How to Make Sense of All Your User Feedback

The feedback economy — or the impact of customer voices in shaping economic growth — in full swing. A 2018 study found that 82% of customers trust the voice of other customers more than a brand’s own messaging. 74% of customer experience professionals say they generate new product ideas from customer feedback, according to a Forrester report. With customer feedback influencing both buyer behavior and competitors’ products, it’s clear that robust customer feedback analysis and the right user feedback analysis tools can mean the difference between a successful venture and a failed one.

In this guide, we’ll explore how you can delve deeper into the feedback you receive from various sources via additional context, analytics, and more. You’ll also learn how to best summarize and share your analyses to help developers fill and prioritize your product roadmap and build positive, productive relationships with your customers.

Analyze User Feedback.

Gaining a complete understanding of the feedback you receive from customers is only possible when your team can accurately analyze that feedback based on category and source. In this section, we’ll dig into the different types of feedback you’re likely to receive as a product manager or product marketing manager for a software solution and how you can go about organizing and analyzing them. Learn more about how to collect and analyze user feedback.

In this guide, we’ll explore how you handle customer feedback analysis for the following categories:

• Feature requests
• Bug reports
• User experience issues

Feature Requests.

Feature requests are user suggestions for new functionalities or updates to existing features. This type of feedback can come from various sources, from surveys sent out especially to gather them to social media posts from users. Feature requests can be exceptionally useful for strategizing your roadmap. However, not all feature requests carry the same weight. To successfully analyze customer feedback in the form of feature requests, be sure to:

• Identify recurring themes. If you’re getting many requests on a specific feature or workflow, it can be a sign that this particular feature needs to get more attention in your upcoming roadmap. If you’re getting multiple requests for the same feature, you’ll know that putting it on your roadmap can win you loyalty among your users, even if it wasn’t on your team’s radar or list of priorities.
• Prioritize features based on user demand and strategic alignment. Once you’ve categorized your feature requests by theme, you’ll want to prioritize them for your roadmap based on both demand and strategic alignment. Adding a popular feature may gain customer approval in the short term, but if the update doesn’t align with your long term product goals, you’ll want to reconsider its priority.
• Consider the feasibility and impact of implementing each feature. Not all feature requests take the same amount of work for your developers, so you’ll also want to take into account the ROI gained from each request before adding it to your product roadmap. A feature that takes months of work to implement and makes only a small difference in terms of user impact should fall lower on your priority scale, even if the request is popular with your users.

Performing a successful user feedback analysis on feature requests is easier with the right customer feedback analysis tool. Learn how you seamlessly collect and track feature requests from your users.

Bug Reports.

Like feature requests, you can collect bug reports from anywhere your customers live, from support tickets and social media to their accounts within your application. This type of customer feedback can be crucial to identifying serious issues with your product and improving your users’ experience, as they highlight errors in your software.

To successfully track and analyze bug reports from your customers, you’ll need to:

• Categorize reports based on both severity and user impact. High severity reports include anything that makes your entire app unusable, such as your website being down. Low severity reports can include broken workflows that already have an easy workaround. User impact ratings can vary based on how many users the bug affects.
• Prioritize bug fixes to address critical issues promptly. High severity reports with high user impact will need to be dealt with immediately.
• Collaborate with the development team to understand root causes and potential solutions for reported bugs. Track down recurring or similar bugs and higher severity and user reports and make this information available to your engineers and leaders. If specific categories of reports increase, work with your development team to create a solution plan and follow up to ensure that it’s enacted.

User Experience Issues.

User experience issues differ from bug reports in that they encompass broader aspects that affect how users interact with your software. This type of customer feedback can come from feature requests and bug reports, as well as general feedback from surveys, customer support conversations, and social media chatter. To analyze user experience issues, be sure to:

• Identify pain points and friction in the user journey. You can track the user journey via tools such as Heap Analytics or Hotjar. For a deeper exploration of user journeys, you may want to employ a UX researcher and gather information from focus groups and live tests. Both methods can help identify areas of friction that can help inform your product’s roadmap and strategy.
• Prioritize improvements based on the impact on overall user satisfaction. As with feature requests and bug reports, whether and when you address user experience issues will depend heavily on how much of a difference it will make to your current user base.
• Collaborate with UX/UI teams to implement changes that enhance user experience. Relying on expertise to make your product more user friendly can make a significant impact on customer loyalty, adoption, and growth.

Prioritize Feedback Based on Frequency and Impact.

To effectively prioritize customer feedback, take a structured approach by assessing the frequency and impact of each suggestion or complaint.

1. Analyze your feedback database to tally how often the same or similar issues are reported. This highlights systemic problems that affect many users versus one-off concerns.
2. Evaluate the impact each piece of feedback would have if resolved on user satisfaction, task completion, retention, and your broader business metrics. For example, feedback about broken checkout flows or missing key features would have high impact since it prevents users from engaging with and paying for your core product.
3. Create a basic 2×2 prioritization framework with frequency of feedback on one axis and potential impact on the other. Items in the high frequency/high impact quadrant should take precedence. Lower quadrants indicate issues affecting fewer customers or that have less consequence, which can be re-evaluated each release cycle.

Visualizing this information can help you determine which requests, bugs, and other issues have earned a spot on your product roadmap — as well as where they fall in priority on that roadmap.

Interpret Customer Feedback.

Interpreting customer feedback comprehensively is a vital component of customer feedback analysis. In this section, we’ll explore how you can better understand customer feedback in the context it was given, identify patterns and trends, and differentiate between individual preferences and broader user needs.

Understand the Context of Feedback.

To gain a comprehensive understanding of what’s behind each piece of user feedback, it’s critical to investigate its full context. This includes not just the surface-level issues raised in the bug report or support request, but also the circumstances, user journey, and prior experiences that led to their commentary. To understand the context of a piece of customer feedback, you’ll have to:

• Reviewing the user’s history and engagement data. Look at which features they’ve used, friction points in their workflow, and their overall sentiment and satisfaction scores. Understanding their typical use case and technical acumen sets the stage for their feedback.
• Recreate their specific actions leading up to the feedback. Walk through the user flows, toggle the right settings, and put yourself in their shoes at each step. This empathy-building exercise illuminates any points of confusion, areas lacking guidance, or breakdowns in the intended pathway to success.
• Ask the customer when you need more information. Follow up on a survey response with a request for a meeting to gain more context. If you’re already on a support call, ask open-ended questions to unveil motivations, goals, and the broader implications of any issues.

With more context on confusing or complex pieces of feedback, your team will be better equipped to get to the root cause of the issues and develop an effective solution. Context also separates valid critiques from possible misuse or misunderstanding, can prevent you from making assumptions, and allows you to truly enhance the product experience in ways that matter most to users. By immersing yourself in customer perspectives, customer feedback can evolve from complaints into constructive insights.

Identify Patterns and Trends.

Aggregating and categorizing customer feedback over time allows you to spot valuable patterns and trends that may otherwise stay buried in the noise. To ensure that you can effectively pull relevant analyses out of your customer feedback, establish a consistent feedback collection and tagging process so you can easily filter and visualize data by key attributes. You can then better analyze your customer feedback data by:

• Grouping similar comments and requests into themes as you accumulate feedback. Look for terms, features, or UI elements that come up frequently as pain points or areas users want improved. Charting feedback topics over time exposes growing trends like increasing call volumes or shifting demands.
• Overlaying feedback data with other metrics like usage, survey scores, and quality ratings to see correlations and the quantifiable impact of different issues. This triangulation ensures you’re not just chasing squeaky wheel feedback, but objectively prioritizing what impacts the most users.
• Identifying your key audience segments and determining which improvements would have the biggest impact for each. For example, identifying the frustrations of your most engaged users highlights retention risks requiring urgent attention.
• Zoom out further to assess entire workflows, journeys, and goals. Look for patterns around specific workflows like onboarding, migration, or collaboration. Any issues that create friction within those key scenarios should be resolved quickly.

It can be difficult to wade through customer feedback and find out what’s actually important to address. By turning your qualitative customer feedback data into structured data that can be easily visualized and contextualized, you can identify the feature requests and fixes that will make the most impact for your customers.

Examine User Feedback.

Occasionally, typical methods of analyzing customer feedback isn’t enough to gain a full understanding of whether, how, and what should be changed within your software application. In this section, we’ll explore how you can conduct deeper investigations into specific issues, collaborate better with your customer support and product development teams when analyzing customer feedback, and utilize analytics to validate user feedback.

Conduct deeper investigations into specific issues.

To truly understand the impact and root causes behind critical user feedback, structured in-depth investigations can be necessary. First, you’ll need to identify your highest priority topics for deeper study through a strategic lens. Look at feedback frequencies and severity, but also align investigations to key company initiatives like expansion into new markets.

Once focus areas are established, assemble a cross-functional task force with representatives from product, engineering, UX, support, sales, and other relevant teams. Each provides unique visibility into different user touchpoints across the lifecycle. Together, your team can examine both quantitative and qualitative data surrounding the selected pieces of feedback.

Talking directly to the users who left valuable pieces of feedback can also provide important context and depth. You can schedule a meeting with a sampling of users who gave similar pieces of feedback or reported the same bug. Your team can then lead a mediated discussion to gather qualitative and quantitative insights and uncover root causes.

You can also use additional tools such as data visualization solutions, user tracking and monitoring tools, and more to guide your team’s questions during conversations both among the internal team and with users. Creating and sharing a SWOT analysis with solution recommendations, estimated development efforts, and project ROI can also help keep your team informed as they make decisions. These data-driven approaches to deeper customer feedback analysis can make it easier to build consensus and get executive buy-in for product roadmap additions.

Once your investigation into a specific piece or collection of user feedback is complete, be sure to close the loop and share your progress with your customers. You can do this easily via a public roadmap or changelog. Connecting all the dots around high-impact feedback creates alignment and trust that their voice directly guides product development.

Collaborate with customer support, product development, and product marketing teams.

Bridging the gap between customer support and product development is critical for transforming user feedback into meaningful product improvements. Open lines of communication allow you to quickly escalate and prioritize high-impact issues. To facilitate better collaboration between these two teams, you can:

• Schedule a recurring sync meeting between Product, Engineering, and Product Marketing, and Customer Support leadership. This team can then discuss top call drivers, common user mistakes, and stickiest knowledge base articles to identify usage friction points. With every contributor bringing a different perspective, these meetings can be an invaluable way to gather and analyze comprehensive user feedback.
• Collaboratively define guidelines for escalating severe issues directly to the product team. Criteria may include feedback frequency, business impact, churn risk, and more. Having these processes in place so you can move with speed when necessary can make the difference between a churned user and a retained one.
• Ensure that the product development team solicits targeted feedback directly from the customer success and support teams on planned feature implementations. The support teams’ knowledge of workarounds and user mental models prevents blind spots that the engineering and product leaders may miss.
• For major product updates, the support team reps can pilot new tools, providing vital sandbox feedback. Their perspective of common pitfalls can help the product teams gather vital preliminary feedback and build a more useful product.

By aligning product evolution with customer pain points surfaced through your support teams, you can optimize the user journey while boosting front-line team efficiency.

Utilize Analytics to Validate User Feedback.

Integrating product usage analytics provides an objective lens for evaluating and prioritizing user feedback. Analyzing behavior surrounding reported issues can help your team quantify the true scope and impact of making product updates addressing specific customer feedback.

One way to include analytics in customer feedback analysis is to identify events and metrics tied to the specific feedback. For example, if users complain about a complex workflow, your team can track drop-off rates, time on task, error rates, and support tickets related to that process. Then you can correlate feedback frequency with measurable business outcomes like conversion and retention. 

The context of analytics with specific feedback can also help validate issues. For example, a piece of feedback about an issue that can be backed up by user behavior via rage clicks or drop-off points points to a valid concern that affects many users, even if you received only a couple reports about the issue. If analytics cannot back up a piece of feedback, you can follow up with the user to find more information, but it may point to a one-off issue or unique use case rather than something that affects most of your users.

You can also segment your user base to identify the most impacted cohorts for each issue or fix. This can help you prioritize fixes for issues that stifle growth, power users, or target buyer profiles. 

By combining voice-of-customer feedback with data-driven behavioral insights, you can develop a balanced perspective that transcends subjective opinions. This tactic can help you prioritize the feature requests and bug fixes that most benefits your ideal user base and moves your product development in the right direction.

Summarize User Feedback.

Customer feedback analysis is incomplete even once you have your behavioral analytics and research lined up to back up (or cancel out) the request or report in question. Gathering information is crucial, but it’s not useful to your team at large unless you can successfully summarize and share the knowledge you’ve gained. In this section, we’ll go over how you can create comprehensive reports of your findings, communicate those findings to relevant teams, and establish a feedback loop with your users for continuous improvement.

Create comprehensive reports.

The first step to ensuring successful communication is to create comprehensive, actionable reports about your customer feedback analysis and findings. Lay out the feedback you’ve collected into clear categories or themes. Helpful ways to organize this information include specific features or workflows, and user segments. Then you’ll need to summarize the these themes with supporting evidence such as:

• Verbatim user comments highlighting the problem and impact
• Analytics showing affected usage metrics like dropoff rates
• Trends in feedback volume and affected user segments over time
• Projections of revenue or retention uplift from remediation

If your report has a lot of information to convey, you’ll want to make it as easy as possible for its readers — usually leaders and decision-makers in your organization, as well as team members responsible for the product roadmap — to understand the data in the report. To do this, be sure to:

• Begin each category of the report with a list of key takeaways. This makes it easy for anyone to skim the report for a basic understanding of your findings, and gives them the option to delve deeper into the report for more information later. 
• Creating data visualizations that quickly convey priorities at a glance. Simple charts may highlight issues by frequency versus business impact. Overlay NPS or CSAT scores by page or feature. A Venn diagram reveals gaps across different user personas and use cases.
• Use lists and tables whenever possible to break up the text. Pages of nothing but paragraphs can lose your reader, but interspersing your report with different types of content can help retain attention.

Once you have the meat of your report completed, go back to the beginning and create a succinct introduction that lays out your key findings, takeaways, and action items. Then re-organize your report so that it tells a clear story of collecting feedback, performing various methods of customer feedback analyses, and ending each section with a list of clear conclusions and actions that each stakeholder needs to take.

Well-structured reports that are both succinct and comprehensive can turn a flood of user feedback into a focused guide to creating a successful product roadmap that improves customer experiences with your product.

Communicate findings to relevant teams.

Once you’ve created a report on customer feedback analysis, it’s time to share it out with your team. This isn’t as simple as sending it out via email, however. First, you’ll want to ensure that your report is made available to anyone who needs it. Try sharing it via multiple avenues such as email, your organization’s internal knowledge base — such as a shared Google Drive, Highspot, Confluence, or similar solution — and make it easily available with bookmarks and links shared via Slack or Teams.

Once you’ve shared your report, be sure to follow up with various teams and leaders to answer any questions and connect disparate teams on shared action items. By facilitating this cross-functional problem-solving and providing answers on user concerns for all relevant teams, you can lay the groundwork for an effective and successful product roadmap.

Establish a feedback loop for continuous improvement.

Your internal teams aren’t the only people you should be sharing your customer feedback analysis findings and action items with. To make sure that your customers feel heard and supported, you’ll need to share your finalized plans with them as well. You can do this by:

• Publishing a product roadmap.
• Updating it on a regular basis as you collect and analyze more customer feedback.
• Publishing a changelog to highlight new updates.
• Reaching out to specific users who have provided valuable feedback with information on how you’re implementing their requests.

Closing the feedback loop in this way can keep your users engaged, encourage them to leave more feedback, and improve customer trust and loyalty by proving your commitment to improving your product and keeping your customers happy.

User feedback scenarios: The good, the bad, and the just okay.

To close out our customer feedback analysis journey, let’s dig into some practical examples of positive, negative, and neutral feedback and how we can analyze them to get the most out of each. For the following fictional scenarios, we’ll look at feedback collected by teams at MaxContact, a cloud-based platform that provides software solutions for call centers.

The good: How to analyze and share positive feedback.

When the MaxContact team added this UI redesign project to their product roadmap, it received plenty of upvotes — a positive sign that the update will be well received when it’s launched. Positive feedback like this is the perfect starting point to dig into your customer’s experience with your platform. To follow up, the MaxContact team could send out surveys or invite comments to this post seeking additional ways to improve their UI. 

In addition to using positive feedback as a starting point for productive conversations with your customers, you can also leverage this feedback for marketing purposes. Once the UI redesign is launched at MaxContact, for example, they can seek quotes from those who upvoted this request as well as any customers who engage positively with the launch announcement.

The MaxContact team will also want to share this upvoted project internally to celebrate the developers and stakeholders who are contributing to the project — this will not only uplift the team but also provide a starting point for internal discussions on further improvements.

The bad: How to analyze and handle negative feedback.

The team at MaxContact, a cloud-based platform that provides software solutions for call centers, received constructive negative feedback on their campaign manager tool, as the navigation made it difficult to reference the figures on the screen. As multiple users gave the same feedback, the MaxContact team not only took the request seriously but made it clear to their users that they were going to address it.

It was added to their public product roadmap, where it garnered fifty upvotes — far more than any of their other items on the roadmap. When the team launched the improved campaign manager page, they made sure to close the loop by adding a post to their changelog.

Analyzing negative feedback that’s constructive, like this feature request, is often more straightforward than analyzing vague positive feedback, as it offers specific information about a point of friction in the product. When the same feedback is collected from multiple users, it’s usually a safe bet that fixing the issue will make your product better for a wider portion of your users. 

As shown by the MaxContact team’s actions, following up on negative feedback by acknowledging it, adding a fix to the public roadmap, and publicizing the fix via a changelog will ensure that your users feel prioritized by your team and improve their experience with your product.

The just okay: How to analyze and respond to neutral feedback.

A 2019 SurveyMonkey study showed that the vast majority of customer feedback is from users that had a positive (85%) or negative experience (81%). Truly neutral feedback is often rare, but it can be frustrating to deal with when it doesn’t offer specific criticism and makes it clear that your software isn’t a delight to use. Still, your team can extract valuable insights from it by leveraging some customer feedback analysis tactics. 

If the feedback came from a specific user, a good first step is to follow up and ask for additional context. Another option is to find other feedback on the same element of your product to validate or find any emerging patterns. If other reviews also indicate a lack of enthusiasm, it may be a sign that the product needs to provide a better experience or that your product is being adopted by an audience that doesn’t match your original persona or segment.

How to implement Beamer Feedback for customer feedback analysis.

• Step 1: Set up feedback collection mechanisms.
  
• Step 2: Implement sentiment analysis tools.
• Step 3: Create a feedback analysis team.
  
• Step 4: Establish a feedback prioritization framework.
• Step 5: Integrate feedback into the product development cycle.

How can Beamer help you collect customer feedback?

Collecting and analyzing customer feedback doesn’t have to be a complicated manual process. With Beamer Feedback, you can store your feature requests in one place, validate ideas early, easily close the feedback loop with customers, and boost user engagement to collect more valuable customer feedback.

Read “How to perform market research for your SaaS”to learn why customer feedback in all shapes and forms is the best way to inform your product development.

More useful links: “How to use customer feedback in product development”.