At some point in your growth, it will become impossible to know all your customers and more importantly, decide on which ones to focus on at a time. Your feature requests are coming from different types of users, however, not all of them have the same value for your business and you definitely can't say yes to all of them. So, to make sure you are working on the right features, for the right reasons, and for the right customers, you will have to segment your feedback based on important customer groups or personas.

What is a segment?

A segment is a group of users defined by a set of rules. Users are automatically added to a segment every time the user profile updates to match those rules.

User segmentation helps you discover the real needs of your most valuable customers so you can better serve them and attract even more of them. The segments that you create should be specific to your product and business goals. Here are a few common user groups you could segment your feedback on:

• Paid vs. free users: This is a no brainer! Paid users are more advanced and committed to your business, therefore, their feedback should have more weight when planning your roadmap. On the other hand, feedback coming from free users might help you find holes in your application that prevent them from converting.
• New vs. long-term customers: New customers are more likely to churn compared to long-term customers so businesses need to pay more attention to them. Are there any features that you are currently missing that could play a role in new customers churning?
• Trialing users: Are there any roadblocks in your features that are preventing users from having a successful trial and converting? You want to respond to trialing users first as they have the highest risk of churning.
• VIP customers/Enterprise: Because they are your highest paying users and they play a big role in your long term growth, you'll want to pay closer attention to their feedback.

Our segmentation feature lets you filter important feedback from noise and see which product requests and feedback matter most to which customers and prioritize accordingly, rather than by volume alone.

In Acute you can define relevant group segments based on criteria like monthly revenue, signup date, number of sessions, etc

Then, you can slice and dice your feedback based on a particular segment to better understand and prioritize the needs of your most important customers.

Need an easy way to segment and manage your feedback?

If you are using Intercom for customer support, your product feedback comes mostly through Intercom conversations. Users will report bugs, enhancements, or feature requests usually coming in the form of questions like "How do I do X?" and "I can't find how to do Y".

Your role is to understand the underlying issue or the "job to be done" that your customer is describing. But how do you keep track of all your product feedback and most importantly how do you follow up with your customers so you keep them engaged and not run the risk of churn?

With the Acute integration for Intercom, you can capture product feedback and feature requests directly from Intercom conversations, keep track of what customers have asked, and follow up with them.

Whenever you receive product feedback from a customer (that can be either a feature request, an improvement for an already existing feature, or a bug) you can push it to Acute, straight from inside the conversation.

You can also capture the customer's exact words when tracking feedback. This way you'll have better insights into your customers' problems when analyzing and planning feature requests later on.  You can track multiple conversations and user quotes (tiny bits of insights the user said that you consider important) for the same feedback post so that you can capture the demand and the different ways of describing the same issue.

When looking at feedback in Acute you can see all the related user messages of that feedback post in a single place to gain a deeper context and understanding. The Intercom conversation will be linked to the feedback post so you can open it at any time from Acute to get more information or ask any follow-up questions.

To make sure all your product feedback is organized and categorized you can tag your feedback post when creating it directly from Intercom.

You can capture feedback publicly or private depending on your needs. The public feedback will be available in your roadmap and feedback page, while feedback that is set to private will only be available internally, to you and your team. This way you can capture feedback privately, validate with your team, and only make it public if it's part of your product vision.

Your customer data is automatically synced with Intercom out of the box, so your team has all the valuable context at hand.

Over time all this valuable data will become key in understanding your customers' needs and will help you make more informed decisions in shaping your product's roadmap.

Need an easy way to capture and manage feedback in Intercom?

Upvotes are important. They are a simple way of capturing a feature's demand both on the user and management side.

However, the downside of feature voting is that when people upvote feature requests you don't have any background information on their specific use-case, how they would use that feature, or why it is important to them, leaving you completely in the dark.

The solution would be to whenever possible, reach out to customers and ask about how they would use that feature and what they are trying to accomplish. Most feature requests come through support messages and those are full of feedback. Users usually ask how to achieve something, indicate that they don’t understand how to use a feature, or share their frustration about hard to use features or bugs. In these conversations, you have the opportunity to ask questions that reveal what the user actually wants to achieve and the real pain point. Gather and track all that background information so you can later have the context needed to analyze and understand the underlying issue of your feature requests.

Remember that your customers request things because they have a job to do. When they request a specific feature it is because it will make their jobs easier, faster, or more efficient. Understanding the real motivation behind that feature is an important part of reviewing feature requests. People use different wordings to ask for the same thing or ask for it in a different way. Having the feedback quotes at hand helps you gain better insights when looking at a feature request by seeing the exact words your customers have used when describing the "job to be done" or pain point.

Introducing Acute's feedback highlights: a way of capturing and keeping track of feedback quotes for better insights.

You can attach conversation messages to your feature requests both when adding a feature request or tracking a vote on behalf of a user, straight from Intercom.

You can see all the conversation messages under the Highlights tab and also open the Intercom conversation for even more context, straight from Acute.

Understanding the motivations and "jobs to be done" behind feature requests is crucial for making sure you are adding the right features to your roadmap but also for making sure that your product development team will implement the right solution.

Failing to do this will cost you time, energy and money and will result in unused features, clogged interfaces and churned users.

Need an easy way to keep track of feedback and user messages?

The first step to organizing your customer feedback is to keep track of all your feedback in one central place. Customer feedback comes from multiple channels like email, live chat, Twitter, demos, and so on, so it's really important that you take the time to keep track of it in a central place, rather than having it scattered.

While you still have to take note of customer feedback coming from different channels you need to create a streamlined way of collecting customer feedback.

Once you start collecting and keeping track of customer feedback you will soon find yourself in the need of a scalable tool for organizing and categorizing your feedback.

You don't want to end up with an endless spreadsheet of scattered feedback which will turn into noise rather than valuable feedback.

Ideally, you would use a tool like Acute to collect and keep track of your customer feedback.

The next step in having your feedback organized is to categorize it. Think about a few feedback categories relevant to your product and start tagging your feedback. By using tags (or labels) you assign that feedback post to a specific feedback group (category) that describes a relevant part of your product.

Usually, there are 2 main categories of feedback:

• Product feedback
• Sales feedback

Product feedback usually comes from your users and customers through channels like live-chats, email, Twitter, or in-app feedback widgets. The product feedback can be broken down into more sub-categories, depending on your product.
The most common ones and the ones that we’re using at Acute are:

Feedback type

• Feature request: new features suggested by users
• Enhancement: improvements to already existing features suggested by users
• Bug: bugs reported by users who usually suggest confusing workflows rather than features not working

Product area

• Admin application
• Widget
• Public page
• Email
• ..etc

Platform

• desktop
• mobile
• extension
• ...etc

This way you can easily scan and filter your feedback list based on the feedback type and the section of your product. This helps you narrow your search to exactly what feedback you are looking for.

For example, you can search for items on how to improve a specific component in your product (tags: enhancement + dashboard) or you can filter new feature ideas for your email functionality (tags: feature request + email).

Once your feedback list starts growing, it can get overwhelming and what once was valuable feedback turns rather into noise. At Acute, our goal is to help you easily manage your feedback so you can gain meaningful and actionable insights.

Need an easy way to organize your feedback?

Building a startup and doing customer development with a small team is a challenge. It gets 10 times more challenging if you are a solo Founder.

Your time and your focus should be your most protected assets and thus you should try to automate as many processes as you possibly can: recurring payments, emails, faqs, onboarding guides, testing, collecting feature requests, etc.

Here is how you can collect feature requests in Intercom and automate your feedback loop using Acute.

Allow users to submit feature suggestions without starting a new conversation

You can embed Acute's widget in your Messenger Home and let customers make feature suggestions and vote on features. This makes it super easy for your customers to leave feature requests directly inside your product, without having to leave the page they're on or sign up for a different service. In return, you will get more feedback and gain more insights. You will also have all your feature requests in a single and organized place instead of spread across email, twitter and support chats.

Capture feature requests from Intercom conversations

Inevitably you will still have feature requests arise in conversations. In that scenario, you can track customer feedback directly from your conversation's inbox. The customer information is linked to the feedback so your team has all the valuable context at hand. You can also see a user's feature requests inside a conversation so you know what features customers have already suggested and are important to them when talking to them.

With Acute, you can add the user message when tracking feedback into Acute. Having feedback quotes (aka user messages) helps you gain better insights when looking at a feature request by seeing the exact words your customers have used when describing the feature. You can see all the conversation messages under the Highlights tab and also open the Intercom conversation for even more context, straight from Acute.

Your customer data is synced with the feature request

Acute links the customer information to every feature request so you have all the valuable context at hand. You can see the revenue of the customer who submitted the feature request, and you can see the revenue of the customers who upvoted the feature request. You can also see the average voter MRR and cumulative MRR of each feature request. This helps you understand what needs your customer segments have and identify what feature requests matter most to your paying users.

Show customers your feature requests' roadmap

You can embed Acute's roadmap widget in your Messenger Home and show customers on what feature requests you are currently working on and what's next in the pipeline. This will help them get a better sense of the direction your product is going and which of their feature requests will be implemented soon. They will love you for it.

Notify customers when their feature requests have been implemented

With Acute, you can close the feedback loop completely automated. You can notify your customers when a feature requests they submitted or voted on has been released with automated email notifications.

Need an easy way to collect feedback with Intercom?

Everyone can agree by now that collecting feedback and feature requests is the first best thing you can do to improve and grow your business. However, collecting feedback isn't enough, you also need to act on it to maintain customer trust and build stronger relationships.

Here are the eight best practices for collecting customer feedback and ways to make them work.

1. Make it easy

The most important aspect of collecting feedback is to make it easy for your users to send feedback your way. Making sure that your method of collecting feedback is as simple and frictionless as possible, will improve your feedback volume and quality.

It is crucial to provide an open feedback form for your users, during their normal workflow in your application. This helps you capture real-time feedback that is more insightful compared to sending periodical surveys and counting on users to share their feedback later on. Having an open channel for feedback will also give your users the confidence that their feedback is welcome and will be addressed.  

Hard ways for users to send feedback:

• email
• twitter
• feedback portal that requires additional signup

Easy ways for users to send feedback:

• live chat
• in product form
• embeddable feedback widget

Feedback is an important aspect of your business, so similar to your signup process, it should be as easy and frictionless as possible.

Your product is definitely the best place to collect feedback as you don’t want to interrupt your user’s workflow by having them leave the application to go to a website or to send an email.

The goal of collecting feedback is to not interrupt the user, but rather provide an easy way for them to share if they want to. So instead of sending email campaigns, in-app survey questions or floating notifications, stick to a non-intrusive but easy to find button or menu link that will open a pop-up with a simple form.

If you want to improve or maintain your feedback volume, make it clear that you are listening to your users and acting on their feedback. Since 95% of companies don’t respond to feedback, users assume it's not wanted, and are more reticent in giving it. Make it clear that the objective of getting their feedback is to help them better achieve their goals and make their lives better.

2. Prompt reply

We just covered the importance of assuring users that their feedback is wanted and welcomed. As your business grows and scales it is crucial to not lose your personal touch with your customers. An easy way to do that is by having a prompt reply to every piece of feedback and feature request that you receive.

Replying to your users' feedback shows them that you are listening to them, that their feedback is welcomed and appreciated and is what builds trust and customer relationships.

Close the loop with your customers. They took the time to give you feedback, for free, so the least you could do is follow up. Even if you don’t act on it, it shows that they’re being heard and encourages them for future feedback.

Replying to users also gives you the opportunity to ask more questions regarding the feedback, or if the user is asking for a feature that you are about to release, you can let them know and give them early access in return for more feedback.

3. Ask for more insights

You want to always ask more questions and to dig deeper. Ask "why" and about their current processes, how they are currently solving this pain point and "how would you imagine this to work".

If you don't talk to your customers to fully understand their problems, you risk not really solving them and only treating the symptoms instead of the underlying cause.

4. Thank the user

You should always thank the user for their feedback. It doesn't matter if it's positive or negative. You want to show your appreciation for their feedback and see it as wanting to help.

You don't have to lie and say it's a good or bad suggestion, and you don't have to prove them wrong and defend your product. You simply have to acknowledge it, thank them for providing their input or wanting to help, and make them feel heard.

Taking the time to thank everyone for their feedback nurtures your happy users and helps turn them into advocates. It creates a connection to you and your product and they will be more likely to support it and recommend it. Thank you notes (in this case a thank you message) is a greater motivation and show of appreciation than any monetary reward.

5. Be honest with your customers

Most often than not, you see companies having a default reply to feature requests and it implies a generic "will look over it/add it to the roadmap". The problem with that is that you are giving your customer false hope and they might keep coming back asking when their feature request will be implemented since they were told it's in the roadmap.

A better approach is being honest with your customers. If you don't know if the feature will ever take part in the roadmap say that the team will look at it and take consideration of it but you can't make any promises. If you are not sure when it will be released say that right now you have other priorities in the pipeline and that the team will take a look after they are completed. If you know that the feature will not be implemented you can politely refuse and simply let the user know that their feature request is not in your scope of features or not part of your product vision.

6.Follow up

Customers love being followed up. It shows them that they matter to your business and you appreciate them. Following up to users can be time-consuming which is why most services skip it altogether. But it's important that you follow up with users and show progress, accountability, and transparency.

Always get back to your users, let them know you implemented something they suggested and ask for further feedback. This gives them a sense of being heard. The fact that they have a say in your application's user experience and product roadmap makes them more connected to your product and encourages them to participate even more and provide more feedback.

This is what is going to help you build a strong relationship with your users and turn them into promoters for your product.

A tip would be to also follow up with lost leads and churned customers. Showing constant progress and devotion to users might just win them back, even if they switched to a competitor.

7. Constant improvements

Collecting feedback and feature requests should be more than an annual or quarterly campaign. It should be a constant effort to listen to your customers and act upon their feedback. Users' needs and expectations evolve with time so providing the best customer experience is a forever going task that should become a routine.

Include customer feedback constantly into your product roadmap. Some suggestions are small improvements while others are game-changing features. Ideally, you would balance your roadmap with the two, but even when you are focused on other things it's important to add a few small improvements to your releases.

This shows constant progress and improvement to your customers and it is a delight. It proves that you are not only focused on bringing new customers and expanding to new niches, but you also improve your product bit by bit for your existing customers.

This is what keeps customers happy and churn low.

8. Welcome negative feedback

Inevitably, you will also get some negative feedback. Don't sweep it under the rug and most definitely don't delete and disregard it. You should be open to it. Ask the user why they feel that way and how they think you could improve in that area. See if there is anything immediate you can do to help/comfort them.

By replying to negative feedback you show the customer that you care about them, and it makes them feel heard and safe. Don't disregard what they are saying. Yes, they might need more support or care from you, and probably have their expectations too high, but once won over they will be your biggest fans.

The fact that the user gave you feedback instead of just switching to a different service means that they are still interested in your product, and there is still hope. Replying to negative feedback can be a very effective way to prevent churn.

Conclusion

Try to bridge the gap between you and your customers by communicating closer with them and thinking about them as members of your team instead of strangers.

Need an easy way to collect feature requests?

Great products are built around solving problems. The challenge for any company is to understand it's users' needs and challenges and improve upon that.

Naturally, you'll tend to want to add the most requested features. But you need to decide if those features fit in with your strategic goals and what you want your product ultimately to be. Start with high-value low-effort features first.

Prioritizing user requests requires answering a mix of questions: How many people want it? How much value does it add to the product? How difficult is it to build?

To effectively prioritize feature requests and assign them a prioritization score you want to calculate an aggregation of scores based on factors. The prioritization score is used to quantify the strategic importance of a feature.

The RICE prioritization framework uses 4 factors for calculating the prioritization score: Reach, Impact, Effort, and Confidence.

Reach

The Reach factor refers to how many users the feature request will impact. For example, a request could be a custom enterprise feature that would impact 1 customer or a more generic feature that would impact 1000 users.

Impact

The Impact factor refers to how much the feature request will increase your conversion rate (or user retention) when a customer encounters it. Impact is estimated as a number between 0.25 (minimal) and 3 (massive).

3 - massive impact
2 - high
1 - medium
0.5 - low
0.25 - minimal

Effort

The Effort factor refers to the total amount of time a feature will require from all members of your team: product, design, and engineering. Effort is estimated as a number of weeks.

Example: 1 week of design (1 designer) and 1 week of engineering (2 developers) equals 3 weeks of effort.

Confidence

The Confidence factor refers to your level of confidence about your estimates and asses risk. Confidence is estimated as a percentage between 50% (low) and 100% (high).

100% - high confidence
80% - medium
50% - low

Example: If you think a request could have a big impact but don’t have data to back it up, confidence lets you control that risk.

Prioritization Score

The prioritization score is used to quantify the strategic importance of a feature. The formula used to calculate the prioritization score is
Reach x Impact x Confidence / Effort

Long term, you should prioritize the important features you need to create for a compelling product rather than the easy features.

Need an easy way to collect and prioritize your feature requests?

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.

Need an easy way to collect and analyze valuable feedback?

What is customer-centricity?

Customer centricity is a mindset and a way of doing business that focuses on positive customer experience. Every product decision is made with the customer in mind, ensuring that the customer will have a positive experience at every stage of their journey. Every aspect of the product is built with the customer in mind (user experience, onboarding, help center, new features, pricing, etc.)

Why should you be customer-centric?

The main reason why businesses become customer-centric is to provide more value to the customer. Long gone are the days where you built a product, people would just signup and instantly pay, and competition was close to none.

As the market becomes more and more competitive, users' expectations of a service rise. If you don't meet your users' expectations then the users will drop. If you don't acquire and retain customers, you can't survive as a business.

If you don't have good customer service and if you fail at understanding your customers' needs, not only will you not be able to acquire new customers to grow but you will be losing customers constantly.

As a fairly new business that just popped up in the market, an unfair advantage you can have against your competition is having excellent customer service and a customer centric product.

The benefits of being customer-centric

Customer centric businesses generate greater profits and bigger growth.

Because customer centric businesses put so much effort into providing value to their customers, they have lower churn rates. Many businesses focus on acquiring new customers instead of focusing on how they can provide more value to their existing customers (improving churn rates). While sales are considered to have linear growth, constantly reducing churn is exponential.

Secondly, customer centric businesses have extremely loyal customers. Loyal customers can increase businesses' marketing power through word of mouth, which is again: exponential. Word of mouth is an extremely efficient growth strategy, but it's really hard to obtain.

Lastly, loyal users are more forgiving towards small bugs and downtime and are less likely to be "stolen" by lower-price and feature-richer alternatives to your product. And that is mainly because of the level of trust the business has built with customers.

Best practices for customer centric products

In theory, being customer-centric is a no brainer, yet many businesses struggle and even fail at simply being customer-friendly.

Have a customized getting started guide of your product

Show your users how your product works and where they can find specific features with a quick tour of your product. This saves them a lot of time and can help them grasp your product and get started in a matter of minutes.

If you serve different niches and have different uses cases for your product, simply ask users what's their use case for your product and tailor the tour guide to their needs. While this takes a lot of time and effort on your part it provides tremendous value to your onboarding experience.

Have an exceptional support service

Live chat is a must-have in 2020. Don't make your customers have to email you and wait for 24h on support.

Most customer questions are just a 5-minute interruption of what you are currently doing, and while it's a diversion from your productivity, it's a price worth paying for your customers' happiness.

If your customers are using your product as part of their work process, making sure they can complete their work and provide customer support for that should be a priority for you.

It shows customers that you value them because you are prioritizing their needs and happiness over your comfort.  No one likes waiting really, and the effort will not go unnoticed. Customers will appreciate you for it.

It also proves to leads and potential customers that you are a business that values people and that can be trusted. People usually make a buying decision over who business replied quicker so you might be able to land new customers simply by having a prompt response to their question.

Collect customer feedback and act on it

You can't be a customer-centric business without constantly collecting feedback and acting on it.

Feedback is the backbone of growth. It gives you an insight into what is currently working well in your product and what you could do better. You will get the information and context needed to better understand your customers' expectations, needs, and problems they are trying to solve. Users' needs and expectations evolve with time so providing the best customer experience is a forever task.

Consistently acting on your customers' feedback shows dedication towards your customers and that you care about solving their pain points and making their life easier. It also shows continuous commitment to your product and customers and that can be a decision driver for buyers.

In a highly competitive market, successful businesses base their business decisions and strategies on real customer data. The goal here is that any improvements, new features or adjustments made to the product have to perfectly fit the customers' needs first.

Have an exceptional help center

The reason businesses have help centers is to help their customers help themselves.

Documenting your most frequently asked questions saves both your customers and employees time. Simply suggest to your users to search for their question first before reaching out to support. It's a win-win situation.

Having explanation documents on how to use features is a lifesaver for users.

Have step by step guides on how to solve different problems with your product with example images can help old users with newly released features and can help new users with old features. Additionally, you can even include a voice-over screen recording for users' convenience.

Conclusion

To become a customer centric company you have to truly believe the customer comes first.

Any decision has to be made with the customer in mind and any improvements, new features or adjustments made to the product have to perfectly fit the customers' needs first.

Constantly ask yourself how you can bring more value to your customers and how you can make their job easier. If you're not sure where to start simply ask your users.

You have two choices when deciding what to build next: engage in guesswork or reach out to your customers to find out what they need.

The hard part is not improving your products and building new features, the hard part is understanding your users and their needs.

Here is how top companies get customer feedback and what we can all learn from them.

Jira

Jira understands that the best feedback is collected when the user has an impulse to provide it. ‌‌‌

‌They have a subtle Give feedback button in the top right corner of their page that triggers a pop-up form. The form asks for specific feedback regarding the current page that you are on and has a checkbox for agreeing to a followup.‌

‌This type of feedback collection ensures users that Jira cares about their feedback, are willing to listen and gives them an easy and open channel to do so. This makes Jira's customers feel more connected to the service and company.

Airbnb

Similarly, Airbnb has a subtle Give feedback link in their help section. The link takes you to a feedback form which has two questions: What are you using Airbnb for and What is your feedback about.

By asking users these two questions Airbnb does a great job of putting the customer feedback into context. They can form a customer persona (traveler vs host) and the product they are giving feedback on (web vs mobile app vs messaging). This way the feedback can be analyzed and Airbnb can find patterns and underlying issues from their customer feedback.

Lastly, Airbnb suggests that you let them know what went well from your experience and what could have gone better. This is extremely powerful as it helps them set in place already working processes that customers are happy with and do not need change, and see aspects of their processes that are not working for their customers and that they should improve on.

Slack

Slack has a Help and feedback link in their menu. The link takes you to their help center which prompts you to send them a message or search their help center.

The first header on the page, the question How can we help? shows the user that Slack cares about them and does indeed want to help. The sub header Questions, bug reports, feedback and feature requests - we're here for it all ensures the user there is someone at the end of the line waiting for them and that they are willing to listen to anything you have to say. Their message is extremely empathetic to the user and conveys that Slack wants to help you, are there for you and want to listen to what you have to say.

Evernote

Evernote goes one step ahead and uses a public board for feedback and feature requests. However, they don't have a feedback link in their dashboard to it so it's harder for users to get here.‌

The transparency that Evernote has, creates a sense of community and makes users attached to the company. Allowing your users to openly post, upvote and interact with each other makes them feel part of your decision making and roadmap. Whenever a new feature is added they know that they are the ones who suggested it, left comments and ultimately helped you improve your product. This is super powerful and builds customer loyalty, and makes them advocate for your product. It makes your users become product ambassadors.

Evernote has a disclaimer that says popularity does not mean implementation. They also use the term suggestion in their forum explanation section. This ultimately manages their customers' expectations and lets them know that their ideas are taken into consideration, but are not guaranteed.

While there are risks with being so transparent, the benefits will most likely outweigh the negatives.

Dropbox

Similarly, Dropbox users a public board for suggestions and feature requests. The most upvoted ideas rise to the top so Dropbox can easily notice what their customers' biggest needs are.

They also assign statuses to their customers' suggestions so they are always in the loop with what's currently in development, what's coming and what has already been delivered. This shows commitment and accountability to the customers' suggestions.

The downside to their public forum is that you have to register a new account for the forum, even if you are already logged in Dropbox. This adds an extra step users have to take for suggesting a feature. Since the accounts are not synced, Dropbox doesn't have the context of the suggestion like Airbnb does (for example the customer persona behind the feature request and underlying patterns in their feedback).

Salesforce

Salesforce has a subtle Feedback button in the dashboard's header and uses a public board for collecting feature ideas. ‌‌‌

‌They go one step ahead and say that they let their customers shape their roadmap and introduce game-like language calling the selected ideas Winners and ranking them on board.‌

‌This makes it fun and exciting for their users not only to shape the service and products but also to see their suggestions win.

Conclusion

Collecting feedback is crucial to growth

While there are many ways to collect feedback and suggestions (email, NPS, surveys) top companies agree that collecting feedback is an essential step in improving your products and is a crucial part of growth.

An open channel ensures fresh feedback

We can also observe that top companies give users an open channel for feedback, available whenever they have an impulse to provide it. ‌‌‌This makes giving feedback extremely easy and is valuable because this way the feedback is fresh and pure in the customer's mind.

Context is important

Context helps you analyze your customers' feedback and understand underlying problems in your current processes and specific issues that customer personas run into.

Transparency is a risk but outweighs the negatives

Being transparent and allowing your customers to take part in your decision making creates a sense of community, builds customer loyalty and turn users into product ambassadors.

Need an easy way to collect and analyze valuable feedback?

Collecting and analyzing customer feedback is essential for improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, improving customer retention and conversion rate, and overall improving your products and business.

There are two types of feedback: prompted (when you deliberately ask for feedback like surveys) and unprompted (when your clients post feedback online on their incentives like in-app tools for collecting feedback or online reviews).

Customer feedback (good or bad) helps you improve your product and services

Customer feedback gives you an insight into what is currently working well in your product and what you could do better. You will get the information and context needed to better understand your customers' expectations, needs, and problems they are trying to solve. Users' needs and expectations evolve with time so providing the best customer experience is a forever going task.

Customer feedback helps you increase customer satisfaction

A satisfied customer is a loyal customer. There is a close connection between customer satisfaction and business performance. Satisfied customers are less likely to churn and more likely to recommend your product. This leads to lower acquisition costs and higher revenue. Giving users an open channel where they can submit their feedback shows you value their opinion and makes them feel more attached to your business.

Customer feedback helps you increase customer retention

Customer feedback helps you detect areas that don't satisfy your customers and where you should improve. Every time a customer expresses dissatisfaction you can immediately respond and find a solution to fix the issue. Putting your customers' satisfaction first shows devotion from your business and increases their level of loyalty and trust.

Customer feedback gives you insights that help taking business decisions

In a highly competitive market, successful businesses base their business decisions and strategies on real customer data. The goal here is that any improvements, new features or adjustments made to the product have to perfectly fit the customer needs first.

Need an easy way to collect and analyze valuable feedback?