Customer Feedback Strategies for SaaS

SaaS is a growing industry. It experienced tremendous growth in the recent years. Since 2015, the market has grown five times in just seven years. As the market grows, several products and services also come into picture to satisfy various needs of the users. This also increases competition in the market with time. To stay ahead of the competition, you must ensure that the solutions you provide are in line with the customers’ needs and preferences.

You may think that you know well about customers’ needs and expectations, but it may not completely true. So it is always better to double-check to ensure that the products and services you provide them are able to fulfill their requirements and expectations. The best and simplest way to know this is to ask them, and the way to ask them is by collecting SaaS Feedback.

Customer Feedback is one of the most important elements that contributes to the success of your business. So if you want your business to grow, it is essential to collect Customer Feedback. Feedback helps you know how your customers feel about the experience they get from your products, services and the company.

Elevate your SaaS Customer Experience⭐

Measure User Feedback at various touchpoints in your product and use the User Insights to delight your customers.

There are various strategies that can help you derive valuable Customer Feedback. In this article, we will learn such strategies that you should use to collect and manage Customer Feedback, and use it to satisfy your product users and ultimately grow your business. Let’s start by exploring the importance of Customer Feedback.

Let’s learn more about the importance of Customer Feedback in SaaS.

1. It helps you understand better about customers’ needs

Customer Feedback is a tool to understand your customers better and know more about what they need and how they expect those needs to be fulfilled through your product or service. When they share feedback, they tell you how much your product was able to satisfy them, and if there is a gap, where it lacks. This helps you understand better about their requirements, and you can take action to increase their satisfaction levels. 

2. It conveys that you care for your customers

Customer Feedback not only helps you fetch valuable customer insights, but poses a good impression on your customers. Asking feedback itself conveys that you care for your customers and are concerned about what they think and feel about your product and services. When you take action keeping their feedback in consideration, this delights them and gives the feeling of being listened to and valued, which ultimately increases their loyalty. 

3. It helps you improve your products and services

Customer Feedback is an evaluation of your products and services from the customers’ viewpoint. When they share feedback, they share what they like about your product and what they dislike about it. This helps you know what works and what not works in the market and as per customers’ choice.

Moreover, you get to know about several issues that customers face while using your products and services. You can use this information to and identify eliminate those issues and make your products and services better for the customers. 

4. It helps to track the performances of your service teams

When you collect feedback about your services and issue resolution processes, you get valuable insights about how your service teams are working. Maybe some of your employees are rude to the customers, or not knowledgeable enough to help them resolve their issues. Maybe some are dedicated and provide outstanding services to the customers. When customers rate their experience of dealing with them, you are able to track the performances of your team members and make decisions accordingly.

5. It helps to retain your customers and prevent churn

Customer Feedback lets you know customer issues at the right time, and when you take action on feedback and resolve those issues immediately, you can win back the customers’ trust and prevent them from churning. When you take Customer Feedback seriously, work on customers’ issues, keep them updated, resolve their concerns, and inform them what you have done for them, this changes their view point, and this can even convert a negative feedback into a positive one.

Let’s explore the strategies you should follow for collecting and managing Customer Feedback.

Let’s learn how you can follow these strategies to collect and utilize Customer Feedback and grow your business.

1. Be Omnipresent to collect Feedback

When you want to collect maximum and accurate feedback, it is vital to use a variety of channels and be present for the customers on multiple channels. For sending your Customer Feedback Surveys, you can use channels like emails and SMS to collect solicited feedback.

At the same time, you also need to provide open channels to the customers like website buttons, pop ups, slide outs, QR codes, and social media handles so that customers can share feedback whenever they like. If you fail to do so, customers have a tendency of sharing unsolicited feedback especially in case of negative experiences on platforms like social media, review websites, and through word of mouth. Negative feedback on such sources is hard to track and can be extremely harmful for your business.

So to avoid this, always follow a multichannel approach and be omnipresent to welcome feedback from the customers.

2. Use In-product Feedback Surveys

While you use a variety of channels for sharing your Customer Feedback surveys with the customers, do not forget to use the most important channel for capturing feedback, which is, your own product. When you want to obtain feedback about your SaaS product and services, what can be a better channel than your product itself!

In-product and in-app surveys provide opportunity to your product users to easily and quickly share feedback while using the product itself. These surveys can fetch you a great response rate on your surveys and you can capture in-moment feedback about your product at various touchpoints.

3. Track Customer Experience Scores with metrics

Tracking Customers’ experience with the help of CX metrics is an effective Customer Feedback strategy to measure customer insights and satisfaction levels with your products and services. The most popular metrics are NPS, CSAT, and CES.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS or Net Promoter Score is one of the most commonly used CX metrics that businesses use to measure customers' loyalty and long-term relationship with the brand in terms of their likeliness to recommend your brand to others. A SaaS NPS survey simply asks your product users how likely they are to recommend your product and services to their friends and known ones.

A rating scale of 0 to 10 is provided with the questions where 10 means ‘Most Likely’ and 0 means ‘Not at all Likely’ to recommend. This gives a quantitative measure of customer loyalty with your product and brand.

On the basis of customers’ responses, the respondents are divided into categories: Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), and Detractors (0-6). To find the Net Promoter Score, the percentage of Detractors is subtracted from that of Promoters. NPS can lie from -100 to 100. The more the NPS, the better it is.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score

CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Score is a quantitative measure of Customer Satisfaction with your product and service. In a CSAT Survey, customers are simply asked to rate their experience with the product or service on a five-point rating scale. Rating options can be in the form of stars, emoticons, or adjectives like Excellent, Good, Average, Bad, and Poor. Customers can choose the option as per their experience and respond to the survey. The scores are averaged to calculate the overall Customer Satisfaction Score.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES or Customer Effort Score is the measure of customers’ perceived efforts to get a work done or issue resolved. CES is the best metric to evaluate the performance of your service team. In a CSAT survey, you ask the customers how likely they agree that the company made it easy for them to resolve  their issues and get their job done. A seven-rating scale is provided to the customers with options like Strongly Agree, Agree, Somewhat Agree, Neutral, Somewhat Disagree, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree. The response scores are averaged to find the overall Customer Effort Score.

You should keep using the above metrics from time to time and as per your business requirement to track customer satisfaction, loyalty, and perceived efforts, and make improvements in your products and services whoever required.

4. Develop a proper Closed Feedback loop Process

Collecting feedback is essential for your business, but it is useful only when you have a proper strategy of Closing the Feedback Loop in place. The worst thing you can so with feedback is not doing anything with the it, and the best Customer Feedback Strategy is to take action on feedback and close the feedback loop effectively. For this, you should follow a proper process.

Segment your survey respondents on the basis of their responses, and take action accordingly. For instance, you have used an NPS survey to collect Customer Feedback. When you have got the responses, your survey respondents will be categorized into promoters, detractors, and passives based on their responses. You should respond and take action for your promoters, detractors, and passives in different ways.

Thank the Promoters or happy customers for sharing their valuable feedback and appreciating your efforts. Similarly, you should ask the Passives what you can do better for them and consider their suggestions seriously while making business decisions. If you follow their suggestions, inform them that you are taking action as per their suggestions. This will delight them and build trust and loyalty in them for your brand.

Apologize to the Detractors or unhappy customers for their bad experiences and ask them where the things went wrong. Try to put yourself into their shoes and see their concerns from their perspective. Do whatever you can to improve their experience and inform them what actions are taking to make them satisfied. This will improve their experience and ultimately contribute to your business growth by preventing unnecessary customer churn.

5. Foster a Customer Feedback oriented culture

Customer Feedback is not only confined to the higher Management or just one team. Rather, you must develop a Customer Feedback oriented culture company-wide. Give training and build such a culture in your organization that every employee and team member is focused to take feedback seriously and improve customer experiences. Convince your team members that a customer-oriented culture will grow your business which will ultimately benefit themselves also. 

6. Utilize positive feedback to attract more users

When you get positive feedback, don't just sit back and relax. Rather, make efforts to utilize that positive feedback to increase the goodwill of your brand and attract more customers. Try convincing your happy customers or promoters to share their positive reviews on popular review platforms like G2, GetApp, and Capterra. You can also redirect them to a relevant platform review web page on a single click.

7. Use Feedback data for Effective Segmentation and Targeting

Feedback not only tells you the level of satisfaction of your customers with your products and services, but also about their choices and preferences. It gives you an idea about what they like and what they dislike. You can also use this feedback data for segmenting your customers and do effective targeting by marketing product features and subscription plans separately for separate customers as per their choices.

8. Use Feedback to prepare Product Roadmap

An effective Product Roadmap is one of the key elements in the success of a product. Collecting Product Feedback starts even in the initial stages of product development and improvement. So you can use Customer Feedback to prepare an effective Product Roadmap. This will help you develop great products that your customers will love to use.

9. Utilize Feedback of Churned Customers

Customer Feedback is useful to avoid churn and increase customer retention. While some of the churn is unavoidable, you can even utilize the data from that churn to increase customer retention. Sounds ironic? It surely does but you can do this! Ask churning customers about the reasons for their churn. 

Although you may not always be able to bring them back, but you can use the valuable information regarding their experience to improve your products and services and avoid such situations for other customers in the future.

10. Use an Effective SaaS Feedback Tool

The last and one of the most important strategies is to use an effective SaaS Feedback Software or app for collecting feedback. Use such a tool that enables you to create various types of feedback surveys for different touchpoints of customer journey and share them through a variety of channels with your customers.

Also, the tool you use must help you in not only collecting feedback, but also closing the feedback loop effectively to improve customer experience and satisfaction, and thus prevent churn. 

Zonka Feedback is a comprehensive Product Feedback Tool that can serve the purpose. Its ready-to-use survey templates of various types can help you easily create surveys for any touchpoint and for measuring any metrics discussed above. The tool provides you real-time feedback alerts and notifications that lets you know about negative feedback at the right time and take instant action on it to improve customer experience and prevent churn.

It also offers a free trial. Try it for free for 14 days and see how it works for your business.