User feedback is essential for building a strong business and staying in touch with the needs of your customer base. Collecting feedback regularly helps you understand how to improve your product and provide an excellent user experience.
As most teams know, though, collecting user feedback without the right tools and processes can be stressful and overwhelming. Below, we talk about overcoming challenges in collecting user feedback for e-commerce platforms, apps, and products. You’ll also learn the full value of user feedback and what it can do for your business.
The value of customer feedback
User feedback is an invaluable resource for your company. It helps you better understand your target market, gain insight into their wants and needs, and learn how they feel about your product and company as a whole. Collecting user feedback also helps you figure out ways to improve existing features and brainstorm ideas for new ones.
The practice of collecting feedback also shows your users that you care about their opinions. Collecting feedback opens up a channel of communication for users who directly share what’s on their minds with product experience teams.
Finally, collecting feedback helps you attract new users. Nearly everyone relies on online reviews to make purchase decisions. If you get into the habit of collecting and sharing feedback, you’ll get a sense of how folks feel about your product while identifying opportunities to improve before they have a chance to impact the wider user experience.
Challenges in collecting user data
Feedback is essential, but it can be difficult to actually collect it.
Lack of user engagement
Motivating users to share their thoughts can be an obstacle. Users may not want to think about what feedback they’ll share, or they simply don’t want to take the time to share it. Some also don’t feel motivated to share feedback unless they have had a negative or unsatisfactory experience. Research shows that users are more likely to share negative experiences than positive ones. This narrows the type of helpful feedback you receive and can actually be put into practice.
Low-quality feedback
User feedback can be vague, off-topic, or lacking enough detail to be useful. If your questions aren't phrased just right or if a user sees them at the wrong time, you risk collecting mostly low-quality feedback. This makes data analysis more time-consuming and makes it more difficult to extract actionable insights.
Poor feedback collection methods
If your tools or processes are inefficient or impractical, they’ll present a challenge in collecting user feedback. For example, social media can provide a helpful starting point when learning about your users. However, you may not be reaching the right user base this way. Reaching out directly to your users may offer deeper insights into your product, but that approach can take time. Remember that there are pros and cons to each feedback collection method.
Large volumes of feedback
If you have a big user base, you may struggle to manage hundreds or thousands of responses. If gathering feedback becomes too cumbersome, your team may fail to use it. It’s important to have established systems for collecting and analyzing your feedback so that it doesn’t take time away from critical product team tasks.
Unintended bias
Unintended bias can skew your results or put off users from sharing their feedback. Here are some examples of biased survey questions to avoid:
- Leading: “Do you agree that our product solves your problem?” This implies that your product does, and to say that it doesn’t would mean you disagree.
- Loaded terms: “How much do you love our product? How terrible are our competitors’ products?” Loaded terms evoke strong emotions and can affect your feedback.
- Confusing wording: “How often do you use our app?” This question might not be confusing if you provide multiple-choice answers, but what if it’s open-ended? Do you want people to think about their daily use? Monthly? Yearly?
Strategies to increase customer feedback collection
To combat the challenges of collecting user feedback outlined above, try the following methods for getting more (and better) feedback.
Ask for feedback at the right time
If you struggle to get enough feedback from your users, consider when you ask for it. You may be surprised by how much timing can affect feedback collection.
Use Sprig to ask for feedback at precisely the right time. Sprig’s in-product Surveys target users when they’ve completed a task, used a feature, or taken a specific action in your app. Your product is still on their minds when they’re asked for feedback, increasing the chances that they’ll respond.
Pay attention to how you ask for feedback
Timing is important, but so is your wording. To avoid bias, take note of how you frame your questions and the words you use. You want to remain neutral with simple, straightforward questions that aren’t leading — and can’t be misconstrued easily.
How you ask questions should also align with what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re digging deeper into a newly released feature, for example, you might ask more specific questions about your users and their opinions. If you’re trying to get an overall sense of customer satisfaction, more open-ended, general questions help you get started.
Encourage users to share their thoughts
How and when you ask for feedback can considerably improve your response rate, but what if that’s not enough? There are other strategies you can use to encourage your users to leave feedback.
Offering an incentive can boost responses. Discounts on a subscription or product, bonuses, or early access to a new product or feature may help. Just be sure to offer incentives for all feedback given, not just positive feedback.
Another way to encourage feedback is to ask for it after a key interaction with your e-commerce platform. If a user gets help via live chat or email support, ask for feedback before the interaction ends. A quick CSAT survey might make sense for live chat. In comparison, asking open-ended questions through emails gives your users more time to respond.
Use an efficient feedback collection system
To effectively manage feedback volume, have a system in place.
A feedback collection tool partnered with Sprig’s AI Analysis speeds up the process but also does the heavy lifting for you. With Sprig AI, it’s all automated: gathering survey responses, updating data as new responses roll in, and generating summaries and key takeaways of the data. Sprig automates the process so that you can spend more time innovating and improving your product.
You should also have processes in place ahead of time to address issues that may come up. What if feedback is divided on a specific feature of your product? Do you ask for more detailed feedback, set up interviews, or test that feature first? Knowing what to do next can reduce overwhelm and help you take action on feedback more quickly.
Get more user feedback with the right tools
You understand how valuable user feedback can be for your team, but maybe you’re hesitant to spend more resources on it. Here’s how small business banking platform Novo collected 40% more feedback and uncovered actionable insights with Sprig.
For Novo, ease of use is a top priority. They want Novo to meet their customers’ needs. But, as a lean team, Novo needed help asking for feedback, summarizing data, and turning said data into product recommendations and improvements.
When Novo leveraged Sprig’s in-product Surveys and AI Analysis, they increased feedback by 40%.
Their audience answered key questions so the team could learn about the product’s ease of use and how new features would improve customer experience. Users answered questions within the Novo platform as they were working within it, improving response rates. Novo also reduced the time spent collecting data and coordinating more in-depth interviews, saving about 20 hours a month. And when all was said and done, Sprig AI turned thousands of survey responses into clear takeaways and user insights, saving Novo team members even more time.
As you can see from Novo’s experience, using the right feedback tool can help you achieve your e-commerce platform’s business goals. They needed to maintain ease of use for their platform, but they also needed a feedback system that didn’t eat up all of their team’s resources. That’s why Sprig, with automated in-product surveys and automated collection and analysis, was the right choice for Novo — and may be the right choice for your product.
Gather and implement user feedback easily with Sprig
Your business must make user feedback a priority if you want to improve your product, brand reputation, and customer service. Doing so takes careful planning and consideration, though. Your timing, questions, and methods have to be on point to get high-quality feedback. And gathering feedback can’t take up too much of your resources, either.
That’s why Sprig’s In-Product Surveys and AI Analysis tools are your best bet. Both can automate the most time-consuming, detailed tasks for collecting and analyzing feedback. Your team can focus on implementing your findings and meeting your users’ needs with your products.
Sign up for a Sprig demo today and see what it can do for your business.
