3 Easy Ways to Incorporate Customer Feedback

Building a SaaS product is pretty easy. Have an idea, flesh it out, pay a developer to build it, launch.

Building a SaaS product that customers actually want to use is a lot more difficult.

Feedback is a major part of the puzzle. Usually, you’ve done some sort of customer feedback analysis to get to where you are – but you’ve likely made mistakes and wrong assumptions along the way, which has resulted in an imperfect product.

That’s okay. No one gets it completely right first time. Or even tenth, 20th or 30th time.

But what I find is, once people get a bunch of customer feedback, they just stop. Then when they’re ready for more feedback, they go out and get it. By that time, it’s kind of late.

Why would you not treat customer feedback as an ever-evolving loop? That way, everything you do is evaluated in real time, and you can always see the one (or five, or ten) things that your customers most want you to focus on at any given time.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Create a Customer Feedback Channel

First up, you (obviously) need to create a channel for your customers to give you feedback. Otherwise you’re just stuck with an inbox full of suggestions that you’ll never be able to keep track of.

There are tons of tools you can use for this. You can create a Slack channel, or you can use a dedicated tool like Canny or Nolt. Here’s an example of how we do it with Nolt. Or, you can also look for customer support tools that can effectively collect feedback from your customers based on your interactions with them

Whichever tool you choose, you need to adopt the same consistent approach: any time your sales team, or customer support, or customer success, or marketing, or anyone else for that matter, gets feedback about your product, they enter that idea into the feedback flow.

At first, this is really about pushing your team to do this each and every time, until it becomes a habit.

Ultimately, what you’re trying to find out is:

• What is the idea? Is it a new feature? A bug fix? An improvement?
• Who is it for?
• What part of the product is it for?
• Why do you want this? E.g. “I’m a salesperson and I lost a deal because we didn’t have this one integration”

If it’s something customer-related, include the customer’s name on the help ticket – something that points to the conversation behind this suggestion. Maybe it’s in your CRM software, maybe it’s in your customer support software. Screenshots should be encouraged too.

This all helps the product manager or anybody else look at it and then understand the idea. So now they have a lot of context. They know the “why” behind it. They know where to go to get more information.

2. Thank the Person Who Reported It

Feedback consists of sincere product suggestions, made by people who already use and love your product, or who would potentially use it if you added this new piece of functionality.

People don’t give you feedback for fun, or because they have a grudge against you – they do it to help you improve your product. So when you’re building whatever new feature or bug fix you’re building, you want to thank the team member who reported it. And you also want them to thank the person who gave that feedback in the first place.

Let’s say it’s a salesperson, and the feedback was over something that cost them a deal. You know, ”I wish you had this integration, I would totally use you.” And then a month, or six months, or a year later, you implement that integration.

Chances are, that person forgot all about you. So you just tell them, “Hey, I know you’ve probably bought someone else by now, but I want to let you know, we actually implemented that thing,” and just simply thank them. 

Also, remember that a lot of the feedback you receive won’t be, “I need this integration.” 

Oftentimes it’ll be, “This thing looks wonky,” or, “I don’t understand this other thing.” It’s small stuff – but it’s the blind spots. It helps you distinguish the features that are things you think you need to do from what your customers actually want you to do.

In other words, feedback kind of forces you to build the right product.

Go through this whole process 1,000 times – take feedback, implement it down the line, thank the person who suggested it – and now you get customers who are super appreciative. You’re telling people that you’re actually listening to them.

3. Build a Roadmap of Product Improvements

This final step is all about transparency.

Any time your customer gives you feedback, you need to put it somewhere. You need to empathize with them and show them that you care. You need to make it clear that this suggestion will be considered by your team, and that they have been heard.

That should be the focus of your response when someone gives you feedback.

What you don’t want to do is give false hope. Never explicitly say, “I’m going to do this,” because they’re going to expect it to happen, fast – and you might not be in a position to do it at all.

If one of our customers says, “You need to add this integration,” and I tell them, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. I’m going to go do that,” their clock has started ticking. They expect it to be live in a couple months – or even a couple weeks.

So if we don’t do it for seven months, or three years, or longer – because we have a big product backlog, just like everyone else – then they’re going to be frustrated, even though we did the thing they asked for. 

Make sure that they’re heard, that you talk through the process and how you have a long list, but that this is important to you.

By implementing a feedback loop, when that new feature or bug fix does go live, the word spreads that you are really customer-driven.

How do you keep track of customer feedback at the moment? What do you plan to change about your existing process? Let me know in the comments below: