean insights into ways their experience with our platform can be improved.
We have an opportunity landscape that we are constantly evaluating for overall prioritization.
Zari Zahra
Spekit's customers have played an integral role in the development of our product to date and how their challenges align with our vision for the future. They are the people we are solving for, so understanding them both at a quantitative and an empathetic human level is what drives our roadmap.
We regularly connect with customers to gather insights on pain points, goals and how they see the future of learning at work evolving.
We have dedicated feedback loops including beta programs, a customer advisory board and scheduled check-ins. But, we also lean on them for less structured and equally important check-ins that allow us to ensure that everything we do as an organization is driving toward the success of their companies and employees alike.
Blaine Bertsch
As we interact with our clients/partners on a regular basis in our software - we are able to take input/feedback directly and if issues/opportunities are represented well enough - we will work with other areas of our organization to make modifications that have positive impact on our clients.
Typically we will record those sessions so we can better understand and share across the business. This speeds up our process and makes it highly relevant to all involved.
Liz Stephany
Every NPS score and comment is sent to a Slack channel that all members of our team have access to. Comments often contain valuable product feedback written in the customer's own words and showcasing this for non-customer facing team members has sparked a number of ideas for product improvements.
Then, as a customer success team, we respond to every comment with more information or troubleshooting or a thank you and a request to give us a positive review on G2 Crowd.
All product feedback from NPS is also logged in Airtable (along with product feedback taken from support tickets or CS conversations) for us to best analyze product trends over time.
We find that actively responding in this way to NPS has turned it from a lagging metric to a leading one.
Andy Crestodina
Call them all!
We literally call every client after their project is complete and ask the tough questions. It's not the Project Manager. It's the Client Success Manager, so the client feels comfortable giving direct feedback.
After several years of asking every single client "what could we have done better" we've learned a lot about our own process from their perspective. It is enlightening.
Of all the metrics in our marketing, the client feedback metrics are both the hardest to gather and the most important. As usual, there is an inverse relationship between the visibility of a metric and its importance.
Jillian
After running customer feedback surveys, we analyze data trends and specific input on how our customers use our features and what they want from our product, and then do follow-up qualitative interviews with customers.
Roxanne Bullard
At Truckstop.com, we compile feedback across multiple product lines from various sources that captures both solicited feedback, in the form of Satisfaction surveys, onboarding assessments, etc, as well as unsolicited feedback in the form of product chats, support calls, and customer and industry forums-looking outside of your company "walls" allows the opportunity to gain great competitive intel and brand perception.
From there, we combine the feedback together with usage data. This creates a big picture view of "what they say" + "what they do" = better understanding of the problems we need to solve for.
Ganesh Rathore
Our customer success team constantly runs various kind of surveys, In the transportation industry we found a gap in educated fleet managers. So, we took a step and launched Fleetx academy for our customers.
Shankar Shethe
We calculate "Customer Effort Score" – CES – How hard it is for people to use our product?
It’s used to measure the easiness-of-use of our product and product engagement. The easier the product to use is, the better the customer satisfaction will be.
It’s usually measured with one simple question and a couple of predefined answers.
Unlike other in-product surveys, CES tells us how hard is it to use the product.
Paige Arnof-Fenn
I have learned in my career that if customers summon the courage to give you feedback, it’s because they care and/or are deeply invested in you. Listening is an appropriate reward for those who care about you thriving in life/business and the value is priceless. One way to get customers engaged is to go on a Listening Tour! Politicians do it all the time and it is great for business too.
Make a list new customers, old ones, the movers & shakers, people you admire and prospects, ask a few smart open ended questions then sit back and take notice. They will be more than happy to tell you what is on their mind. If you listen to what they share with you there will be plenty of opportunities to help them. I did it when business slowed and picked up several new customers but you can do it any time. It is a great way to connect and a lot of fun too.
Start listening with no strings attached, you'll be amazed what you find. It does not cost anything on Zoom or for the price of a few coffees and meals you will get an earful. I had no idea what to expect and got a lot of great ideas, insights and new work as a result.
I did my listening tour the old fashioned way by sending out e-mails & picking up the phone then brought a pad & pen, asked a few open ended questions then shut up and started taking notes. People love to be asked their opinions and they will share feedback and tell you where they have problems and need help. It has worked for me, I believe most feedback has some value, but the most valuable comes from people who care about you, whether you know them well or not.
Balaji S
Every time a customer reaches out to our support channels, an agent from our end picks it up and addresses the customer concerns, at the end of each conversation or interaction, the customer receives a survey that lets them give a rating and enables them to provide feedback about the interaction or the experience.
These scores are later on analyzed and are taken into consideration when making the decisions on what changes are to be made to the services and the process we follow. This in fact has helped us define the current process that we follow in Keka.
A lot of times our support teams get questions regarding a few requirements that the customers have that we might not have in Keka, in such cases, a feature form is sent to the customers where they would help us understand what exactly the requirement and the expectation is.
This form is forwarded to our product team who take the requirement and a lot of other factors into consideration and create a roadmap for a quarter and start working on developing the new features, in the meantime our support team keeps the customers updates on the status of the requirement requests they had raised.
Apart from all of this all of our customers on regular intervals receive our NPS feedback surveys which helps us to check in on the customer experience with the product and the service, These surveys help us understand the overall experience the customer is having and gives us an idea on what areas to focus on in our further enhancement of the product or the service.
