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I mainly use email to ask for feedback and the response rates are terrible, 2-3%.
Are there any effective ways of getting feedback from customers? Tools or templates?
If you don't have any, log user actions when they succeed or fail to do something. Even a simple log can tell you many things.
It also tells you if they're failing to discover or use a certain feature, or if they're using something in an unintended way.
You can set up Slack channels for your product to help users troubleshoot issues. We have workspaces where users can get help. Whenever the 20th user complains about something, what to do next becomes clear. We tend to focus on issues with high frequency and high severity as opposed to say stylesheets, but it's because the field is struggling not for lack of good CSS. But it may be different for you and you may have a product where the value of the product is the better interface. Adjust accordingly.
- [0]: https://posthog.com/
At the early stage my experience has been:
1. You should install SmartLook, FullStory, or similar to watch users. Qualitative feedback beats quantitative b/c your raw numbers are too low to be useful.
2. Identify key points in the customer journey when you want to collect feedback. For B2B SaaS I ask for feedback via email at these stages:
- When a customer signs up for a trial
- When a customer converts to a paying sub
- When a customer doesn't convert
- After 1-2 months of paying
- When a customer churns
First I'll make sure that I get system-generated emails when these events happen so I can send them manually.
I'll eventually automate sending these emails once volume gets too high. I'll automate them by sending from our app or from a tool like UserList or Intercom.
And when I get feedback I centralize in the tool I'm building (www.savio.io) and use it to prioritize what to build next.
It's pretty effective at getting very early bug reports, gathering interest on potential features, and their initial use was for feedback gathering. Random users won't give you feedback however until they came across a bug or a need though in my experience!
* If you're pre-product/market fit, just reach out to users via email, in-product messaging etc. You can incentivize them with Amazon gift cards as well. At this stage nobody actually needs your product so you'll have to do it by hook or by crook.
* If you're post-product/market fit then people actually _need_ your business. Once you make it clear that you're going to action on their feedback they're highly incentivized to help you out – so use the same strategies as above but make it clear what you'll use the feedback for.
* Set up automated surveys, especially ones that are unobtrusive in order to not create a shitty user experience – this allows you to baseline your product's effectiveness which is the first step towards continuous iteration. Eg last quarter we were at 3.3/5 satisfaction, let's get to 4.0/5 this quarter. These surveys are also a great way to find customers to interview.
* FullStory and Hotjar both allow you to view user sessions, highly recommend them as well.
The most important point: if you're an enterprise business, I highly recommend identifying the "best" customers that you have, building relationships with them, and favoring their guidance over others'. Once you hit scale all of your customers will want to give you feedback, but only some of them will have the wisdom/intelligence/creativity/whatever to have a great sense for what _you_ should build for _your_ business to succeed. When you find these customers, get them onto a customer advisory board / meet with them a lot as they will help you in the art of pulling a great product out of your market.
Since we know that 3 out of 10 users who receive this offer will accept it we segment users by industry / feature usage etc. and send offers to talk to them to listen their stories and feedback.
It talks at length about the challenges, especially, of getting _honest_ feedback from prospective users. And it has a lot of ideas to that effect.
"We are very interested in how you are getting on with . Please email us if you have any suggestions about how we can improve ."
But that only works if you are getting sales.
Also the more responsive you are to customers, the more likely they are to report bugs or make suggestions.
I wrote about my experiences getting feedback here: https://successfulsoftware.net/2008/04/28/getting-customer-f... (old article, but still relevant)
Firstly though, you need to have an idea (doesn't have to be perfect or 100% right) of who your target segment is. These are the people whose problem you are solving - and therefore initially are going to hold more weight with their feedback.
Once you have identified these users - use a combination of current users and potential users to get feedback from.
Some ideas:
* Email (like you've been trying) - Try and be candid and frank. Put yourself in their shoes - why should they respond? If it's a generic email their probably going to be of the mindset of either 'Someone else will do it' or 'I can't be bothered'. If you make it unique and more personal you're going to have a higher reply rate - but obviously a higher time commitment. I'd also suggest pushing for feedback calls rather then just messages. A call with a target user is worth its weight in gold.
As other users have suggested - offering a giftcard in exchange for a feedback call is also another valuable route if you can afford it.
* LinkedIn: Depending on your business (B2B or B2C) you can follow up with these users and potential new users on LinkedIn. Again this comes back to being somewhat more personal. Explain who you are etc.
* In app messaging: If they are constantly using your app - ask them while they are there in the midst of it. Don't be spammy though (this is approach we take mainly with delighted).
Lastly, once you have gotten your feedback - don't just take it at facevalue. Try and really understand what problem they are trying to solve as the solution might be completely different then the one they were thinking of.
E.g. if you were building an analytics app and someone gave feedback that they want to be able to export the data. If you take that at facevalue you will most likely build a tool that exports their data. However if you dig deeper and try and understand why they want to export the data, you might be able to solve a bigger issue for them AND for more users. E.g. if they come back and say they want to do XYZ with the data beacuse that means they can then gain ABC insight from the data - you might be able to add the ABC insight into the dashboard instead, skipping the need for export and customer work.
If you want more of a hand feel free to reach out! I'd be happy to help you out!
[1]: This is actually a problem we are trying to solve with Delighted so I feel your pain - https://getdelighted.co
For qualitative data such as user interviews/calls the solution for most teams is either to spend a lot of time on find users to talk to and set up calls or to pay companies like usertesting.com for access to their panels.
These tools don't allow you to get quick (and for most teams affordable) access to your own users for user interviews though, which is something that was enough of a pain point within my own team that we've built a tool exactly for that (https://tryribbon.com).
The Mom Test is also a great read on how to get useful user feedback in general (https://amzn.to/383bo92).