Driving product growth through customer feedback outlines a feedback loop process of asking for feedback, organizing that feedback, acting on it by implementing fixes or features, and following up to ensure customer needs were met. The feedback loop aims to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty over time, which increases product usage, referrals, and overall growth through word-of-mouth and case studies highlighting happy customers.
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Hello everyone I hope you’re all doing well! My name is Sunanda, im a product manager at Microsoft working on Azure – which is its cloud computing division. And today we’ll be talking about growth, and particularly how you can leverage customer feedback as na engine to drive product growth.
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Before we get started, Iwanted to share two quotes from great leaders that talk about how important it is to focus on the customers and get it right for them.
The first one is from bill gates – “SAY THE QUOTE” As a PM, you’re looking to solve customer problems and empower them, and those that are unhappy with your product will have a lot of feedback that could improve your product and make them satisfied users.
The second quote is from jeff bezos “SAY THE QUOTE” – If you have a great product that your custoemrs really loves, it solves all their problems and empowers them to do whatever they need to do, they will tell everyone about it – friends, family, coworkers. And that sort of referral is very powerful in getting new customers and driving growth for your product
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Ok, so the talk is about customer feedback leading to product growth. But I want to show how exactly getting customer feedback translates to product growth. And product growth, can mean a lot of things. It could mean that you have more # of customers, or same customers using more and more of your product over time, more revenue from your product, or some mix of these. And different products have different ways of defining growth, and even that can change during a product’s lifecycle.
For a products that is relatively new, growth may mean more signups or user activation. Later on in the stage growth may be tied to increased usage and retention, more revenue or something else. So growth could be any of these, and lets see how customer feedback helps increase product growth
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When you build products, you’re building it for the people who will be using them – your users and customers. Im sort of using the term ‘customer’ and ‘user’ interchangeably here, but its important to be aware first that you may have people who decide/buy your product, and others who will actually use it. When you get feedback from custoemrs it helps to improve your product so that your customers can benefit more from it. And when you add new improvements that custoemrs can benefit from, it leads to more satisfied customers because youre helping solve their needs. So then your customers will be more loyal to your product and want to use it more and more. Happy customers will also talk about your product with others, so that will also help you get new custoemrs..so all of this is how you go from customer feedback to product growth..
All you have to do is listen to your custoemrs pain points and help solve their problems
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So I wanna talk about how you can incorporate customer feedback to make sure youre solving the right problems for your custoemrs that will help drive growth. Ill talk about how to get started with getting feedback and actually using it to drive decisions and path for your product. So lets start
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For getting good customer feedback, the first thing you want to di is be clear about the goals you want to achieve. Is there a specific problem your having – such as an increased number of customer support calls or complains, or churn – are your custoemrs using your product for a bit but then never coming back. Or are you looking to understand the general market for your product or decide what features to build next. In all of these, your main aim should be to empathize with the customer and understand what they are trying to do and what problems are they facing? You don’t want to simply take what a customer says and go implement it, you really want to understand where its coming from and how your product can help them with their goals. Sometimes a customer may think they want something but they actually need something else.
Then you want to figure out how exactly will you get the feedback from customers. You could be having 1:1 meetings with some customers, or sending out surveys to a broad group or even doing some secondary research on knowledge that already exists that point to certain customer preferences. There are two ways to classify the data you get from feedback – qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative data is usually free flow and descriptive where customers can talk about their thought and opinions. Something like “what don’t you like about this product” is a qualitative question because the answer could really be anything. Quantitative feedback is usually more specific and can be good when you already know certain patters or what specific qs to ask. For example, something like “how many hrs of your day do you spend on your computer”
So both qualitative and quantitative feedback is important to help drive growth and you want to use both types of feedback when creating surveys or meeting with customers. Ask them both open ended questions and more specific questions.
As I mentioned before, when you get feedback, be mindful to not just take what the customer says but really dig deep to understand what they are trying to do and what their underlying problems are.
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Alright, so once you’ve actually gotten some feedback from customers you want to be able to convert it into actionable next steps. As mentioned you will have both qualitative and quantitative feedback, so you want to be able to get a 1000 foot view of the patters arising from all the feedback. For quantitative data that you may get from surveys and talking to customers which have direct answers – like yes/no or answers from few options, its easy to put them all together and analysie. For qualitative data, you want to categorize descriptive, open ended feedback into buckets so you can work with something concrete. you’ll realise that maybe just some simple bug fixes could help drastically improve your customer satisfaction and usage, or you may need to add some new big features or improve some big friction points ofr the customer…look at all the feedback you get (in an excel spreadsheet or dashboard) to understand what you need to do to solve their problems.
Solving their problems and making customers happy is the best way to gain more customers.
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Once you’ve looked at all the feedback and understood customer pain points and know what next steps to take, focus on implementing those and building out the improvements or bug fixes or features that will help your custoemrs and providing e a great experience. In some cases, you may realise that few bug fixes may framatically improve you r product or customer satisfaction. In other cases, you may need to completely redesign the product or add new features or all of them.
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And then you want to follow up after sometime. Reach back to your customers to see what they say? Do they like it? Does it help them? Did it solve their problems? If you’ve really focused on solving pain points for your customers, chances are they’ll be more satisfies and happier with your product. And you wanna have happy, satisfied customers.
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And as you work to solve customer problems and improve customer satisfaction – your customers will become your biggest product promoters. They will talk about how great your product is with their colleagues and friends, and so more people would want to use it. And when you have happy, loyal customers, you can publish case studies with your customers where you highlight what problems they are trying to solve and how your product helps them. You can also publish blogs and articles with the customer where they provide testimonoals about your product. And this feedback from existing customer would bring new customers. So that’s how customer feedback can help drive product growth. That’s all I had, thank you everyone and ill take some qs if you may have any.