How SaaS Brands Can Collect Feedback—and the Right Tools To Do It

This article is a guest post from Ryan Gould, from Elevation B2B, an agency with customers like AmazonCisco, and Citrix.

An essential part of doing marketing is understanding why things don’t work. Some would say that spotting the problem is more important than coming up with elegant, fast solutions.

  • But, how to figure out why customers choose or leave your product?
  • What they like and what they don’t like?
  • What creates friction in their entire experience?

The answer is feedback; it is the key to growing your SaaS business. 

Getting inside your users’ minds will help you determine what they do and don’t like about your product.

As a result, you’ll be able to make informed product improvements and create an enjoyable experience for both new and existing customers.

Why Feedback is Important

Feedback is the most actionable kind of data for several business development activities, including product improvements and pinpointing essential moments in the sales cycle.

Here are some of the specific reasons why SaaS companies must collect user feedback.

Identify Moments of Truth and points of friction

Moments of Truth (MoT) are points along the sales cycle where a user interacts with the brand.

These specific and incredibly important moments have a lot of influence over how a user moves forward in the journey. 

Feedback from users can help make the process slicker and ensure that these moments are converting as well as they should be. 

If you want a practical way to understand Moments of Truth and friction points, we recommend you to watch this keynote from Dharmesh Sha, co-founder of Hubspot, called “5 Tips From The Customer Code To Grow Better”:

In this keynote, Hubspot smartly explains the concept of flywheels and friction, making them practical by showcasing common friction points during the buying experience, such as:

  • Pricing pages with no pricing but an ugly form
  • Unpersonalized messaging
  • Difficult cancellation

Such friction points—and the ways to solve them—are identified through customer feedback.

Identify Product Improvements

Making your product the best it can be should be one of your top priorities. This in turn will bring in new users and reduce overall churn rates.

Getting insights through user feedback can help you identify areas where your product could be improved and glean inspiration for potential new features. 

An awesome demonstration of feedback-led product roadmaps in Conversations 2019, a marketing event hosted by Manychat.

Mikael Yan, founder of Manychat, in the introductory session shared the incoming features the team would work on.

The way to measure feedback was gauging to which feature people vowed the loudest, and that’s how they prioritized features such as better reporting and a conversion pixel to track conversions coming from Messenger.

Coney Your Message 

SaaS brands often have to explain a difficult concept to potential users in just a couple of sentences.

This can be difficult when you’re trying to highlight the benefits of your product, what makes it different from your competitors, and what it actually does above the fold on your homepage. 

Feedback can help you phrase your messaging in a way that resonates deeply with your user base. 

Asana, a leading project management software, went through a entire brand and product re-design based on user feedback loops that they described in great detail in these articles:

You can judge if such feedback collection was worth it:

Before:

After:

Speed Up the Onboarding Process

The onboarding process is one of the most important parts of the SaaS sales cycle because it marks the moment when a user goes from the free trial to being a paid user. The smoother the transition is, the more enjoyable it will be for users. Feedback from the onboarding process will help hone it into a well-oiled machine. 

A great example of a truly customer-centered driven is Hotjar.

One of the quick wins they got while reviewing feedback is that one of their tiny but vital features was failing:

hotjar snippet installation

After reviewing some feedback, they noticed the “copy to clipboard” wasn’t working, which may affect the on-boarding of new users that wanted to install Hotjar.

Their blog is full of actionable ideas on product feedback and their actual review process. I encourage you to read some of their articles:

Boost Customer Loyalty and Reduce Churn

Customer loyalty is key for SaaS brands because users pay monthly and can bounce at any moment if they think they can get a better service elsewhere. Consistently tapping into feedback and using it to fuel strategic business decisions can help maintain customer loyalty and, as a result, dramatically reduce churn rates.

The outcome of a good customer experience is retention and its opposite churn rate.

One of the main metrics companies use to gauge such loyalty—besides re-purchases and acquisition through Word of Mouth— is NPS or Net Promoter Score.

The actionability of NPS is not just defining detractors, neutral users, and advocates, but asking users what you’re missing to be a 10/10.

If you want to calculate your NPS, Survey Monkey wrote a great step-by-step guide.

How SaaS Brands Can Collect Feedback 

1. Pop-Up Surveys 

Pop-ups catch your users when they’re using your service so they’re in the right mindset to offer feedback. 

These can be integrated somewhere into the backend of the tool and ask users how they’re finding the service, what improvements they might like to see, and whether they have any specific feedback comments that might make their experience better. 

Tools to use: SmartSurvey, WisePops, Ometrics, and Refiner.io

2. Feedback Request Emails 

Head straight to your users’ inboxes with a feedback form. You can send this out when they take a specific action with you, like upgrade their plan, reach out to customer support, or simply sign up in the first place. 

You can create a simple survey using SurveyMonkey or Google Forms and link to it in the email. Ask questions like:

  • How did you find your experience with us?
  • Could we have improved anything?
  • How easy was it to use customer support/sign up/upgrade your plan?
  • Did we meet your expectations
  • Did you get all your questions answered? 

Tools to use: SurveyMonkey or Google Forms 

3. Embedded Chatbots

Chatbots are great for a number of reasons: they provide 24/7 answers for consumers, provide quick solutions, and eliminate the lengthy wait time for a customer support response. 

But they’re also a really effective way to get feedback from users. 

Whenever a user carries out an action with your chatbot, whether it’s asking a question about one of your subscription plans, enquiring about an issue they’re having with your tool, or simply want to get a quick answer to a question, you can ask them for feedback. 

This can be a simple five-star rating system or a lengthier set of questions that automatically deploy when the user has answered the previous one. 

Tools to use: SnatchBot, Wizu, LandBot, or SurveyBot.

4. Customer Support Helpdesk 

A customer support helpdesk is a one-stop shop for supporting your users with their questions. Support in this form works throughout the sales cycle, with support for presale users, first-time users, and long-term customers. 

These helpdesks store all of the questions and queries you get and can provide reports on trending issues. This gives you an insight into what your users like and don’t like about your product and the common problems they have with it. As a result, you can use this information to fuel product improvements and create a better user experience. 

Tools to use: Zendesk, Gorgias, Gladly, or Kustomer

5. Dig Into Reviews

Reviews are a goldmine of valuable feedback for SaaS brands. Not only will you be able to see what star-rating your users are giving you, but you can also get a better insight into the user experience. 

Better yet, the reviews are directly from your users which means you can use their exact wording in your messaging to resonate better with future users and dissect key suggestions for product improvements. 

6. Social Listening

There’s a very high chance your users are talking about you on social media. By listening into what they’re saying, you can glean nuggets of information about their experiences with you. 

Look out for mentions of your brand on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can take it one step further and create a brand hashtag for social media where you can collect every conversation about your brand together in one place. 

Tools to use: Hootsuite, Mention, or LeadKlozer.

Feedback Can Help Design Your SaaS Future

Feedback is invaluable for SaaS brands. Not only can it provide insights into potential product updates, but it can build deeper connections with your users and dramatically reduce churn rates.

Use the methods here to get inside the heads of your users and continue to improve your product and brand. 

About the author

Ryan Gould

www.elevationb2b.com

From legacy Fortune 100 institutions to inventive start-ups, Ryan brings extensive experience with a wide range of B2B clients. He skillfully architects and manages the delivery of integrated marketing programs, and believes strongly in strategy, not just tactics, that effectively aligns sales and marketing teams within organizations.

Ryan Gould
Ryan Gould
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