Benefits of Getting Customer Feedback Through Countly

Your customers or users hold the power to make or break your web or mobile app. Their decision to sign in regularly, engage with the app, or churn makes the success (or failure) of your product and, consequently, your business. Which is why listening to your users, especially before issues that bother them are allowed to grow, is important for your app and the customer experience it provides.

In this article, we delve into why you should be focusing on customer feedback and how tying your users’ opinions into other analytics of their experiences can make them even more effective.

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Customer Feedback: Driving Product Development

To understand your users’ preferences, habits, and experiences (with your app), you would normally rely on some form of analytics - mobile or web, or product analytics for cross-platform application.

While these analytics are crucial to understanding how users interact with your product, they do not necessarily show you the entire picture. What they often cannot shed light on is what additional features users would like to see in your app, personal experiences with your customer service department that could adversely affect their use of your app, how a particular feature update may be perceived in comparison to the older version, and other similar factors.

This is where customer feedback comes in.

Customer feedback offers unique, subjective, and critical information from the users themselves. It gives you real and authentic insight into your target user’s thoughts and requirements, essentially giving you information to develop a product that will resonate perfectly with your audience. Which is why customer feedback is critical to product development.

Collecting Customer Feedback

Every product manager and business owner will highlight the importance of speaking to your customers. Given its importance, different options have become available to be able to do just that.

Collecting feedback can be done, among others, via:

1. Interviews: Short or long, one on one discussions, where you speak to your users at length about their preferences, requirements, dissatisfactions, and expectations.
2. Group discussions: Similar to interviews, these can be undertaken for groups instead of one person at a time.
3. Feedback forms: These include surveys, ratings, and feedback forms shared via email, requiring the users to answer multiple questions about their entire interaction with your app.
4. Analytics’ integration: These include surveys or feedback pop-up tools that are integrated into your analytics tool, and that allow you to reach out to your users at specific times.

Let’s jump into a quick overview of the pros and cons of these options.

So what’s the optimal solution?

Customer Feedback Collection Through Product Analytics

Collecting customer feedback through your web and mobile app analytics tool remains one of the stronger options due to its advantages. One of the ways to overcome the disadvantages is to then opt for a product analytics tool that includes customer feedback collection features.

The result of this approach is that:

• You do not spend time on the integration of multiple tools
• You reduce techstack costs as you replace multiple tools with one
• You avoid data mismatches since all data is collected via the same logic
• You can see customer feedback as part of the bigger picture of overall customer behavior and product performance
• You can better target your feedback collection by applying your analytics tool’s user segmentation, while also rolling out updates in a sequential manner
• You maintain all data in one place, thereby eradicating the risk of data breaches

It was the aim to give customers these very advantages that led to Countly including a Feedback section in our analytics platform.

Collecting Customer Feedback with Countly

With a focus on giving product managers and app developers the most comprehensive picture of their users’ journeys and product experiences, Countly has included three feedback collection methods.

Surveys

Surveys are direct and elaborate prompts aimed to achieve the most detailed insight into customer thoughts, emotions, criticisms, and suggestions. Since surveys are good at capturing a good chunk of information from users, you can pose multiple questions. For instance, your survey could be contained within a freeform template or span across multiple screens where users can go through questions one at a time. You can also include different types of questions in a survey, ranging from multiple choice to paragraph-based responses.

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It is always a good idea to let customers know how much time it would take for them to fill the survey in. This has been seen to improve response rates.

NPS®

NPS® or Net Promoter Scores can measure customer loyalty by asking the simple question, “How likely are you to recommend this product to your friends or family?”.

Taken on a scale from 1 to 10, every customer rating will contribute to the overall score. To get an accurate score, customers are categorized into three groups:

• Detractors: Those who give a rating from 1 to 6 and are not likely to speak positively about your product.
• Promoters: Those who give scores of 9 or 10 and who will give you positive recommendations.
• Passives: Anyone who does not fall within the above two groups and who don’t count toward our evaluation.

The formula for calculating NPS® is: NPS® = %Promoters - %Detractors.

An NPS® question can be presented to customers at any interaction, allowing you to test elements of the customer experience as they take place. You can also add follow-up questions to gain more subjective and personal insight into why a specific score was submitted.

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NPS® acts as a good indicator of customer loyalty and is sometimes found to be more effective than surveys due to the brevity of time demanded from the customer. But they are also more telling than ratings, which is our next method of collecting customer feedback.

Ratings

Ratings are the simplest form of customer feedback that allows users to rate your product on a custom scale. The scales may be from 1 to 5, 1 to 10, emoji-based, or starred ratings. The simpler the UI for ratings, the easier it is for customers to leave a review.

A simple rating screen should ideally contain an easy query and an attention-grabbing interface. Users are also more likely to provide ratings if the prompt is limited to a single screen.

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Ratings are most effective in gathering quick feedback from users at specific interaction points. They are also the most convenient form of user feedback collection as they don’t require customers to think further than their most recent interaction or spend more than a few seconds to form an opinion.

However, analysis of ratings can easily become confusing as they are the most frequent and diverse form of feedback collection. You can gather ratings from many instances of user interactions, and they can answer several queries ranging from quality, ease of use (CES), speed of resolution, etc. Some ratings may be influenced by the customer’s perception of your entire brand, while some may be based on just their current experience. Therefore, you can separate user ratings based on whether they apply to the entire product performance or whether they only apply to how a service was rendered.

Bringing Customer Feedback and Product Analytics Together

The main benefit of including customer feedback in product analytics is the ability to make subjective, detailed insight part of the overall understanding of how users use your app or website. This brings a level of authenticity and relevance to product development that can otherwise be easily missed.

A study by Bain and Co. found that a 5% increase in customer retention rates increased profits by 25% to 95%. Customer strategy think tank organizations also say that the cost of retaining existing customers is much lower than the cost of acquiring new customers.

Product performance, user journey optimization, and an enjoyable customer experience are integral to retention. However, what is equally, if not more important to retention and loyalty is ensuring that your users feel heard.

A product that is easy for a user to associate and connect with is a product to which they will remain attached.

Want to know if Countly can help you bridge the gap between your web, mobile, or desktop app and your ideal user? Talk to one of our analytics experts today.