“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”

– Bill Gates

What has been said here takes huge precedent in whether you will decide to ignore the user’s voice or take what’s been said by your users and take action. Getting negative feedback is much better than having none or having positive feedback where the surveyed audience is from your personal contact list. Keep asking for feedback no matter how scary it may seem and no matter how potentially discouraging it can be to feel you are on the wrong path.

Feedback Example

Let’s consider a scenario outside product development and a room full of people researching how to use the user’s voice.

Let’s assume you are on a road trip heading to place X. Somewhere in the middle of the road you decide to make sure you are on the right road and you ask one of passing by people to confirm. The answer you get from this person says you are miles away from being on the right road. Yes, this will piss you off tremendously and you will be mad, scared, and everything that follows crisis situations.

When chemistry in your body cools down you will start planning for a jump back on the road. At some point, you’ll be back on it and heading to your desired location. Would you prefer to get a false positive response even though you are not on the right track?

Would you prefer that the person you asked for direction and confirmation about your path told you what you wanted to hear or hard naked truth?

Collect Customer Feedback

The point of using tools to measure your scores and then promote your service with numbers your tool generates based on customer service or other departments’ success is short-sided since there is no action item to reshape and adjust your approach based on those negative feedbacks. Yes, you should definitely promote your service using scores collected on tools such as MetricsFlare. But, make sure to keep an eye out for all those negative ones.

Negative feedbacks are the very core of change initialization. As more negative ones you have the more work, you’ll have to get your service on the right track. Yes, it also sounds scary and looks even worse when negatives start to pile up. The most important reaction you need to have at this time is to understand that your product or service stage is at its beginning thus, negative feedback is exactly what is expected. Without it, all the potential to be made by changing certain aspects of your service or app would be missing.

Metrics Flare

When using MetricsFlare you can choose what to focus on while digesting reporting data. For instance, under the NPS breakdown chart, you can click on labels for “Positive” and “Neutral” parts of the chart so you can focus on negatives only. This way you start planning for action items based on negative replies extracted from reporting.

Looking at the above chart you can easily find those negatives by navigating to rates feed on https://app.metricsflare.com/rates:

Both of these rates came from chat (look at the label next to rate itself) which means that there is a probability of urgent matters were reported. This is far from being a rule but, something to keep in mind if the anatomy of feedback is to be considered. Then we have two different matters outlined as the reasoning behind negative rating (this was the NPS scale for what it matters).

First-rate

The first-rate addresses functionality issue that is most likely held up by internal processes within development or product team (or both in correlation with management). What usually happens is that reported issues or bugs reported weren’t put on top of the priority list or for some reason the fix or patch takes more time to take place. In any case, this rate points out that there are procedures to be placed for handing off reported issues, bugs, or otherwise feature requests.

Second-rate

In the second rate, you have a bit more precise comment addressing a more concrete issue and it concerns how your support team is handling situations. Use the above comment to do the audit of a person or entire team to find out what are gaps you can close by couching people or help them get a hold of the situation appropriately.

Conclusion

It is important to analyze your business from every perspective. A reliable way to know how you’re doing is to gather your customers’ feedback. After all, you are only as good as what your customers say.

There are a number of different methods to start building a perfect customer happiness team so, why not do it now 🙂

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