The Top 6 Product Feedback Tools & Strategies

Putting in the time and effort to find out what your customers really think of your products is one the best things you can ever do for your business. And if you don’t figure out a way to gather effective product feedback, measuring the impact of the tweaks you make to your product is a guessing game. 

Read on for the six best strategies and tools for quickly and easily gathering the kind of feedback that can help you create products that outshine their competition.

The best product feedback tools 

The best product feedback tools help you paint a clear picture of what your customers do and don’t like about your product – and why they feel that way.

Focus on these simple and effective methods to make sure you’ve got every piece of the puzzle in place when it comes to what your customers think about your products:

Website analytics

Actions speak louder than words, as the old adage goes.

Which is why the analytics platforms you've linked up to your website and app, heat mapping software, and session recording tools are so invaluable when it comes to gathering product feedback. 

Together, these tools will help you analyze exactly how potential customers navigate your site and users interact with your platform. 

This can reveal insights you won’t be able to glean any other way, such as:

• Which features your users gravitate to, 
• What problems they use your product to solve, and 
• How they navigate around your interface (and any clumsy aspects of your UX). 

Diving into the data you can glean from analytics platforms is a relatively cheap and easy way of getting direct feedback on what your customers do and don’t like about your product. And while these tools can’t tell you the “why” behind the “what”, it gives you a great jumping off point for which insights to try and unearth when you move on to more hands-on feedback channels. 

Book a demo of Assembly to make it easy to gather and organize feedback from your customers. 

Surveys 

Product feedback surveys are one of the most widely-used product feedback tools – and for very good reason. They’re easy to set up, cost next to nothing, and help you quickly get a general sense of how your customers feel about a certain area of your product. 

And because a multiple-choice survey only takes up five or ten minutes of your customers’ time, it’s often easy to incentivise your users to take part with vouchers and discounts.

You just need to be sure to design your surveys around a specific aspect of your product you want to understand better if you want to generate the most valuable insights from them. Ask questions that are too general and surface-level and you won’t see much of a return on your investment, so let the data you get from your analytics guide the way when it comes to what questions you ask in your surveys. 

Design feedback sessions

Inviting your current users – and potential customers – to a design feedback session is the best method at your disposal for diving deep into their thoughts and opinions about your product. 

During these sessions you can ask follow-up questions, read non-verbal cues, and get a much better sense of your customers’ spoken and unspoken thoughts about your product.

Each design feedback session takes time to organize and will require a bit of budget. But they’re one of the most effective ways there is for getting in-depth feedback on what is and isn’t working with your product. 

To get the most from your design feedback sessions, you should first use website analytics and surveys to get an overall sense of how your customers feel about your product and which features they do and don’t like. Then, invite people who give a range of interesting responses to your surveys to a feedback session to dive deeper into their point of view. 

Try Assembly to see how easy it can make running design feedback sessions.

Simple and effective product feedback strategies

Now you’ve got the right tools for the job, it's time to learn how to get the most out of them.

Follow these strategies to quickly and effectively gather the kind of product feedback that can help you transform a flop into a runaway success:

Choose your channels

Each of the product tools we’ve outlined above have their time and place. 

Your website and app’s analytics can help you understand how potential and existing customers interact with your brand. This can not only reveal some great insights on its own, but also give you an idea of areas to dig into through surveys. 

The responses to the surveys you conduct can then inform what areas you explore in design feedback sessions, which are the ideal tool to delve deeper into specific details and unearth some invaluable insights. 

Together, each of these channels will reveal a different kind of insight into what your customers think about your product that you can combine to form a complete picture. 

Keep it focussed

You’ll get the most actionable insights from all this feedback if it’s focussed around a specific aspect of your product you’re looking to improve. 

For the best return on your investment, pinpoint a specific part of the customer journey or just one of your product’s features to dive into through feedback. 

The more focussed your efforts, the more valuable the insights you’ll get from it are likely to be. Try to cover too much at once, on the other hand, and you’re likely to end up with shallow insights into several different areas.

So, keep the aims of your product feedback focussed for the best results. 

Book a demo of Assembly to see how easy it can make gathering, organizing, and analyzing product feedback. 

Stay objective

The purpose of gathering product feedback is to get objective insights into how your product fulfills the needs of your target customers – and how that stacks up against the competition. 

So it’s crucial that you listen to the objective feedback that it generates. 

Of course, this can be hard if it’s not what you want to hear – especially if the feedback your customers give you suggests you need to rethink a feature or even pivot your product entirely. 

So, remember: the purpose of listening to your customers’ feedback is to uncover the facts. If you listen to them, you’ll give yourself the best possible chances of your product being a success.

How do you manage product feedback?

When you gather product feedback using several different methods, organizing all that data is a crucial first step in turning it all into action items for your team to execute on.

If you’re planning on collecting feedback from hundreds of customers using several different tools, a feedback management system like Assembly for Enterprise can make collecting, organizing, and analyzing all that feedback a lot easier. 

Assembly’s native integrations mean you can collect customer feedback through your tools of choice and keep it organized all in one place. You can then collect this information in a knowledge base your whole company can access, then create projects around improving each issue flagged by your product feedback.

The final word

Gathering feedback from your customers is the only way to find out what they truly think about your product – and then make changes that will keep them customers.

Use the tools and strategies we’ve outlined in this short guide to make sure you’re finding out what your customers do and don’t like about your products before it’s too late.