Closing the Feedback Loop for your SaaS Product

Product Feedback from the customers tells you how your product is performing in the market and how your customers feel about their experience of using it. But collecting feedback is not enough. When customers spend time sharing their valuable feedback with you, they expect that you will do something with it. And, after all, what’s the benefit of collecting feedback if you don’t use it to create better customer experiences!

Here comes the need for closing the feedback loop. Feedback loop is not just a concept. It is a cycle in which feedback comes your way and you take action on it to eventually make your product better and more successful. SaaS Feedback can help you develop great products, but only if you have an effective closed loop process in place.

In this article, we will explore how you can close the feedback loop for your SaaS product and ultimately lead your product towards success. Let’s start with exploring what Closing the Feedback Loop is and why it is necessary. You can also directly jump to the process of Closing the Feedback loop.

What is Closing the Feedback Loop?

Closing the Feedback Loop is the process of responding to the customer feedback, engaging with the customers regarding it, looking into their issues, resolving them (if any), and letting the customers know about the feedback-driven actions you have taken to improve their experience.

The Closed Feedback Loop process starts with collecting the feedback itself and every action you take on the feedback and all the interactions that you do with your customers regarding feedback come under the process of Closing the Feedback Loop. The process ends with informing the customers about all the actions you have taken to improve their experience, or any changes or improvements you have made in your product to avoid any more issues in future.

Let’s explore why Closing the feedback loop is necessary for the success of your product and the overall business.

Why Close the SaaS Feedback Loop?

Before answering this question, I would suggest you ask yourself a question. “Why did you collect feedback? What is the use of feedback for you and what was your goal of collecting it?” When you answer this question, you will begin realizing the importance of closing the feedback loop.

Closing the Customer Feedback Loop is simply taking action on feedback, or doing something with the feedback and utilizing it to grow your business. If you just collect SaaS Customer Feedback and leave it unattended, it defeats the entire purpose of putting all the hard work in collecting feedback from the customers.

To understand this better, let’s explore some benefits of closing the feedback loop.

Benefits of Taking Action and Closing the Feedback Loop

1. It conveys that you respect your customers’ opinions
2. It helps you resolve customers’ issues
3. It helps to maintain strengths and overcome weaknesses
4. It increases customer satisfaction and loyalty
5. It helps you improve your product
6. It helps to prevent customer churn

1. It conveys that you respect your customers’ opinions

Collecting Feedback itself conveys that you care for your customers whether they are happy with their experience with your product or not. But when you act on feedback to close the feedback loop effectively, it shows that you take feedback seriously and you listen to the voice of the customers.

2. It helps you resolve customers’ issues

Your customers may encounter several issues while using your product. Feedback helps you identify those issues, and closing the feedback loop resolves those issues and thus helps in improving customers’ experiences.

3. It helps to maintain strengths and overcome weaknesses

Feedback lets you know the strengths and weaknesses of your product, and when you work on feedback to close the feedback loop, you tend to consider those strengths and weaknesses. This helps you to maintain the strengths of your product and eliminate the weaknesses.

4. It increases customer satisfaction and loyalty

Closing the Feedback Loop has the power to convert a negative feedback into a positive one. If you follow the process of closing the feedback loop, it boosts customer satisfaction and enhances loyalty among them.

5. It helps you improve your product

When you work on feedback to close the feedback loop, you find meaningful customer insights and ideas to improve your product. Working on these ideas and eliminating the bugs and issues that customers face helps you to develop better versions of your product.

6. It helps to prevent customer churn

If customers are unhappy with the experience they get from your product, they share negative feedback. But if you leave the feedback unattended, it frustrates the customers even more and it adds to their bad experience. Whereas, if you work to close the feedback loop effectively, it improves the customers' experiences and can bring them back and avoid churn.

Let’s learn how you can close the feedback loop.

Closing the Feedback Loop for your SaaS Product

Closing the Feedback Loop is a wholesome process, but very beneficial. To derive the benefits of this process and take your product towards success, you have to follow proper steps of Closing the Feedback Loop. Learn the steps to close the feedback loop effectively.

Steps to Close the Feedback Loop for your SaaS Product

1. Collect SaaS Feedback
2. Analyze the Feedback and decide action
3. Take Action on SaaS Feedback
4. Inform the Customers

1. Collect SaaS Feedback

As stated earlier, the first step to Closing the Feedback Loop is of course to collect feedback. But to utilize your feedback, your feedback data must be relevant and in good quantity. Inaccurate and less feedback can lead you to wrong product decisions, ultimately harming your business.

You can collect feedback through various ways. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube can give you a large amount of feedback in the form of comments, likes, dislikes. But it is a big challenge to bring out the relevant insights from all the vague data.

So the best way is to use a good SaaS Feedback Tool to create and send SaaS Feedback Surveys to your customers and collect feedback. With effective feedback software, you can easily create your feedback surveys and share them with your customers through multiple channels like email, SMS, website, and more. The best channel is your product itself. 

With an effective survey tool like Zonka Feedback, you can easily create in-product surveys and present them to your customers in your product, app, or website. You can use popups, feedback buttons, and slide outs for this purpose.

Popup Surveys appear on your product page when the users have scrolled around 30% of your website. Your product users can easily respond to the survey and submit their responses within a few clicks. In case they don’t wish to share feedback at the moment, they can simply close the popup window.

Feedback Buttons appear on your webpages and are usually named with a single word like ‘Feedback’. These buttons are clearly visible on your web pages, and the product users can click on them to take the survey and provide feedback as and when they feel like sharing feedback.

Slide Outs appear at the sides of your web pages. Like feedback buttons, they are also represented with a small name and are clickable links. As your customer clicks it, a survey slides in the web page and the customers can easily fill it up and share their feedback. 

2. Analyze the Feedback and decide action

When you are done with gathering SaaS Feedback, the next step is to analyze it to find out meaningful information in it. You can use a good feedback tool like Zonka Feedback, which provides you centralized feedback data collected from various sources at one place and enables you to analyze it effectively.

You can use its advanced dashboard and analytical features like Sentiment Analysis to analyze the feedback data. You can also get various types of reports like Snapshot report, Trends report, Locational Analysis report, and more.

3. Take Action on SaaS Feedback

The next and the core step of the process of Closing the Feedback Loop is taking action on the feedback. To take the right action at the right time, you first need to prioritize as to what feedback you should work on first. Although all feedback is necessary, however, working on every feedback at the same time may lead to confusion and chaos. So it is important to prioritize feedback to take effective action on the feedback. 

First of all, take negative feedback into consideration and prioritize that feedback which needs urgent resolutions like a bug or some issues that the customers are facing. You should work on resolving those issues.

Secondly, bring out meaningful and feasible suggestions from the feedback data so collected and so that you can work on them to improve your product. 

Prioritize solving those problems that a large number of your user base is facing, and try developing those features that most of your users wish to have in your product.

Thank the customers who share positive feedback for recognizing your efforts. Ask for suggestions from the customers who shared neutral feedback about how they think you can make your product better for them. Apologize to the customers who shared negative feedback for their bad experience and do what you can to resolve their issues and prevent churn.

Make improvements to your product as per customer feedback. Create product roadmaps influenced by Customer Feedback and add the most-wanted features to your product. 

4. Inform the Customers

Keep your customers updated and informed while you work on their feedback, create product roadmaps to improve your product and close the feedback loop.

When you take action to resolve customers’ issues, keep them updated about the status of their tickets. When you are done with your action, inform your customers about it. Convey all the improvements you have made in your product and how it can benefit your customers.

Closing the Feedback Loop with Zonka Feedback

In order to run the process of Closing the Feedback Loop effectively, you should use an effective SaaS Feedback Software like Zonka Feedback. Zonka Feedback not only helps you create effective SaaS Feedback Surveys and share them with your customer through multiple channels, but also allows you to create and assign tasks based on feedback to the relevant teams.

You can set alerts and notifications about the completion of those tasks to be sent to the customers as soon as a ticket is closed and the action on feedback is complete. 

Zonka Feedback also provides a free trial. You can try it for free for 7 days and see how it works for your product.