How to convert user feedback into instant business growth

Product quality is more important than ever, whether you’re part of a global enterprise or a tiny startup. New users have only a few interactions with your products before they make up their minds for good. Those who have a low-quality experience drop off, submit poor ratings and ultimately tell their friends and colleagues to avoid your brand. But those who have a high-quality experience stick around longer, use your products more often and offer rave reviews and positive word-of-mouth.

The most important business metrics — user retention, brand equity, churn, and revenue — are all driven by the quality of your products and the experiences you deliver. Good product quality is good business, and that’s a fact. Companies that consistently deliver great products and experiences beat the competition, and those at the top of their industries in satisfaction rankings grow revenue 2.5 times faster than their peers. In addition, 80% of consumers will pay more for a higher-quality experience. And, positive reviews can increase conversions by 270%.

Delighting users is easier said than done, but you can bridge the gap with the insights provided by the users themselves. By identifying quality issues in user feedback and gathering the actionable data within those reviews, you can use it to guide leadership, product, engineering, and support teams. While that’s difficult to do across products, versions, languages, platforms, and many internal and external feedback channels, we have identified four steps you can take to overcome those challenges.

1.  Fish for Signals in a Sea of Noise

The first step into converting user feedback into business growth is finding signals in the vast amount of user feedback noise. It’s quite challenging to break down when you add internal and external sources of feedback then account for different regions and languages user feedback comes in. And of course, there’s the process of determining the context, sentiment, relevant metadata, and more. Then, there’s the prioritization of the issues and identifying which are the mission-critical ones. As one can imagine, this can quickly become overwhelming for teams to work towards and align on.

For smaller companies and startups, there are limited resources to rely on to effectively collect, aggregate, evaluate, and solve user feedback. And for larger enterprises, the volume of feedback is even higher, making the processes even more convoluted and challenging for teams to align on. However, regardless of company sizes, it’s important to catch the actionable signals from the noise. If you turn a blind eye to them, you’ll miss opportunities to increase both product quality and user experience.

The best solution to tackle this step is finding an automated solution that can deliver actionable insights in a timely and organized manner for your teams. This will allow them to get one view across all your user feedback then work on fixing the right issues at the right time. As a result, you can expect reduced noise, categorized issues without bias, and quantitative data to drive your product forward. In addition, your teams can get aligned addressing the right quality issues that will have the most impact on your business.

2. Identify Quality Issues

Although aggregating all user feedback data seems straightforward, there are different articulations of comments that can hold hidden valuable issues or product suggestions. This next step is crucial: you must identify which of those are Quality Issues and then look into each one carefully. A passive comment could actually be a critical issue if not fully analyzed. This is an added dimension to account for when teams are prioritizing and making product-related decisions.

Business teams also rely on quantitative data to ensure they’re acting and fixing the right issues. This will ensure they’re allocating resources in the right direction. The data will help them quickly and accurately understand the scope, impact, criticality of each issue so the right prioritization and triages can occur. If there are no quantifiable details, teams won’t be able to align on how to approach them. Automated product quality analysis helps address quality issues and equips teams to make data-driven decisions. It demonstrates the health of your products and empowers teams to focus on what matters most for the product and business. Moreover, it also removes the reliance on anecdotes and data silos assumptions. In turn, this ensures businesses are not wasting valuable time and resources.

3. Connecting Product Quality and Growth

A must for connecting quality and growth in this third step is making sure you’re consistently delighting and delivering the best for your users while driving growth. User acquisition costs are typically high, and so is the cost of churn. You initially impress your users with your product, and they’re willing to stay if you continue raising the bar with our product quality. If your product quality can retain users with high engagement and satisfaction, retention will grow. Moreover, ensure you’re listening to your users as they hold the answers on how you should navigate your efforts.

The best solution is not to limit your perspective to just a fragment of your user feedback data and channels (e.g., survey data). Focus on both positive and negative feedback that helps you get a single source of truth across the full landscape of your user feedback. An automated product quality analysis will help make connections between keywords, issue categorization, star rankings, prioritizations, issues remediation, company performance, and more. It gives you a complete view of understanding the high impact and mission-critical insights, so your teams can efficiently prioritize and automate workflows. They can use data to make the most impactful decisions and work faster and smarter on items that correlate key goals across your business.

4. Foster Alignment Around Quality

This final step is fostering alignment around quality. In order to do this, the previous steps come into play. No one can deny reliable, trusted, and timely data. The data needs to be crisp and clear to make it easily comprehensible, consumable, and actionable by your cross-functional teams. With a data-driven mindset, bias is removed and ambiguity is decreased.

Correspondingly, teams can align and effectively work together to drive the product forward in the most efficient and effective way. Furthermore, mission-critical issues are addressed before they become widespread and important integrations are placed to grow the product. By having an automated product quality analysis, there’s one framework to bring teams together. They can seamlessly work together to track progress, evaluable the impact of each quality issue, and understand user needs. 

Drive Growth with unitQ

Supreme product quality is essential for user retention and a variety of business metrics. Other valuable factors such as time to fix, ticket volume, and negative sentiment will also improve. Leveraging user feedback elevates their experience and drives growth towards your product quality and subsequently your business growth. See how unitQ Monitor helps your teams align around product quality and get fast and accurate insights on product health. unitQ has a powerful impact analysis reporting tool where our customers can see exactly which quality issues they should fix that has the most impact on KPIs they’ve set for their organization. They can use the data provided to monitor trends, gauge product health. There’s no ambiguity or anecdotes to ponder on, they can really drill down on issues based on data that will foster growth in their retention, engagement, and ultimately revenue. Our unitQ Score shows, again and again, that companies with higher quality scores lead their industries. They see the quality signals within their incoming user feedback noise.