For any business it is extremely important to delight its customer with its products, services and customer experience. Businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE know very well how important it is to satisfy your customers. Happy and satisfied customers start trusting the brand and become loyal to it. The customer loyalty have many perks, such as loyal customers tend to be a good brand advocates. Customer loyalty also helps establishing good relationship with your customers, loyal customers tend to have high tolerance towards negative experiences. Moreover it is 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than selling to an existing customer.
That could have a huge impact on the cost, especially marketing and onboarding cost. That is why the customer loyalty is considered to be so important. For increasing customer loyalty business made several offerings, one of them is the most relevant products that resonate with your customers. The products that customer like, want and need. In order to understand customer persona, their preferences, and their interest, businesses take several approaches. One of the most effective approach is to acquire and analyze the customer feedback data.
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The customer feedback can provide a great wealth of business intelligence data that can be utilized to improve customer experience, products/services, internal processes, employee training programs and communication. In fact the customer feedback can impact each and every aspect of your business. The businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE have started transitioning from a sale oriented to customer-centric business models since more than a decade now. Most of the large scale enterprises, SMEs, and local businesses have already transformed into a customer-centric business. That means they put customer first in every strategy, policy, plan and company goals.
The customer-centric business approach helped businesses gain customer trust, drive customer loyalty and increase profitability and support sustainable long term growth. When it comes to customer-centric approach, businesses have to understand what their customers think, feel, want and need. The intense implementation of digital solutions enable businesses to capture a ton of business intelligence data. Which mostly comprises of analytical data and customer feedback. The customer feedback enables businesses to align themselves with the customers and market trends.
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What is Product Development and Why is it Important?
By definition the product development is a processes which comprises of series of steps including market research and analysis, concept and idea creation, design, prototyping, production, marketing and support. The purpose of product development is to replace outdated products, or the products that are not performing well, rebrand existing products, or to create new products to increase the market share and to obtain more customer satisfaction. Furthermore the growth is a continuous process for any business, and not every product will appeal all the audience groups, if a business wants to reach out to more targeted groups they might have to develop new products that cater the needs and demands of their targeted audience.
The product development is a very crucial process. It have huge impact on business, it costs a lot, and it requires a lot of efforts. That is why the businesses need highly accurate and comprehensive analytical data and customer feedback data at each step of the product development process to make sure the final product will produce the desired/expected outcomes from the business’s standpoint. In this blog we will discuss how business should use customer feedback to maximize the efficiency and efficacy of their product development process.
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Why Customer Feedback is Important for Product Development?
Collecting regular customer feedback is a very common strategy among the businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE. The customer feedback helps strengthening the relationship with customers, increase customer retention, strengthen customer loyalty, and increase customer engagements. However, most of the businesses do not integrate customer feedback in their product development process. Mostly in case of manual feedback collection businesses failed to make sense of the customer feedback data and doesn’t pay much attention to it. That is why the best way to collect customer feedback data is to utilize a digital customer feedback system.
The customer feedback system helps businesses collect highly accurate customer feedback data. Furthermore it have in-built analytical tools which help businesses to perform different analysis and let them generate customized reports which can be utilized in decision making process. The new products are designed to offer better value and functionalities which attract your existing customers and also help you to expand your market share. The customer feedback data can precisely tell you what your customers want and expect from you and this can also save a lot of cost of adding unwanted features and make product development process more effective and efficient.
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Here is how to create Customer Feedback Surveys for Product Development
A product manager is responsible for creating the product development surveys. The product development process is also known as product management process. It is important to have a very precise and clear objective before you start preparing your survey and questionnaire. Whether you are developing a completely new product or you want to upgrade an existing product or your aim is rebranding, you must ask yourself the following questions:
- What information do you need?
- What will be your plan of action?
- What do you want to learn from the final reports?
- Who is your targeted audience?
The answers to these questions will guide you to set the objectives and goal of the survey. This will provide you a better understanding of what your customers will like and what they might not appreciate much. Without this knowledge if a product is developed and launched, then it could be a financial disaster, as it is the customers who will decide if your product will be a hit or a flop. During the research businesses can also estimate how much the product will cost them and whether they will be able to compete in the market or not. Ultimately the business would want to make profit from the product, so it is important that you know if the features you might be planning to offer, are doable within the competitive price range.
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What are Different Types of Product Development Surveys?
The product success entirely depends on customers, whether they are satisfied with the product, its features, price and experience matters a lot. Businesses not only rely on customer feedback they do detailed market research, competitive analysis, customer behavior and several other information. However, when a product manager initiate the product development process they have to made several assumptions too. It is the product development surveys and customer feedback that validate these assumptions and let the product manager estimate the success or failure levels. There are several different types of product development surveys, some of the most commonly used surveys are:
- Idea Validation: This is the most basic product development survey type. When a product manager have an idea, they ask the targeted audience questions about this idea. This will tell them if their idea of the product or new features will be able to solve the problems of the customers or not, whether they will be willing to spend for that idea or not, etc.
- Concept Testing: Once the product manager have an idea and identified the needs of the customers, now is the time to test several different solutions which can solve the problems and fulfill the needs of the customers.
- Customer Satisfaction: After developing a product the product manager ask customers if they are happy and satisfied with the product or service. The customer satisfaction surveys are designed to measure the level of customer satisfaction.
- Customer Experience or Product Feedback: The customer experience or product feedback surveys are a detailed survey which let product manager analyze the customer experience in more depth to understand the customer satisfaction level.
The product manager can conduct several different types of surveys to acquire the needed information at any stage of the product development. It is important to utilize a structured framework to organize all the surveys and the responses. This will help you to extract the actionable data from the customer feedback with much better accuracy and authenticity.
See Also: What is Multichannel Customer Feedback and Why it is so Important?
How to Create the Questionnaire for the Product Development Surveys?
For customer feedback survey the most important thing is the questions, sometimes product managers invest a lot of efforts and resources in planning the campaign, selecting the channels and means to propagate the questionnaires to the right audience, but still failed to get the required information. There are two things that will legitimize the information, first is the quantity of the feedback data, and the second is the quality of the feedback data.
Businesses often invest a lot in channels and mediums by which they will reach out to the targeted audience, however, the questionnaire is extremely important, if the questionnaire is too long, complex, use ambiguous language or ask irrelevant questions, then people might not attempt it, and most of the time people left halfway through due to these reasons. Here are a few key factors that you should consider while creating the customer feedback survey:
See Also: Characteristics of Closed-Loop Customer Feedback Tool
- Set Clear Goals: Setting up the goals and objectives of a customer feedback survey means the product manager should know what they want to ask and to whom they will ask. They should decide what data they will collect and what information they need to acquire from this campaign. The goals and objectives tend to keep the product manager focused on the important things, and enable them to writer a better questionnaire which can produce required information.
- Simple Language: It is important that you use a plain and simple language while creating your survey questions. Difficult language or ambiguous wording will result in low conversion rate, people often leave the survey without completing it. Avoid technical terms, lengthy sentence and use the language your audience speak and understand. Multi-lingual surveys tend to produce better results in terms of quality and quantity.
- Specific Questions: It is extremely important that all of your survey questions are focused on the goal of the survey. Avoid including any question that produces unwanted information. Keep your questions specific and ask only about one topic, if you will keep asking many things, the accuracy and quality of the data will be reduced. It could confuse the audience and people might not take it or leave it incomplete.
- Avoid Biased Questions: One of the biggest reason that reduce the quality of the customer feedback data is biased questions and leading questions or words in the questions. These are the questions and words that can influence the response. The suggestive statements or biased questions are most likely to confine the customers’ thought process and produce low quality data. Most often customers just lose interest in such surveys which also impact the data quality.
These some of the very basic rules you should follow while creating a product development related customer feedback surveys. Obviously each survey would be different, some would be long some would be short, but these rules are applicable to all.
See Also: Utilizing Customer Feedback for Competitive Advantage
Basic Ingredients of a Product Development Customer Feedback Survey
The customer feedback surveys for product development target different audience groups, sometimes it is just a random strata from a large pool of customers, sometimes businesses might want to reach out to a wider audience and so on. Another important thing to understand is that the objectives of each survey would be different, some surveys might be intended to learn about the customers’ expectations, or features they might want to see.
Some surveys will be designed to evaluate your products’ existing features and some might be to build a completely new product. Whatever the case is here are some basic ingredients that would help you to maximize the outcome in terms of both the quality and quantity of the feedback data:
See Also: How to Collect Customer Feedback using Mobile Phone Applications?
- Introduction: Most of the time the product managers don’t pay much attention to the introduction of the survey, some even don’t include it at all. The introduction is the very first impression of your customer feedback survey. It has to be good, it should explain the purpose of the survey, what customers should expect and how does it will help the customers in future.
- Rating Scale/Happiness Meter: The rating scale or happiness meter is one of the most common and simplest form of questions. Usually there is a question or statement and the users are asked to rate their opinion via a rating scale, happiness meter or likert scale. This makes the feedback quicker and simpler and the feedback data is also easy to analyze.
- Multiple Choice Questions: The multiple choice questions have a question or statement with multiple answers listed underneath. The user can either chose only one answer or they can select many from the given choices. The data generated is highly accurate and well-structured which makes analysis and reporting more convenient and easier.
- Yes/No Questions: The yes/no questions are a great way to segment your audience, for example, you can put a statement asking if the user is already your customer or not and by the response they select you can provide them a separate series of follow-up questions. The closed-ended question (yes/no question) is a great way to organize your customer feedback data.
- Open-ended Question: The open-ended questions are vital for a product development survey, it allow the customers/users to respond in their own words. They don’t have to choose any answer from a pre-set value, in fact they can freely express themselves. Although it is harder to quantify the open-ended feedback but it can be a great help for product development.
- Thank You Message: It is always good to appreciate the customers and people for their efforts and time to complete the survey. The thanks you not should thank the users in a great and very warm way, then add a statement assuring them that their feedback will be utilized in product development process and to make improvement for the sake of customers.
A good customer feedback survey should be able to produce both qualitative and quantitative data. If you focus on a smaller group to get more in-depth insight, you might miss out a larger audience. So, it is important to prepare your surveys with the aim to target a larger audience. In order to generate actionable reports the quality and quantity of the customer feedback data both are important.
See Also: Key Features of a Customer Feedback System
Examples of Product Development Customer Feedback Survey Questions
While creating a customer feedback survey it is extremely important to ask the right question and in a right way. The product manager should consider each tiny bit of detail and think twice before adding a question. First of all it is crucial that you prepare your questions to get the information aligned with your goals.
There is no hard and fast rule or set of questions that you must use, but there are some principles that you should follow in order to make your survey more productive. Here are some examples of the questions that are generic and can work in almost all different scenarios:
- Question: How frequently you use our product [product name]?
Answer: The answers should give customer a frame of reference, such as daily, weekly, monthly or a few time in last six months, etc.
- Question: Which features do you use the most or more frequently?
Answer: The answer should have the list of the features and the customer should be allowed to choose multiple options.
- Question: What more features would you like to see in this product [product name]?
Answer: It can be an open-ended question or you can list down some features that you might want to evaluate.
- Question: How happy or satisfied are you with this product [product name] or how was your experience with this product [product name]?
Answer: The answer should be a rating scale from 1 to 10 or a happiness meter with 3/5 emoticons representing different levels of satisfaction/happiness.
- Question: How easy of difficult it is to use our product [product name]?
Answer: The answer is usually a likert scale with 7 possible answers ranging from very difficult, difficult, somewhat difficult, neutral, somewhat easy, easy till very easy.
- Question: What is the one thing that we should add to improve this product [product name]?
Answer: It is better to keep it an open-ended question but you can also offer them some options to choose from.
- Question: How likely are you to recommend this product [product name] to you friends, family and colleagues?
Answer: The answer is usually from 1 to 10 rating scale and the analysis is also very simple.
- Question: Do you think the price of the product [product name] justifies the features and value it offers?
Answer: The answer is usually a 1 to 10 scale but happiness meter (3/5 emoticons) and a 1 to 5 rating can also be used.
- Question: Any other suggestion or though you want to share with us which can help us develop better products in future or help us improve this product [product name]?
Answer: That should be the last question and it is always open-ended, it allow customers to express their thoughts, allow them to describe their opinion in their own words.
The product development customer feedback survey doesn’t have a pre-defined set of questions, all of the above mentioned questions are generic questions. The product manager can be more specific about the product and its features, they can enquire about the features they are planning to add in the product. This will provide you a deeper understanding of what your customers want from you and what do they think about what you are already offering them.
See Also: What to Collect and When with a Customer Feedback System?
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Conclusion
The product development is one of the most crucial process of any business, it is a time consuming process, require a lot of resources and it is expensive. On top of that if a product development goes bad it could have devastating effects on the business’s growth and success. That is why the product development process is taken very seriously by the businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE. In this blog we have discussed several aspects of the product development customer feedback surveys, including the basic principles and methods to create the surveys. If a product development manager or product manager follow these steps they can create highly efficiency and productive customer feedback surveys.
The customer feedback is an essential part of business intelligence data that help businesses to take informed decisions and avoid repercussions of making assumption or following the market trends blindly. The product development customer feedback surveys give you a deeper insight to the customer’s mind and help product managers understand what their customer wants, needs, or like/dislike. It will enable them to understand what customers are expecting and what they think about the existing products. Integrating customer feedback surveys in the product development process can result in excellent products and help reducing the risks. The customer feedback data should be collected and processed to product actionable reports. Which is extremely difficult with the traditional customer feedback collection methods and tools.
A professional customer feedback system or software is a great tool to collect customer feedback and analyze it with accuracy and ease. RSI Concepts offers a wide range of standard customer feedback systems along with customization which is helping businesses achieve their goals since more than a decade. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want our help to build a tailor-made customized customer feedback system for you, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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