7 Ways to Collect More User Feedback for Your SaaS Startup

Created time

Jan 8, 2024 06:12 PM

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1. Add a feedback collection tool to your site

The goal with feedback is to make it easy and obvious to your customers.

Feedback collection tools are a great way to do this. They often come with some form of widget that you can place prominently on your site that you can add to emails, chats, or in a dashboard.

Tools like Featurebase (this is what we use after switching from Canny), Upvoty and Canny have some great features like:

Notifying users of when their feature has been implemented

Changelogs so you can show the release of new features that have been requested and

Upvoting capabilities so you can see which the most popular feedback and feature requests are

Both Featurebase and Canny also have strong free offerings to get you started.

Use a feedback widget like Featurebase to collect and prioritize feedback from users

Customer support chat doesn’t have to be a one-way street where users ask you questions and raise bugs but you get nothing in return.

They are a prime opportunity to ask questions and get feedback from people who have landed on your site. You can use free chat tools like Crisp or Tawk, and at the end of each conversation with a visitor just ask, what they would like to see built next, and what is missing for them to convert to a customer.

Remember, you don’t have to action all of this feedback, but it is worth listening to and capturing.

If you want to make this process slicker and more quantitative, opt for a tool like My AskAI, an AI customer support assistant that automatically categorizes and groups each conversation held with it so you can see in an instant what the most common questions and requests are.

Collect, categorize and group feedback automatically with My AskAI

3. Email your users for feedback

Every user who signs up did so intending to use your product, your value proposition hit them.

If they don’t end up using it (or they haven’t converted to a paid offering) then they are someone you want to talk to - did you overpromise? Was your messaging vague? Was there a bug or did you miss out on a key feature for them?

They have a vested interest in making your product work for them, so you aren’t being rude by emailing them and asking for feedback.

The customers who are most likely to respond are probably your strongest leads, and it may just be that you didn’t communicate a feature clearly enough to them.

You don’t need to overcomplicate it, just:

Ask them to reply to the email with any quick feedback

Ask them to join a call to share feedback

Ask them to complete a survey (Google Form)

You can even make this part of an onboarding flow or other transactional emails - just make sure you are capturing the responses!

4. Call your users for feedback

This one scares a lot of people, but it’s time to conquer your fears. You will get way more out of a call with a user than an email from them.

You can delve deeper into their questions, get to the root of issues, demo parts of your product and ask them questions, get them to show you their issues, and see firsthand how they use your product.

Occasionally you might have to incentivize feedback calls, in which case, don’t overcomplicate things and just use an Amazon voucher and keep the call short (15-30 mins), a lot of users will even say they don’t want the voucher in my experience.

Add an offer for a call to onboarding emails for paid users (and free if you have the capacity or are very early stage), and use calendar scheduling software like SavvyCal so they can book in directly (it’s usually best to collect some information in advance also, like company name, maybe how they want to use your product, that kind of thing).

If you want to try and make the most of your time, you could turn these calls into weekly drop-in hosted sessions where multiple users can attend at once and share feedback, just bear in mind that depending on who is in the session it may make others less likely to contribute.

Don’t shy away from taking calls with users, schedule them easily with SavvyCal

5. Create a community to crowdsource feedback

Not one for the faint-hearted and not to be underestimated, but works well for some products - creating an open or closed community on a platform like Discord, Slack, or even Telegram, WhatsApp, or Facebook (depending on where your customers are).

The key with this is to engage often and openly with users, be specific about what you want feedback on, ask questions and utilize, hashtags, emojis, and polls to quantify reactions and feedback, keep calm, and don’t overreact to any feedback as everyone will see it!

The benefit of a community for feedback is that it creates a multi-participant chat where users can spark ideas and feedback in one another, coming up with ideas or concerns that they may not have previously considered.

Crowdsource your feedback with a community

If you have a relatively engaged company social media account (or a strong and aligned personal network) then it may be worth asking for feedback where people spend most of their time - on social media.

One benefit is that questions tend to get more engagement in social media posts and so you get the added benefit of additional visibility.

But the main point is that you can treat it similar to the community feedback but with slightly more control as you control the questions asked.

Depending on how the algorithms favor you (or not) you may also extend reach to new potential users and get their feedback, as opposed to the other feedback channels which all rely on inbound visitors or users (this does however mean you have to discount social media opinions, unless they are also a user already).

If you have an audience on social media, ask for feedback there too

7. Get feedback passively by observing your users

This final one is a no-brainer but also potentially the most difficult feedback to interpret - you can add a behavioral analytics tool, like Hotjar or Clarity to your site and (anonymously) observe how users act on your site.

You will see them navigate around, where they click, hotspots and also be able to track them through using your product.

This is a passive feedback approach as it happens without the user having to do anything differently.

The downside of this is, as you can’t talk to the user, you don’t know exactly what they were trying to do, you can only guess and try and figure it out.

However, after you’ve spent a couple of hours watching a few hundred user recordings, you will quickly start to pick up similar patterns of behavior which you can use as feedback to improve your product experience.

Use passive behavioral monitoring tools like Hotjar to capture feedback and user actions.

Get customer feedback

How many of those 7 feedback methods are you already using and what is missing? Our approach has always been to make it as easy as possible to provide feedback so we can stay as closely aligned with our users’ needs as possible.

Once all setup, and with a little automation, getting feedback shouldn’t be a full-time job, it should just perform part of your habits and weekly rituals for your SaaS business.

So, stop reading this and start collecting some feedback!