Feedback Management

What is a feedback management system?

Wouldn’t it be great to take the guesswork out of product development? 

Well, if you’re a product owner or product manager, you’ll want to know about Customer Feedback Management, or CFM. 

To make great CFM happen, businesses use a feedback management system, which is the specific blend of business processes which enables the customer feedback loop.

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It’s the nuts and bolts of requesting, collecting, analyzing, then closing the loop on, feedback directly from customers. Depending on the business, the feedback management system can be a single one-and-done platform, or a daisy chain of other systems linked together. 

When done right, using a feedback management system of this kind improves customer satisfaction, reduces churn, boosts revenue, and perhaps most importantly, empowers customers in the knowledge they’re really being listened to. 

How can we improve our feedback management and why?

Most companies are already doing feedback management of one sort or another, but how many have really formalized the process?

A survey via email or the occasional NPS pop-up in-app might yield a few choice insights, but, for the best results, brands need to deploy a Customer Feedback Management system. 

By doing so, they can establish bulletproof processes that ensure all team members know how they’re collecting feedback, why they’re doing it, where it goes, and what changes it creates. 

So how can you improve your feedback management? Here are a few pointers to get you started: 

• Define your end goal. Ask your product team specifically which type of feedback would be most helpful to them. Do they want to know what works well, or what works badly?

• Be clear about the type of feedback you want. Some customers will use a feedback management system to submit complaints, which you might value, but you still want to be sure you’re getting what you need. Feature requests? Bug reports? Bad user interface design? Make it clear for the customer giving feedback.

• Understand what you’ll do with feedback. It’s very easy to collect customer feedback, but what are you going to do with it? Critical insights can be lost if you don’t put a system in place to categorize and organize the data you collect.

• Establish a workflow for actioning feedback. There’s nothing worse for a customer than to be promised their feedback will be taken into consideration and then hearing… crickets. Ensure you close the loop on all feedback - even if nothing is actioned - by establishing a complete end-to-end workflow for feedback. 

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List of modern tools for feedback management

Now that you have a better understanding of what feedback management is, let’s turn our attention to exactly how you make it happen in practical terms.

So, in no particular order, here are the 5 most popular tools for feedback management today:

• airfocus is a complete solution for managing customer feedback then feeding it directly into the product roadmap. Built with a simple modular approach, Airfocus even allows users to share custom roadmaps based on customer feedback 一 so they can really see their suggestions in action.

• Hotjar Surveys is an advanced surveying tool available as part of the Hotjar heatmap tool. It allows users to send cross-device surveys with multiple question formats and reporting options.

• Survicate is a feedback management tool with built-in NPS features. It can be deployed across websites, web apps, and mobile apps, as well as via link or email.

• SurveyMonkey is one of the most well-known survey tools, offering comprehensive design options, mass emailing, as well as advanced features such as sample selection and bias elimination.

• UserVoice is an all-in-one customer feedback management platform which can be enabled in almost any website, app, or mobile app. Importantly, it also offers a robust back-end data analysis suite for making sense of customer feedback.

Enterprise vs. Customer Feedback Management

You might have heard the term ‘Enterprise Feedback Management’, or EFM, being used almost interchangeably with Customer Feedback Management, and the two are very similar in concept 一 but they’re also different. 

Allow us to explain.

EFM is a term which refers to the holistic view of a company or organization. It’s usually used to refer exclusively to surveys as a feedback tool, and has a much wider scope than CFM. As the names suggest, EFM is focused on the business; its employees, its organizational structure, its products. Whereas CFM is focused exclusively on the customer experience. 

Modern thinking holds that CX is what really matters, and that CFM offers the right breadth of feedback mechanisms to deliver those insights.

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