Feedback can make growing a new business a much easier task, but only if it comes from the kinds of people your business intends to cater to. For companies developing apps in the SaaS sector, feedback related directly to their apps is worth its weight in gold. However, it can be hard to come by without taking a proactive stance to acquire it. Keep reading to learn just why customer feedback matters so much and how you can go about capturing more of it.
The importance of customer feedback
Customer feedback is vital to any growing company’s long-term wellbeing. Your customers’ opinions can be used to guide major decisions and set up new milestones worth reaching as your business matures. Although there are numerous companies out there that mostly disregard customer feedback, they often do so to their own detriment. Feedback from the people you serve can help improve all aspects of your organization’s operations and offerings. However, the importance of such feedback extends beyond improvement initiatives, impacting growth prospects and wider market perceptions as well.
When companies do not keep up with customer feedback and adjust their processes accordingly, unhappy customers can quickly spread their dissatisfaction to others around them. Even worse, 91% of those who remain silent are particularly prone to simply walking away and never returning to do business with your company again. Clearly, customer feedback has its place where both improving your company’s strategy and minimizing its shortcomings are concerned. Here are a few more specific areas in which customer feedback can come in handy:
For development
There are clear benefits that customer feedback can provide for developers, such as early identification of potential problems and impediments. Although software development teams may have a clear roadmap laid out to guide their efforts already, customers can quickly point out pitfalls along the way that team members might have missed. Capturing customer feedback throughout the development process can help highlight the need for new features, adjust your team’s objectives to align with customer interests, and even reveal vulnerabilities in your code before they can be exploited. This way, your customers can actually be your ace in the hole, helping your team to turn over a much more refined product in the end.
For customer churn
Customer feedback comes in handy for businesses faced with troubling retention issues. If many of your customers are currently walking out of the door never to return, then something is definitely wrong. Unfortunately, assumptions made without their input are unlikely to yield the best results, and you may find it impossible to stem the tidal outflow before it breaks your bottom line. Soliciting feedback from your customers can not only help reveal your company’s shortcomings quicker, but also show people how committed you are to serving them.
For business decisions
Setting a course for your company to follow in the years to come can be a tricky affair and miscalculation can lead to a loss of interest among your customers. The last thing any growing company wants to do is expend valuable resources developing in a direction that leads further away from paying customers. Unfortunately, that’s often what ends up happening when organizations forget to ground their growth expectations with their actual customers’ expectations. Timely feedback can inform your business decisions before they get the better of you.
How to collect app feedback effectively
Knowing why you should collect feedback from your customers is only half the battle—knowing how to collect that feedback is what will ultimately determine your success at market. Here are some of the best ways that you can open the floodgates of feedback and strengthen your connection with your customers:
Use surveys
Surveys may seem like an old-school approach to garnering a response from your audience, but they remain as effective a tactic as ever. Plus, surveys have evolved over time to meet the needs of the modern age. Gone are the days when a mail-in voucher was the only way to get in touch with your user base.
Now, you can embed a survey just about anywhere you need to and measure everything—from general satisfaction to the likelihood of a given customer recommending your company to a trusting family member. For businesses operating in the SaaS industry, surveys have moved from websites directly into the services on offer themselves. This allows for more specific questions to be asked and more actionable data to be obtained. In-app surveys also boast a much higher response rate than mobile web surveys, the former netting a superior 13% compared to the latter’s paltry 3%.
Tools you can use to create in-app surveys:
- UserReport: This option can be integrated directly into your app and revolves around a simple pair of widgets.
- Canny: With this tool, you can collect feature requests directly from your customers.
Open lines of communication
Another great way to garner feedback from your customers is to embed real-time chat tools into your services. This makes it possible to pick up on any number of nuances affecting your audience that you may not have noticed otherwise.
Tools you can use to embed real-time chat in your app:
- Intercom: Use this tool to embed live chat interfaces directly in your product and manage conversations in a way that aligns with your team and customers’ preferences.
- Drift: Leverage multiple inboxes to segment conversations and more with this powerful, embeddable chat solution.
Learn more about customer feedback
For more information about customer feedback in the context of a wider SaaS app development and marketing strategy, have a look at some of our content on the topic.
