Getting and staying close to customers is an important north star for product managers (PMs), marketers, and customer success leaders alike. And for good reason: Knowing what your customers need (and want) is crucial to delivering a product experience that adds value and keeps users coming back.
The hard part, though, is ensuring you have the right tools and processes in place to collect, organize, and act on customer feedback effectively.
In a recent webinar, Pendo’s Rebecca Notté (product operations manager) and Hannah Chaplin (principal, product marketing) discussed why customer feedback is crucial in today’s business climate—and how Pendo Feedback can help teams establish and maintain efficiency.
Here are some of the top takeaways from their conversation:
Why feedback matters for efficient growth
As businesses adapt to current macroeconomic headwinds, efficiency is the name of the game—including a not-so-subtle pressure to deliver more with less resources and increase productivity with the same headcount. For product teams, one of the clearest paths towards efficiency is ensuring you’re building products and features that users actually want.
This is where feedback comes in. If you’re able to establish a direct line of communication with your users, you’ll be better equipped to deliver software that truly makes an impact. If you have a clear process for users to submit feedback, you can even reduce the number of support tickets coming in, since you’re able to separate out feedback from support inquiries. And when you know you’re building the right things and improving the customer experience, retention (and growth) will follow.
Let’s dig into three ways you can use Pendo Feedback to implement a feedback process that’ll make an impact on your customers and your company.
1. Centralize your feedback data
Hannah and Rebecca started by describing a common problem companies face: feedback is scattered in multiple places, and therefore hard to trust—and find. When teams don’t have one place to view all feedback data, it can get lost, lacks context, and is difficult to consume and analyze.
With Pendo Feedback, companies can easily overcome this challenge and centralize their product feedback in a single location. When feedback data lives in one place, everyone knows where to go to learn what customers are saying about the product, and you’re able to view all requests at once. This also results in less time spent (read: wasted) digging around for feedback, and eliminates the potential for feedback to get lost in translation from customers or internal stakeholders.
Pendo Feedback pro tip: Use the Zapier integration to set up automatic Slack notifications whenever a user submits a new request in Pendo Feedback.
2. Pair qualitative and quantitative data
Another challenge many teams face is the ability to back their decisions with data. While product teams of the past have relied on gut instinct, today, that no longer cuts it. Luckily, Pendo Feedback makes it easy to pair qualitative feedback with quantitative data like product usage and user metadata.
For example, when you view requests you can also see contextual data about your users like if they’re a free user vs. paying customer, or how active they are in the application. Similarly, you can sort requests by account value or number of votes to better identify your highest value requests. Better yet: After you create a report in Pendo Feedback, you can save it and easily share it with your team and refer back to it in the future.
Pendo Feedback pro tip: If you’ve built a dashboard in Pendo, you can add the Product Requests by Product Area widget to bring in qualitative data from Pendo Feedback.
3. Communicate back to requestors
Beyond collecting, organizing, and using feedback to improve your product, it’s important to keep the customers who provide this feedback in the loop. This is not to say that you’re responsible for acting on every piece of feedback you receive. It’s more about keeping customers informed and updated on where their request stands, why you are or aren’t implementing it, and what your team is focused on in the short and long term.
Any PM knows it’s not realistic to respond to every request that comes in. With Pendo Feedback, you can bulk select requests (e.g. those that relate to a certain feature) and let all of these users know that you’re taking their feedback into consideration. You can also use the “What’s Coming?” report in Pendo Feedback to keep users informed on what your teams are planning and building.
Pendo Feedback pro tip: After a new feature is released, set up automatic updates and simultaneously email users who voted for the feature and publish an in-app announcement.
Want to dig deeper into using Pendo Feedback to drive efficiency? Watch Rebecca and Hannah’s full discussion here:
