What is user feedback?
What is user feedback?
User Feedback refers to information about an audience’s opinions, needs, preferences, and requests on a given product or brand.
Why is user feedback important?
User feedback is important for optimizing any brand, product, or service since it can help creators change designs to optimize the user experience, increasing engagement, brand loyalty, and overall success. To put it simply, you can’t make your users happy if you don’t know what they want.
What are the different types of user feedback?
User feedback can take many forms including ratings, reviews, survey answers, and social media engagements. Generally speaking, user feedback can be described as either quantitative, consisting of data regarding users’ actions and their implied preferences, or qualitative, which takes the form of feedback and comments in the users’ own words. Qualitative data is more nuanced than quantitative data and can tell a brand more about how their users think and feel.
How do I collect user feedback?
There are many ways to collect user feedback, but the most successful will create abundant opportunities for users to communicate their needs and preferences with the least friction.
Some common methods of collecting user feedback include:
- Rating
- Reviews
- Email surveys
- In-app surveys
- Social Media
- In-app communications such as Stories
When should I collect user feedback?
User feedback can be beneficial at every stage of development for an app or brand, and the more the better. Larger sample sizes will give more accurate and therefore beneficial data, but a brand must be careful not to overextend the capacity of their audience with constant requests for feedback. Segmenting your audience and asking for different types of feedback from different types of users on different aspects of your design and product will provide the most insightful data.
Types of user feedback
User feedback can generally be described as either quantitative or qualitative. Most quantitative feedback can be expressed with numbers, whereas qualitative feedback tells more of a story. Another way to think of it is that quantitative feedback tells you what users prefer, but qualitative feedback will tell you why those preferences exist.
How to Collect User Feedback
Any channel that allows for communication from users to a brand can be used to collect user feedback. Some common techniques in digital marketing include using pop-ups to encourage ratings, sending follow-up emails with survey questions after customer service requests, or asking questions on social media. The best methods of collecting user feedback are targeted, quick, and fun, such as interactive elements on in-app Stories.
Important user feedback metrics
Which user feedback metrics are most important will vary from brand to brand depending on the company’s goals, but most user feedback metrics are focused on the customer experience either with a product itself, or the process of interacting with the company. Some examples of important user feedback metrics would include;
- Customer Retention Rate
- Average ratings
- Churn rate
- Bounce rate
- Net promoter score
- Number of referrals
- Reviews
Best practices for collecting user feedback
Collecting user feedback can be a delicate process, but the actionable insights gained are worth the time and investment put into gathering and interpreting user feedback. Here are some best practices that can help create a user feedback system that meets the needs of brands and their audiences.
- Ask smart questions. Before you ask for audience feedback, take a look at user data and action patterns to identify aspects of the user journey that may need to be addressed. Is cart abandonment common in a certain demographic? Make a plan to find out what the barriers are to conversion.
- Time your feedback requests well. Getting user feedback at key points along the customer journey is key to understanding their experience, but if the requests create friction, they can do more harm than good. Try to include feedback opportunities that don’t collide with conversion such as asking for a review after the user has engaged with the app daily for a week, or after a product has arrived and there’s been a few days to use it.
- Make it easy for customers to talk. Give your audience multiple opportunities and methods for sharing their thoughts, and make it quick and easy for them to do so. Gathering feedback directly in the app with intuitive, engaging tools like Story Stickers is ideal. Read more about using Storyly to gather user feedback here.
- Say thank you. Be sure to thank users for their time and input, and honor their investment by responding both directly to their messages and more broadly to their needs.
How to manage user feedback
Asking your users for feedback without first creating a method to respond to their needs can be frustrating and alienating for users so it’s important to have systems for tracking customer feedback as well as methods of collecting it. Deciding on which key performance indicators (KPIs) are most important to your customer satisfaction strategy can help guide the focus of your customer feedback management strategy. Generally speaking, the feedback from your most valuable customers on your most important elements should be interpreted and addressed first.
