How can PLG Teams Build Better Products from User Feedback?

Learn what user feedback is, why it’s crucial, and how you can enhance your feedback process to elevate user satisfaction and refine your product.

User feedback is the lifeblood of product development, offering valuable insights that shape the success of SaaS companies. It serves as a direct line of communication between your company and its users, creating a collaborative environment for continuous improvement.

At Beamer, we understand the pivotal role user feedback plays in refining products and enhancing user engagement. User feedback is needed not only to measure customer satisfaction but also to define your product strategy.

In this blog post, we’ll explore all of the intricacies of user feedback, and why it is crucial for your SaaS company’s growth. Let’s dive in.

What is User Feedback?

User feedback encompasses the thoughts, opinions, and suggestions users provide about your product or service. It can be as simple as an emoji reaction submitted via a customer feedback tool, but in most cases it goes beyond simple reviews and offers a detailed perspective on user experience and customer expectations.

There are many types of user feedback. Qualitative feedback like comments and reviews provides direct insight into the user experience and user sentiment, while quantitative feedback like Net Promoter Scores (NPS) serves as a metric to gauge user satisfaction. But it doesn’t end there: customer feedback can also include feature requests, bug reports, and more valuable data that contributes to the continuous improvement of your product.

Why Should You Invest in User Feedback?

User feedback isn’t a rhetorical device. It’s not meant to confirm your assumptions about customer satisfaction, nor a validation system for previously made decisions. Instead, it’s an iterative process that helps you understand users at a deeper level, leading to insights that can steer the direction of product development. From impacting important growth metrics like user retention to improving feature prioritization, here are some compelling reasons why you need user feedback.

Improving user experience.

User feedback provides insights into how users perceive and interact with your product or service. It’s your most reliable source of truth to understand user experiences and identify areas that need improvement.

Product improvement is an integral part of the customer feedback loop. After collecting and analyzing customer feedback, taking action enables you to keep the feedback cycle alive as it rewards their initial engagement and influences them to continue to engage.

Implementing user suggestions also fosters a sense of collaboration and partnership between your team and your users, creating a product that truly meets their needs.

Bug detection and troubleshooting.

Users often need help with issues or bugs that may not be apparent during the development or testing phases. User feedback serves as a valuable source for identifying and addressing these problems, helping SaaS teams create more stable and reliable systems for bug testing and troubleshooting.

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Beamer tip: Organize your customer feedback data into categories that help your team navigate through the noise and identify what needs to be addressed. For example, when collecting feedback on a new feature, create tags that separate feedback around general user sentiment from feedback that reports specific issues or bugs that have been identified. You can take it a step further by automating this process with Beamer Feedback and Zapier. When a bug is detected and categorized, automatically shoot a Slack message to your engineering team to address bugs as soon as they are submitted via Feedback.

Feature enhancement.

Users are the most qualified judges to evaluate the performance of your product’s features. Through feature requests, users can ask for new features or suggest improvements to existing ones. This feedback is instrumental in shaping the evolution of a product, ensuring it aligns with user expectations and stays competitive in the market.

Tracking feature-related feedback can also help product teams prioritize and validate building and enhancing features. Gathering user feedback to influence roadmap decisions is a tried and tested PLG strategy, ensuring that your product is truly catering to its users.

Customer satisfaction.

Users who feel heard are happy. Addressing your customers’ concerns and incorporating their suggestions can foster a sense of trust and loyalty, leading to user retention, upsells, and cross-sells.

You can measure customer satisfaction from user feedback with both qualitative and quantitative approaches within you user feedback tool. With Beamer, for example, users can rate your product and services on the NPS scale, or have in-app conversations with a CSM to relay their experience.

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Adapting to changing requirements.

The SaaS market is constantly evolving and companies that want to succeed must consistently seek innovation. Customer feedback helps organizations stay agile by adapting their products to meet changing requirements and emerging trends in their segments.

High-velocity teams often struggle with ensuring that the speed at which they roll out new features and improvements match all of their users’ needs. It’s easy to get distracted by competition and adapt your product only to fit external pressures.

User feedback will also allow you to adapt your user communication and user experience to different segments in your user base. Creating targeted feedback requests and leveraging the data you collect will help you further personalize your user communication.

Prioritizing development efforts.

With limited resources, organizations must prioritize development efforts. Customer feedback provides valuable information on which issues or features are most important to users, helping teams allocate resources effectively.

Pranav Goyal, Product Manager at Pepper Content, believes that keeping users engaged can not only win them over but also transform them into an extension of your product team. And his hypothesis has been proven right. After streamlining its feedback loop to better collect and manage feedback, Pepper Content was able to allocate 50% more engineering time toward user requests.

Identifying successes.

User feedback can tell you what you’re doing right and what could do more of. Positive feedback highlights aspects of a product that users appreciate and serves as source material for Product, Product Marketing, and Marketing teams.

Recognizing and promoting these strengths can also help teams build on what is working well and differentiate themselves from competitors. In Pepper Content’s case, for example, customer feedback unlocked opportunities to serve the B2B market, generated over $180k in revenue, and completely pivoted their business model.

“Beamer helps us bridge the gap and makes our users happy. It definitely impacted our revenue in a positive way and increased our NPS.”

– Pranav Goyal, Product Manager at Pepper Content

Engagement and community building.

For customer-centric teams, user feedback is a crucial part of its community-building strategy. Users who feel heard and valued are more likely to remain engaged and loyal, contributing to long-term success.

It’s also a powerful sales enablement resource. More than 80% of customers use feedback in their buying decisions. Positive reviews, social proof, high NPS scores and other ratings will validate your product’s strength. There’s no more trusted source than another buyer.

Iterative development.

All of the great benefits of user feedback above contribute to the overall goal of achieving product success. Streamlining your feedback loop to constantly communicate back and forth with users supports an iterative development process. Instead of relying solely on initial design and assumptions, SaaS products can continuously refine and enhance their offerings based on real-world user experiences and preferences.

The crux of product-led growth.

How can Beamer enhance user feedback collection?

Beamer is a user communication platform and customer feedback tool that helps product teams effortlessly update and engage users. It’s no-code user feedback tool is designed to simplify the process of creating and managing changelogs, release notes, in-app notifications, and user feedback.

Beamer Feedback has a track record of helping SaaS businesses improve their feedback management and collection processes, and here’s how it can benefit you:

• Feedback widget: The feedback widget makes it easy for users to provide feedback directly within your product. This immediate and accessible channel encourages users to share their thoughts in the moment, leading to more accurate and timely insights.
• Segmented targeting: Beamer enables you to target specific user segments with tailored messages. This ensures that you gather feedback from the right audience, allowing for more targeted and relevant product enhancements.
• User voting: Users can upvote or downvote specific feedback or feature ideas, providing a quick and quantifiable measure of user sentiment. This feature helps prioritize issues or features based on the collective voice of your user base.
• Changelog management: Beamer simplifies the process of managing and communicating product changes through a dedicated changelog. This transparency keeps users informed, reducing confusion and generating constructive feedback. Explore SaaS changelog examples to determine what will resonate with your audience.
• In-app notifications: Reach users directly within your application with in-app notifications. This feature ensures that important announcements and feedback requests are seen by your user base, increasing participation.
• User-friendly interface: Beamer is designed with a user-friendly interface, making it easy for both your team and users to navigate and engage. The intuitive design promotes a positive user experience, encouraging more active participation.
• Analytics and insights: Gain valuable insights into user engagement with Beamer’s analytics. Track user interactions, measure the success of announcements, and use data-driven decision-making to continuously improve your feedback collection strategy.

Experience the full spectrum of benefits by exploring the features of Beamer Feedback – the number one user feedback tool – yourself. Sign up for a free account today and witness firsthand how Beamer can revolutionize your user feedback collection and management processes.