How do you improve software products? Learn how user feedback can help you gain a new perspective in providing solutions to software users. Let’s discuss.
Feedback is essential in any business. Whatever industry you serve, you want to ensure that your consumers are satisfied with your product or service. Additionally, user feedback reduces the risk of failure as it paints a picture of what your consumers need.
Gathering feedback is one of the most effective ways to manage customer loyalty and satisfaction. Whether they provide positive or even negative reviews, both are equally important. This way, you will be able to learn to improve your product. More importantly, user feedback is necessary to deliver quality software products.
When you are in software development, gaining the trust and confidence of your users is essential. How do you make sure you are targeting the correct problems with the right solutions? You will learn more by studying user feedback.
What is User Feedback?
User feedback is defined as the quantitative and qualitative data gathered from your customers. This includes information on your customer’s likes and dislikes, requests, and impressions of the software product.
Gathering data is necessary for businesses that want to make improvements or launch new products or features. Making sense of feedback will help ensure that you deliver quality software products and services to your users.
The channels where we collect feedback continue to expand into digital media, especially for software products. Users can rate you through reviews or make a complaint about your software product. The good thing about this is that you have a lot of data you can use to improve.
User Feedback: Uses and Importance
There are several reasons why you need to gather and utilize user feedback, such as:
Iterative Improvement
When working on your product, sometimes it is difficult to pinpoint what needs to be improved. You need to allow your users to provide you with helpful feedback to fix design issues and functionality. After all, you are providing the product for your customers. It would make sense to learn what they think and how you can better help them.
Process Improvements
Besides gaining feedback to improve iterative processes, you should also get feedback on processes. Don’t take things such as customer service, technical support, and after-sales for granted. Getting feedback on these aspects will help refine your processes and help your users maximize the use of your product.
Putting your Customers First
Allowing your customers to provide feedback and review makes them feel that you are listening to them. Once they see the improvements you made, they will also feel that their feedback is essential.
Handling Negative Feedback
Receiving complaints and negative feedback is inevitable. Listening to customers doesn’t mean that you filter out the negative feedback. You can leverage the unhappy customer to build better processes and software that will help avoid more users facing the same issue. This way, you will turn the negative feedback into a positive solution.
Customer Segmentation
There is always an opportunity to provide your products not only to your current customers but to new ones. User feedback gives you insights into new customer segments that you might not know of. Additionally, this information will help you design new software products that allow you to gain new users.
Branding and Customer Loyalty
Your users will continue to use your product if they see that you are continuously making improvements. Additionally, paying attention to user feedback will provide a better customer experience that helps build customer loyalty.
Gathering user feedback should be one of the most critical aspects of software development. Include this process throughout the product life cycle. Design your software product with your user in mind to meet their needs.
How to Gather and Interpret Data
There are multiple channels and ways that you can gather user feedback. Some of the most popular include:
- Sending surveys
- Community Forums
- Observing how your users interact with your software
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
If you’re finding the right channel to get feedback, you can start by sending out surveys to your customers. This is the simplest way to get user feedback and can be utilized in many ways. You can send surveys regularly or even after a customer service interaction. Once you’ve gathered feedback, it’s time to interpret them. Here are some points:
- When first interpreting the data, you should already have customer segments or buyer personas.
- Try to group users by frequency or purpose to have a better idea of their needs and expectations about your product.
- Find the common themes between each feedback.
- Consider if there is some repetition to different concerns.
- Tackle the most impacting problem and innovate the solution.
User feedback might distract you from the big problems at hand. Carefully consider which feedback you want to act on. You can put some input on the back burner for future improvements. Make a list of the top feedback received for your software team that you want to improve.
Managing User Feedback
Maximizing the potential of user feedback will help you pinpoint potential problems in your software that also help save time and money. Also, collecting and acting on feedback will allow you to be more effective and connected with your users.
Take time in organizing and categorizing the data you receive. Whether it is negative feedback or a complaint, consider all opportunities to create better systems and processes. Encourage your team to understand the value of feedback and enable them to act on them.
Steve Job’s lesson on feedback means that you take the essence of the problem and solve it thoughtfully through innovation. Doing so will increase the performance of your software product and also gain more loyal customers.
At Full Scale, we take feedback to heart. We want to provide excellent service and deliver quality software products to our partners. That’s why we only hire the best developers and have them go through a rigorous hiring process. We ensure that our global staff is committed to success.
We have a pool of highly qualified software developers and marketing gurus who are ready to work with you. Contact us to know more about how we can help you build better processes and reach your big business goals.
