How to get feedback from your customers to improve your products

Getting feedback from your customers is a great way to find out what your customers need or how your business can solve a tough problem they have. And responding to that feedback is a great way to get customers coming back.

What’s the best way to get feedback from customers?
I talked with Mai Sue, a Product Manager on our team at Intuit to find out how she gets customer feedback to improve our products. Mai says, “The best way to get feedback is to talk directly to your customers. However, it’s sometimes difficult to reach a lot of customers at once – and you don’t necessarily get enough of the information you need.”

At Intuit, we ask for your feedback in a lot of places. There’s usually a point in our software somewhere that asks you for feedback about our product or whether you’d recommend us to a friend. Mai feels that customer feedback is extremely valuable: “It’s great when customers take the time to write constructive feedback.” Mai recommends the following ways to get feedback:

• Provide a form on your website to request feedback.
• Create a survey that customers can respond to (you can use survey creation tools like Survey Monkey or Google Forms).
• Provide your customers with a link to a review site like Yelp to give you a review and star rating.

“Invite your customers to provide feedback to you because they may not think to email or call you directly themselves.” Mai suggests that you give your customers multiple choice questions or a scale rating. “When you give your customers an open ended feedback mechanism, sometimes people are overwhelmed and can’t write a response.”

What do you do with feedback after you get it?
We’ve all given feedback and kind of wondered if anyone pays any attention to it when we do.

Mai looks at feedback all the time. “I definitely pay close attention to feedback that customers give to us when they report bugs and issues. If I see a lot of comments about the same issue, we’ll definitely focus on fixing the issue right away. Feedback is a great way to see if the software that we just released is going well or not. It’s a fast way for us to learn what’s working, what’s not, and what we can improve on.”

Intuit does extensive testing using quality assurance testers and user studies where we invite users in to test our software before we release our software to customers. But it’s not quite as good as having customers using our software out in the real world. “We try our best to thoroughly test new features before releasing our software to customers, but sometimes issues arise that we can’t predict.  That’s why it’s important to keep a close eye on customer feedback and have the ability to react quickly,” Mai points out.

Should you respond to customers that give you feedback?
Regardless of whether a customer leaves a positive or negative comment about your business, the fact that you responded and acknowledged their feedback makes your customer feel appreciated. Mai says, “To respond on a site like Yelp, you have to claim your business, and then you have the ability to respond to any review, positive or negative.

“For a negative review, you can say, “We’re sorry you had a bad experience, we’re definitely going to look into that.” And you could provide the reviewer with some kind of incentive to come back again. You don’t want to lose them as a customer, and it’s a good way to remedy a bad review.

“For a positive review, a simple, “Thanks for stopping by – please come by again,” is going to always be appreciated by your customers – and may make them come back again.”