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Alberto IncisaProduct and Growth at June

24 May 22

Types of customer feedback to derive insights from

Customer feedback is incredibly valuable to businesses. It highlights missing links and provides actionable steps to improve your product, service, and process. The business-customer relationship is now one of the most important for high-growth startups, and listening to customer feedback allows this bond to flourish.

Businesses are always trying to figure out what their consumers want and give it to them quickly to satisfy their needs. According to a survey by Moz, a single negative review could cost a business up to 22% of its customer base and four negative reviews could turn away as many as 70% of potential consumers, a situation from which any firm would struggle to recover.

This clearly shows the importance of customer feedback. Whether it is positive or negative, it is equally valuable to businesses large and small. One of the best things any business can do is listen to what their consumers have to say. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to implement a quick change. Feedback is only as valuable as the insight you gain from it, and uncovering it can be an entire process in itself.

June makes understanding customer behaviour an easy and enjoyable process for the entire team, from founders, product managers, design, and the marketing department. Our suite helps SaaS businesses track valuable insights that should be integrated with customer feedbacks to assemble a complete understanding.

In this article, we’ll first explore what customer feedback is, understand different types of feedback, and how June can help you to get the big picture.

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is a combination of opinions, reactions, and reviews by customers about how they feel about a product or service. The primary goal of customer feedback is to determine how satisfied customers are with your product and brand.

Customer feedback not just helps you improve how consumers feel about your product and brand, but also boosts your team’s performance. It also helps you minimize churn by understanding frictions.

Customer feedback helps you identify the faults of a product and how to fix them. And on a more positive note, it’s a great way to understand what your customers love about a product so that you know what to push on. Although at times it requires effort to understand what customer feedback means, fortunately tools can help provide insights in a faster, automated way.

Types of customer feedback

Customer feedback can be classified into two main categories; explicit feedback and implicit feedback.

  • Implicit feedback is behavioral feedback that you acquire through analytics or session recordings. Implicit feedback is indirect as data is collected by an analytics tool in the background monitoring user behavior
  • Explicit feedback is a form of direct data collection and involves directly asking users questions to understand their experience. However, this form of feedback is not always accurate as respondents often give answers based on how they think they will behave instead of how they actually do.

To get the full picture about your users you need to collect both and assemble learning together.

Let’s have a look at the different types of feedback in these two categories:

Breaking Down Implicit Feedback

Implicit feedback provides insight into how users behave with your product or service. A few examples of implicit feedback includes:

  • User engagement with features
  • Churn risk
  • Monitoring user stickiness

User engagement with features

One way to find out how to improve engagement is to figure out what your top users love most about your product through our Top Features report. You should study their behaviour closely and then create a model out of them. Example for slack: a user is engaged if he / she sent at least 50 messages per week and was active at least 3 days.

Another interesting type of implicit feedback is the adoption of a particular feature. By looking into how your feature is being used with June's feature release report, you'll be able to understand which aspects need to be improved.

To take this a step further, June helps you audit major features of your product to measure and compare their popularity and frequency of use. This data is presented in an easy-to-understand graph that will inform you where to pin your focus, where iterations are needed, where to run experiments to improve the product, and even which features should be axed entirely.

Churn risk

It is incredibly important to figure out which of your users are about to leave. Remember, acquiring a new user is five times more expensive than keeping one, so it’s critical you look into the behaviour of the users that are at churn risk and come up with the possible reasons. Getting a list of users that are about to leave is a matter of two clicks with June’s ‘Slipping Away’ report. Make sure to understand wether they did not activate or if they are leaving after a long time.

In a spreadsheet, keep track of when and where users are most likely to leave. Over time, you should begin to see patterns of common reasons for cancellations or user drop-off so that you can then prioritise actions to be taken. Once you've done so try to get some explicit feedback from by interviewing them or through a survey. This type of implicit feedback provides a quick way to get an overview of bottlenecks where most users begin to disengage with your product.

Monitor your User Stickiness

User stickiness is the ratio of daily active users (DAU) divided by monthly active users (MAU). It reveals the percentage of your users who were active in the past 30 days and are active again on the day the test is done. If your user stickiness ratio is 100%, it means every user is using your product or service daily, but that’s unlikely to ever be the case. But rather than doing this complicated calculation manually, June automates it and provides this information to you out of the box.



Generally for SaaS businesses, 15%-30% user stickiness is desirable.

So, if your user stickiness falls below this value or starts decreasing over time, it’s a clear indication of big problems with your product service.

To help figure out exactly what is going wrong, we’re going to use explicit feedback to gather more specific insight.


Collecting User Feedback Explicitly

Explicit feedback can take a variety of different forms including:

  • NPS Surveys
  • Onboarding feedback
  • Feature requests
  • Sales objections
  • Bug reports
  • Reviews and direct feedback
  • Customer surveys
  • Feedback after support interaction

NPS surveys

NPS is an acronym for Net Promoter Score. This simple survey is used to evaluate customer happiness and loyalty with two main questions;

  1. How likely are you to suggest us to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1-10?
  2. What made you pick that particular score?

It is the most widely used feedback survey metric since it is short, simple to interpret, and conveys a broad idea of general customer loyalty. NPS, on the other hand, does not reveal how consumers feel. Here’s an example of an NPS survey in the form of a popup:

The results of your NPS survey divide your customers into three main groups:

Promoters: Customers that pick 9-10 fall into this category. These are your ardent customers. They're the least likely to leave and the most inclined to recommend your business to others. You can take advantage of this by requesting a testimonial or case study from them that you can use on your website.Remember to show these customers gratitude and make sure they’re the first to know if you have a referral program.

Passives: Passives usually give a 7-8 NPS and they are satisfied with your product's performance. They probably won't churn, but they're also not loyal. In terms of promotion, they are unlikely to tell anybody about your company. It’s your duty to turn them into promoters rather than passives. Learn why they went with a passive score and whether there are any quick fixes to win them over. If they don't provide a reason, you can contact them to see what you can do to make their experience better.

Detractors: The most difficult category of customers to deal with are detractors. They are the customers that pick an NPS score of 1-6 and they are more inclined to leave and complain about your company. You can contact them and find out how you can transform their unpleasant experience with your product into a favorable one. You can also ask them questions like: “what made you pick that particular score?

Onboarding feedback

One of the most important periods in the relationship between you and customers is onboarding. This is the first time they're experiencing your product and they'll undoubtedly have questions and require helpful input.

During the onboarding process, make sure customers have access to assistance at every step. You should give customers the opportunity to quickly provide feedback about your product.

Because onboarding feedback is fresh, it's really valuable. Customers who are just learning about your product have no prejudice. For this reason, especially at the beginning, running onboarding calls can be very useful to both make your users more successful and to gather unbiased feedback.

Feature Requests

Feature requests are suggestions for ways to make your product or service better. They typically stem from customer frustrations — they want to perform an action, but they aren't able to. So, they ask for a new feature.

One of the most effective types of consumer feedback is feature requests.  Adding features that your consumers demand increases the value of your product and helps you build trust. Make note of every feature request you get and who asked for that feature (type of users, vertical etc) so that you identify patterns and prioritise better these requests in your roadmap.

Though, some feature requests might not be a good fit for your brand. Take into consideration only the ones that are aligned with your long-term plan and vision. Not doing this could lead you to build many different unrelated pieces in your product that will increase your tech debt.

Sales Objections and Cancellation Surveys

These are the reasons a prospect decides not to make a purchase. If one potential customer has an objection, others are likely to have it too. That is why it is imperative to ask prospects, "Why not?" when they opt out of your product or service. Make sure to keep track of the objections and make a list. Eventually, you should see patterns and be able to implement solutions. If you're getting the same reasons again and again, change it up.

Some common objections include price, lack of demand, and absence of a feature.

Here’s a cancellation subscription message from Rewardful:


Bug reports

Bugs are issues users experience with your product. It might range from minor UI glitches to the entire site being offline. Churn is almost guaranteed if your product has a lot of bugs because customers cannot benefit from your product if it does not work and if there's nothing to keep them engaged.

The first step in dealing with a bug report is to make sure the issue exists by asking about the user's experience and checking to see if you can duplicate it.

A few things you should consider when fixing a bug include;

  1. Who is the bug going to affect?
  2. What is the severity of the bug?
  3. What would it take to fix it in terms of time and money?

Make sure to prioritize bugs that are affecting your most strategic customers or the ones that are likely to upgrade to your paid plan.
It is fairly common to have a small set of users are very picky and that usually spot and report many of your bugs. Try to create a good relationship and prove to them that you team is responsive.

Review sites feedback

Review sites allow customers to informally discuss your business. Unfortunately, people mostly use these sites when they are furious with a product. At this stage, you have no say in the matter as anyone is free to voice an opinion about a product or solution.

But it’s not just G2 or Capterra where customers can leave feedback.Here’s an example on SPP:

It's crucial to monitor what people have to say about your product on these sites. You have the option to browse through them manually or set up a mention that notifies you each time the brand is mentioned.

Keeping track of this form of consumer feedback is important. At its most basic level, it tells you what customers enjoy and dislike about your product. Moreover, it also allows you to openly address issues and request more input.


Customer surveys

One of the more common methods of gathering feedback is customer surveys. A survey's objective is to inquire the experience of a consumer. Surveys are usually sent to loyal customers at least once or twice a year.

One major disadvantage of surveys is that it can be difficult to get customers involved without incentives. Most customers are busy to go out of their way to provide feedback, so there is likely to be low response rates.

Surveys require a fair bit of time and thought, particularly when compared to other mediums like NPS surveys, which just take a few seconds.

Therefore, creating a great survey requires meticulous formatting. You should let the customer know you appreciate their time and effort and to get helpful responses, ensure you ask appropriate questions and open up the possibility of continuing the conversation.

A great example of explicit customer feedback is the Product Market Fit survey.
Basically you have to ask your customers these questions:

1. How would you feel if you could no longer use [your product]?
A) Very disappointed B) Somewhat disappointed C) Not disappointed

2. What type of people do you think would most benefit from [your product]?

3. What is the most valuable thing [your product] does for you?

4. How can we improve [your product]  for you?

The most important of these questions is the first one. In SaaS you've probably reached PMF when at least 40% of the responses are Very disappointed.

This article shows how Superhuman reached an amazing 58%

Feedback after support interaction

Some businesses allow customers to rate support interaction after the fact. This type of feedback requires little effort from users and gives you a general idea of how you're performing. This is more about support interactions than customers' experiences, but it still provides useful information on how to improve.

Providing good support could make people talking about you on social media:



Start prioritizing customer feedback

If you pay attention to customers' feedback, you can improve every aspect of your business. Evaluate important objectives and begin with one clear straightforward approach of gathering client feedback before moving on to more advanced techniques like analytics. With an abundance of channels to gather feedback from, the influx of consumer input data might get overwhelming. If you're not sure where to start, June’s range of analysis tools can be just what you need to improve start gathering implicit feedback easily.







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