How do you leverage customer feedback to improve product adoption rates?

This isn't exhaustive, but can be a good starting point:

1. Annual survey results. It's a lot of work, but after gathering that feedback, share it back with your customers in a annual survey results PDF. For example, share some of the best practices, which tools have high adoption, success stories, or other items that could help your audience become inspired, motivated, and have a path to adopt

2. Internal feedback loop. If you aren't already feeding that information to your Product and Exec teams, now's your chance! Not just the NPS or CSAT scores, but what is a summary of the qualitative feedback? What are customers saying? (hint: use AI such as ChatGPT to aggregate themes...just make sure to anonymize your data!) This is incredibly helpful for executives and Product Managers to get involved, listen to customers, and respond with substantial changes

3. Contact your customers. This should go without saying...but when a customer submits feedback, try to respond! Thank them, ask them clarifying questions, let them know "that part of the product annoys me too and I'm sharing your feedback with them tomorrow afternoon in our next sync meeting!"

There are plenty more, but this takes the feedback to share with customers globally (annual results), to your teams (internal feedback loop), and in a more intimate manner with customers (contacting the user who submitted the feedback). These are all ways to demonstrate to customers you are really listening.

Customer feedback can be a goldmine for improving product adoption rates. A wealth of information can be gleaned if you go about it the right way. A key point to note is that it is important to leverage both solicited and unsolicited feedback to continuously optimize your strategy:

Solicited Feedback:

Targeted Surveys: Conduct surveys at key points in the customer journey, like onboarding, feature adoption, and renewal periods. Tailor questions to gather specific insights on the user experience, their effort and satisfaction.

In-App Feedback Tools: Embed tools within your product that allow users to easily submit feedback, report bugs, or suggest improvements.

Unsolicited Feedback:

Active Listening: Develop your active listening skills during customer calls, training sessions, or support interactions. Pay attention to user language, hesitations, or workarounds – these can reveal hidden challenges.

Support Ticket Analysis: Mine your support tickets for common themes and recurring issues. Look beyond the specific problem to identify underlying factors impacting adoption.

Social Listening: Monitor social media platforms, user forums, and industry review sites (example Gartner Peer Review). Analyze conversations to identify trends in user sentiment and pain points related to your product.

Turning Feedback into Action:

Actionable Insights, Not Just Data: Don't get bogged down in data. Analyze both solicited and unsolicited feedback to identify recurring themes and pain points. Focus on actionable insights that can be translated into concrete improvements.

Prioritize Based on Impact: Not all feedback is created equal. Prioritize issues based on their potential impact on adoption. Address critical usability hurdles or roadblocks that hinder core workflows.

Close the Loop: Communicate back to users how their feedback is being used. Demonstrate that their voice matters. This builds trust and encourages continued engagement.

Targeted Onboarding: Use feedback to personalize onboarding experiences. Highlight features that address common pain points for new users of a specific segment.

Focus on the "Why" Behind the Feedback: Don't just fix the "what." Understand the underlying motivations and goals behind both solicited and unsolicited feedback. This helps you solve the root cause of adoption roadblocks.

Important Point: Establish a feedback loop with your Product Development and Product Management teams. Share customer insights directly with those who can translate them into product improvements.

By actively soliciting feedback through surveys and in-app tools, while also being a keen listener for unsolicited feedback in conversations and online discussions, you'll gain a well-rounded understanding of your user base.  

This comprehensive approach enables you to continuously refine your product and the onboarding process, thereby creating a user-centric experience that drives product adoption and long-term customer success.

Here’s a strategic approach to effectively use customer feedback to enhance product adoption:

• Collecting Feedback Across Various Channels

  • In-app and email feedback tools: Use prompts and surveys within the application to gather real-time, context-specific feedback. Use emails for stakeholders who are not logging in regularly to engage and cover all your bases. At Gainsight, we use in-app NPS for end users and email NPS for our key decision makers. We also use CES (Customer Effort Score) surveys to identify friction points in adoption.

  • Customer support interactions: Analyze issues and suggestions that arise in support tickets. CSAT ratings are a good proxy of product satisfaction as well.

  • User interviews and focus groups: Conduct detailed discussions with users to dive deeper into their experiences and gather qualitative data.

  • Use your customer-facing teams: Your CS, Sales, Sales Engineering, Support and Services are a wealth of knowledge when it comes to product and the customer feedback on features. Sakes can tell you which features land well in a demo and help us create a market differentiator. CS can tell you which features are driving most value and which features have the highest friction. Support can tell you which features have the highest number of priority 1 support tickets (which, mind you, is not a bad thing because it also shows mission-critical features of your product). I have seen product teams not gathering enough data from customer-facing people who have a synthesized understanding of the product adoption across your future and current customer base.

• Segmenting Feedback: Organize feedback by user type, feature, or phase in the customer journey. This helps in understanding which parts of your product or which user groups need attention. For example, if new users report difficulty understanding a core feature, that’s a signal to improve onboarding materials or the feature’s design.

• Prioritizing Feedback: Not all feedback will be equally important. Prioritize based on:

  • Impact on user experience: Feedback that addresses widespread or critical issues should take precedence.

  • Strategic alignment: Focus on feedback that helps achieve business goals like increasing adoption or reducing churn.

  • Feasibility: Consider technical and resource constraints in prioritizing which feedback to act on.

• Close the Feedback Loop: Communicate back to customers about the changes made based on their input. This not only validates that you value their feedback but also encourages further engagement and feedback. For instance, update release notes, blog posts, or direct emails can be used to inform users about how their suggestions have been implemented.