How to analyze your customers' feedback

The main reasons why organizations collect customer feedback is to improve their current services and to prioritize what feature to build next. Analyzing your customer feedback helps you get a better understanding of how to increase customer loyalty and customer lifetime value, and reduce churn and customer support.

If you have lots of feedback but you are not analyzing it you might be "data rich but insights poor".  Putting your customer feedback into context is what gives you the insights to act on it.

Feedback should not be considered equal in value and needs to be analyzed and validated before acted upon. Here are the things that you need to look at to get the full context behind your customers' feedback.

The user giving the feedback

There are 5 segments of users that you should be looking at: long-term customers, power users, high-tier customers, new users, and inactive users.

The long-term customers are the ones that have the most experience with using the product and valuable insights on what currently works well and what can be improved. When it comes to the underlying vision of your product, this is the feedback you should focus on.

Power users are the ones that use your product most often and they have a mix of improvement suggestions and ideas for new features. If you are looking to improve your user experience, this is the feedback you should focus on.

High-tier customers are the ones that pay significantly more than others. You need to make sure that you are keeping your high-tier customer satisfied with your service to protect your revenue. If you are looking to increase your MRR, this are feature requests you should focus on because this type of customer is the easiest to upgrade.

New users are the ones that have the most feature requests. As your service grows, new users can help you find new use cases for your service and can help you break into new niches and markets. This is the type of feedback you should focus on if you are looking into expanding your service.

Inactive users are churned customers, inactive trials, and customers that are at risk of slipping away because they haven't used your product in a while. This type of user can help you find issues with your product that you weren't aware of. If you want to improve customer churn or your conversion rate, this is the type of feedback you should focus on.

The volume of the feedback

How many people make the same feature request or improvement suggestion matters. This is especially important when prioritizing improvements and feature requests.

If 80% of your customers' feedback is about an improvement they need in their current workflow, you should probably listen up and prioritize that over new features.

Quantifying the volume of the feedback can also help you with "recently bias" where people usually assume that things they heard recently have the greatest importance.

Cumulative MRR

When in doubt, look at the cumulative MRR of your customers' feedback. Cumulative MRR is the feedback volume * customer MRR. Filtering customer feedback based on cumulative MRR shows what your highest-value customers want most.

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