How do you gather feedback from existing customers to enhance the user experience of mature products?

One of the benefits of working with a mature product is that you likely have access to a large pool of existing users from whom you can solicit feedback. In contrast, new and emerging products often have a much smaller user base, especially in the early stages or if you’re still working on finding product-market fit.

With that said, here are two of my favorite methods for gathering feedback:

Built-in, In-App CSAT/NPS Widget

Many of the products I've worked on invite users to provide feedback during their use. This can take the form of a persistent 'Feedback' button that's always visible or a more dynamic pop-up or slide-out that appears under certain conditions (for instance, after the user has performed a key action or been using the product for several minutes). Keep in mind that the implementation of this mechanism can affect the type of feedback you receive. For example, if you add a feedback button that users need to discover on their own (versus actively prompting a random selection of users for their opinion), you may find that the majority of respondents are those who absolutely love or hate your product. After receiving in-app feedback, you can reach out to the user to ask if they’d be open to a more detailed chat, either in person or virtually.

Mining Support Tickets 

Unless your product is perfect (which, let’s be honest, no product is), there will likely be some volume of support tickets. These tickets are a goldmine of information about the challenges your users encounter, whether it’s due to a bug, incomplete documentation, or a misalignment between the product team's intentions and customer expectations of how the product should be used. Depending on the volume of support tickets, you might encounter a high noise-to-signal ratio, or you might need to use a third-party tool to assist with sorting and categorizing to uncover overarching trends.

The short answer is -- gather user feedback all the time through multiple channels. Ideally, anytime the user interacts with the product, you should have the ability to either get direct feedback or indirect feedback via workflow monitoring.

Generally speaking, the following metrics should be continuously monitored from user interactions with the product so you have an understanding of the baselines and can quickly flag deviations from those baselines:

• user engagement

• user friction (drop off in the common workflows)

• user churn

Direct feedback can be gathered via:

• in-product CSAT

• periodic user surveys of the current customer base

• in-person at conferences, customer sessions, customer advisory boards, webinars etc.

Customer Advisory Boards (CAB) are a valuable way to gain insight into your customer's use of your product, as well as their needs that you might not have yet imagined. Mature products have an advantage since they typically have an established customer base to work with. Having regular discussions with your customers outside of of the CAB is important to ensure you are getting timely feedback.

Sales can be a valuable channel. A true sales professional will understand the customer's business, their true needs, and may have insights into the industry and competitors. I would not replace direct conversations with customers from sales, but if you have the right sales professional on the team, they can be a valuable partner.

A word of caution though, if you have a sales person just asking for features, or worse a comparison of your product against a competitor's, I would avoid taking input from that person or you will end up with a feature factory and a mountain of technical debt.