How to Leverage Customer Feedback to Build a Better Product Roadmap
Creating a product that stands out from the rest of the competition has never been more challenging. The marketplace continues to become more competitive, and trends constantly change in unexpected ways. Customer expectation requires your business to get innovative with the way it produces its products. Having the best product vision around is crucial for the overall success of your business.
To succeed at keeping up with the demands of the market, you need to ensure that your product team is acutely aware of how customers are using the products right now and how they will want to continue using that product in the future. However, the only way to accomplish this is by having a process that provides you with customer feedback that will be crucial to the development of your future products.
Customer feedback is becoming a necessity for product management every year.
One of the biggest issues we see with customer feedback is that it is ignored in the initial product development, and the various teams working on the product are not always aware of the requests customers have for the products.
That raises some challenges since the company is setting itself up to fail. That leads to time and resources being wasted senselessly, something no one wants to happen when they are building a product.
It is critical to leverage your customer feedback when developing a product roadmap.
For this post, let's go over how you can leverage customer feedback to build a better product roadmap.
What is a product roadmap?
The roadmap serves as a guide for everyone outside of the product team to know what work needs prioritization. Generally speaking, it is structured by buckets of work in progress, up next, and coming soon.
There is a wide range of ways for product teams to organize their roadmaps, everything from robust timelines around a particular period of time to flexible roadmaps that outline the priorities without dedicating to a set deadline of when it needs to be completed.
Ordinarily, everyone inside of your company has access to the roadmap, along with several outside users. It’s essential to provide your internal team insight into these priorities, so they can use them for leveraging tools to make better decisions.
Plus, it helps ensure everything stays aligned across the company on what’s coming next for the product in both the short and long term.
For instance, your sales team can use the roadmap to entice a prospective customer with some new upcoming features that are going to be released soon and make the interest in your product even better than the features being provided right now.
The marketing team can also use the roadmap to their advantage by coming up with blog posts and campaigns about the new features to drive new and existing customers to the product.
Identify customer feedback channels
One of the first things you need to do is list out every one of your customer feedback channels to comprehend the volume of feedback you receive from each channel.
Here are some challenges you should consider when developing your product roadmap:
● Customer interviews
● Cancelation feedbacks
● Customer support and live chat tools
● CRM
● Product and customer satisfaction surveys
● Social network
● Trail feedback
● Internal idea from your teams
● Net Promoter Scores
While there are many ways to receive feedback from your customer, product managers can become overwhelmed if they use too many of them. You need to decide which of these channels are suitable for your organization and team.
Keeping track of everything will make things more challenging and lead to losing sight of what you are trying to achieve by acquiring feedback from your customers. Grouping feedback into segments will help them ignore the noise in favor of what truly matters.
Product managers are not able to do everything, so it’s crucial to focus on features that would excite customers.
Chances are, your organization is using business tools and applications to keep up with your customers. These tools are an excellent way to get started on your customer feedback.
They can provide you with the original discussion and context that should assist you in understanding the underlying issue of your customer.
From your support tool or CRM, you will gain access to customer contact details, making it easier to reach out to them and dive deeper into the problem.
Keep in mind that your industry will impact how you managed to get feedback. For example, one of the best channels for B2B companies to receive customer feedback is online review sites.
Customers tend to frequently leave feedback about their experience and product features that are crucial for the product team to know about.
Due to the way these sites are built, you can find out what customers enjoy and what they don’t like about the experience with your product. The feedback shared on these review sites also grants you insight into where customers place the most value.
Use the right tools to collect your feedback
Once you’ve managed to identify your primary feedback channels, you need a way to come up with a way that allows you to gather all of the feedback in a single place and consolidate the feedback to identify any improvement opportunities for your product.
While not necessary, this step is highly recommended since it makes the feedback process much easier for your team. There is only so much time they can spend gathering the feedback themselves when they have to put in time building and improving your products.
Using a tool to automate your process will provide them with more time to focus on reading through the feedback and working on their product instead. Fortunately for you, there are plenty of tools out there that can help you automatically sort and identify every feedback you receive for every product you sell.
Here at SupporTrends, we provide you with a tool that can automate product insight, sentiment, consumer actions, and employee insight.
Our platform uses a highly sophisticated AI to understand and organize your customer feedback from various channels, such as online reviews, support tickets, call recording, and even surveys, enabling you to see and understand the data with the best possible clarity.
Our tool extracts specific product feedback from existing customer conversations for every product offered by your company. It can also help you identify the most prevalent topics of conversation and highlight crucial characteristics, such as customers with the highest and lowest satisfaction.
Categorize the feedback
To make better sense of the customer feedback, you want to group them for a much easier time. Here is a general way to pull this off:
Type of feedback
The theme of the feedback
Feedback data
SupporTrends offers some new integrations to help with this - Asana and Jira. These integrations allow your product and feature feedback that’s already organized on our platform to integrate in real-time with your product planning board of choice, automatically!
Type of feedback
Categorizing the feedback in several varying ways can help you manage any unclassified feedback from your customer support team or in the case of customers that are writing whatever they enjoyed in a survey field.
Here are several helpful categories:
● Bug
● Billing
● Generic responses (e.g. "I love or hate your product!")
● Feature request
● User education problem
● Usability issue
● Others (this one can be used to store away feedback that is difficult to categorize. It is possible to go back and recategorize it at a later date when you notice a pattern in the data.)
Theme of the feedback
Segmenting your feedback into themes can be helpful when you are attempting to understand the massive volume of incoming feedback. However, if your current feedback rate is on the small side, this may not be suitable for you.
The themes you establish will be connected to the feedback you have received. And will typically relate to various aspects of the product. For instance, let's say you worked for Twitter, and you receive a ton of feedback from users.
The theme you establish may look like a list of specific product features, such as:
● Bookmarks
● Profile
● Explore
● Lists
● Messages
● Moments
● Notification
These kinds of categorization are helpful when you are working through a scenario where you are most likely to feed that insight back into various teams to take action. For example, one team can work on Moments, while another group works on Explore.
At times, these themes can also be team-related, or they all be related to unmet needs that customers are dealing with at the moment.
Take the time to come up with several themes and see if any of them are useful for your product roadmap and the data you are attempting to comprehend.
Feedback data
At this point, you need to start reading through the feedback you have managed to acquire over time and segment each one into different sections.
The section that you create for each piece of feedback needs to be specific to the product related to the feedback. If one of the feedback is speaking about various points, such as two different feature requests, it’s useful to set these aside into two separate sections in separate columns.
At first, you may start naturally and set your feedback into a more open-ended column. But later one you can start breaking them down when you have a clear picture of what is going on in your feedback. Keep a close eye on the type of language customers use.
Some of the problems may sound the same at first, but they could be a wholly different problem. For instance, let’s say you receive customer feedback related to a billing issue. However, when you continue reading more, you start to realize that these breakdowns are different problems. Billing transaction bugs and billing acceptance bugs are two wholly different issues.
As you continue reading on, you start to realize that you need to break one of the columns down into a few more specific columns.
For instance, a request for better control over visual design could be segmented into the ability to add bullet points. Remember to go back and reorganize your row as your information expands.
Summarize what you have discovered
Now that you have dived deep into your customer feedback, it’s time for you to generate a summary of the data based on issue popularity and share it with the product team.
If the feedback you have acquired is less than 50, consider summarizing it in a simple table or one-page document.
For more sizable sets of feedback, consider breaking them down by other variables, such as the ones mentioned above. Doing so makes things much easier for you and the team to tackle the different buckets of feedback you’ve identified.
It allows you to better delegate them to the appropriate people in your organization who can work on fixing the issue discovered in the feedback.
The best course of action you can take with your customer feedback is to prioritize the most critical issues. Build a top most wanted list of customer problems or top requested feature list that you can then use to build up your product roadmap.
Size of the work
The final thing to contemplate when prioritizing which features you are going to tackle on your roadmap is the size of the work that will go into each product.
Knowing how long and how much effort it will take to ship out the new feature can assist you in acknowledging the tradeoff for other features being developed, along with making the right call on if the benefit of the feature is worth the time and resource spend developing it.
Conclusion
If you want to ensure that your company can provide the best possible product, it needs to start taking advantage of customer feedback.
It won’t be easy to leverage the feedback at first, but once you do, you’ll be able to develop a product roadmap that will have you remain on top of everything.
If you neglect to use the feedback being sent to you, that only shows your customers that you don’t care about what they have to say, which discourages them from sending you feedback in the future.
If you need help maintaining your feedback, then try out SupporTrends. We provide you with the tools you need to automate your customer feedback.