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We have found that our customers collect up to 35x more feedback than before once they add the widget to their websites! It does depend on where you place the "Give feedback" button though — the more visible it is, the more feedback you'll collect.
Beauty of it is they sneeze, we know. Everyone in the team kinda knows what's important what's not. we can confidently say things like "nobody cares about that fancy feature". It super valuable for a startup to get immedeate feedback. Especially valuable has been knowing - the first things the notice when they start using: where is sort? how do i add team members? do i have to prepay? - feature requests: it's painful to keep closing windows, need the ability to adjust windows, I also want to do this other thing you guys havent thought of. - Bugs: why am i seeing double messages.
Disadvantages are that some customers expect immedeate answers, unrealistic expectations. and its cringey to lay down the rules and set expectations every time. no matter how many times you do it.
Our take is its 80% good and 20% bad. As we grow the company, the idea is to keep doing this for a "representative sample of customers" . Customer feedback is gold. If you can setup some kind of process like this, its great.
* Hitting up active customers on Twitter, just writing a short message: "Hi xyz, just saw that you are using Splitbee quite actively. Do you have any feedback for me, that would help a lot"
For this method I got answers from 9/10 people with amazing feedback. Very detailed and long messages. Be sure to target "power" users.
* I sent automatic emails if someone embeds splitbee successfully to their page & a mail if they don't do it within 24 hours. People often engage with them and explaining why they did not embed it yet. Also pretty helpful
* We added the feedback.fish widget to all of our https://splitbee.io/docs/embed-the-script and in our app. We get about 8-10 submissions a month which is quite a lot for our size.
Secondly, (maybe it's mentioned I've read all comments) you need a community and keep it active and read the on going discussion on how people think of your product
- I have installed a chat popup on my landing page and I always try to answer any question within 1 hour, and then follow up with those users afterward.
- I have a feedback portal (similar to canny). Whenever anyone leaves any kind of feedback, I write them a thank you email and try to elaborate more on the feedback they left, no matter if this is negative, positive feedback or feature request. For example, if they ask for a feature, I tell them when I plan to develop it.
- Whenever user purchases a license for my app, I also write them a thank you email, and ask for a small feedback. I try to do a short investigation on what user is doing and include some personal touch in it. Usually, 50% of such emails get an answer.
- If I see some bug report coming from a known user I immediately send them an email explaining why that bug has happened, how and when I'm gonna fix it.
I also keep a page in my notes called 'Followups' where I put the user's name and the reason why I should follow up with them. For example next week I'm preparing a new release of the app that has changes which I know are used heavily by a couple of users and I will reach out to them this week, give them an alpha build and ask for their feedback. Whenever I get an idea of how I can bring someone's attention to the product, I add their name to this list.
The responses on here are reasonable but a bit short sighted. What works in one context will not work in another.
We built a widget exactly for this! https://feedback.fish It integrates in your website so that users can give feedback immediately once they feel a need (whether that's a bug report or a feature request). We have found that our customers collect up to 35x more feedback than before once they add the widget to their websites! It does depend on where you place the "Give feedback" button though — the more visible it is,…
A discord server is useful for far more than most people understand. You can show daily progress; show new features; highlight community contributions; have a centralized bug report channel; and the other users will start solving other users' problems when it attains critical mass.
The nit is "critical mass". But if you make something that people find remotely interesting, people will join. Broadcast what you're doing on twitter, and eventually you'll get noticed.
Surveys and cold calls are like trying to make fire by banging stones together. Tools from a different era. Sure, they work, but I've found the above process to be far more effective.
It helps to make your discord a general topic, by the way, rather than a specific product. Our ML discord recently passed 1,000 users. https://discord.com/invite/x52Xz3y
Community building is tough work, and I've had several failed attempts. You shouldn't expect yours to take off immediately. You should do it because you like it, and eventually something will work.
But it depends entirely on the business. Most businesses don't need a community. But I can't think of a single business with a community that would have been in such a strong position without it.
You are asking about user research. There is an entire industry of user researchers out there, and lots of great books and articles. It fascinates me that HN has such a blind spot for this topic. The responses on here are reasonable but a bit short sighted. What works in one context will not work in another.
Heaps of information on how to get started in this blog: https://userresearch.blog.gov.uk