If you’re a SaaS founder/employee thinking about using product reviews as the epicenter of your marketing strategies, here are some interesting facts for you (based on a 2023 study):
- 89% of potential buyers will always check for reviews before buying any software products.
- Your potential customers are going to use these reviews during all stages of their buying journey (awareness, consideration, and decision-making).
- Your leads prefer seeing reviews over other content materials (such as user guides, product demos, and training).
This proves that product reviews are one of the most important social currencies around. If you operate in the SaaS world, you need to learn how to use them strategically because your customers are actively looking for them, and your competitors are probably already using them.
In this article, we’re discussing all the ways a SaaS company can generate, manage, and leverage user feedback. Let’s examine how you can turn genuine reviews into business success.
How to generate user feedback
What’s the secret to generating this goldmine of customer feedback? Follow these simple tips.
1. Offer gifts in exchange for survey completion
One of the best ways to get your customers to review your products is through surveys. While it might be challenging to convince them to sacrifice a few minutes of their time, you can improve your chances with an incentive. You can hire a customer service virtual assistant to manage all these tasks for you.
Consider offering gift cards or exclusive product perks (e.g., Amazon Gift Card or free membership for a year). Some companies even offer these incentives to get folks to leave testimonials about them on peer-to-peer review sites (like G2, Trustpilot, TrustRadius, etc).
To make these surveys more pocket-friendly, these incentives and perks are sometimes only offered to limited customers for a limited time (to encourage them to review the products faster).
2. Make your requests short
Another way to generate user feedback is to ask your email marketing audience to rate your product (as they’d typically be your customers and stakeholders).
Consider making these short (you can refer to the requests made by Laura Kluz on the ProductLed newsletter) and creating more engaging surveys (use software like SurveyLad, Typeform, SurveyMonkey, Jotform Survey Maker, etc.).
3. Turn to your loyal customers
Truthfully, no one knows your products better than your loyal customers. Some brands, like Glossier, understand this, so they’ve created micro Slack communities to contact their loyal customers and get their thoughts/opinions on any new product they launch.
This micro-community of Glossier was even monumental in helping it develop some products that it thought its audience might need (e.g., Milky Jelly cleanser). Just like Glossier, you, too, can consider creating micro-communities of loyalists you can always reach out to for positive reviews.
4. Consider in-app requests
Have you ever been on software, done some work there, and suddenly received a notification requesting you to rate the software? Well, that’s an in-app request, and you can leverage those as well to get user feedback for your business.
Consider personalizing these messages, keeping the request short, and focusing on UI/UX that makes the request itself engaging enough for customers to want to review your product. Alternatively, you can create a chatbot that would send such requests.
Small PSA: The timing of when you send these requests is important, too!
5. Use social listening tools
Often, when customers are shy of frankly expressing their opinions about your product to your client-facing teams, they’ll tell other users about their experience with your product on social media.
While you might not be able to tune into every conversation your customers have about your product, you can employ social listening tools to find conversations about your product and other topics (e.g., your competitor’s products).
In other words, these tools help you keep track of online reviews (regardless of how many are flooding in).
If you want to understand how customers perceive your product even more deeply, marketing analytics platforms like Redbird can prove invaluable. They provide comprehensive insights into customer sentiments and produce automated marketing reports, helping you decipher not only what’s being said but also the underlying emotions and trends behind the conversations.
Plus, they enable you to glean actionable intelligence from the vast sea of data, ensuring that you don’t miss a beat when it comes to monitoring and enhancing your product’s reputation in the digital space.
6. Ask for reviews in person
Lastly, if you wish to get qualitative reviews, a great way to ask for them is to interview your customers in person or over a call.
If you’re already on a call with a customer or if you’re hosting webinars with your clients, maybe strike up an honest conversation to get their raw insights about your product. Don’t underestimate this tactic for generating genuine customer reviews.
How to manage user feedback
Now that you have all this feedback, how do you turn it into useful insights? Here are some tried-and-true methodologies that work.
1. Create a system
While most customers expect companies to respond to reviews within two weeks (especially to negative reviews), most companies don’t have a review management policy in place.
So, when you create a system, identify the following things:
- What script will you use when responding to both positive and negative reviews?
- How do you create feedback loops?
- What can you do to turn a negative review into a positive one?
- How will you address your B2B buyers?
- Who will respond to reviews?
- What’s your time limit for the response?
- What actions will you take to implement changes to the issues mentioned in the review?
2. Categorize the feedback
Next up, categorize all feedback based on different areas of improvement.
For example, some reviews can be about sales, some about the product itself, some about your customer service, some about your UI/UX, and so on and so forth.
All these areas of improvement apply to different departments and must be categorized accordingly to ensure each department can work on its area of expertise.
3. Use feedback management software
Finally, a great way to manage your user feedback is to use feedback management software (like Chisel, Promoter, and UserVoice). However, if you don’t see using such software, you can use spreadsheets to make sense of your data, too.
Some experts even use reverse ETL to collate all the information and draw insights from the feedback they’ve gotten.
How to leverage user feedback
For the grand finale, learn how to put your feedback to good use.
1. Make data-driven decisions with it
One of the biggest reasons for getting user feedback is to understand which areas require improvement (read: product features) and how to improve your business processes. This rings true not only for the SaaS industry but also for other industries.
Even Laura Kluz from ProductLed, could grow her open rates to 35% and double her subscriber list after implementing all the feedback she received from her user reviews.
To replicate this result for your brand, consider categorizing authentic reviews and feedback and finding common topics of conversation. Find out how this affects the customer roadmap, which persona it most affects, and what you can do to improve (in some situations, your customers might’ve already given you the answers about what they’d like to see).
2. Use it as social proof
If you have an abundance of positive feedback, you can often use this feedback as social proof to imbibe trust, loyalty, and credibility in your product. For example, you can publish star ratings from review websites, your top testimonials, and your awards on your website and social pages.
A small tip would be to put your social proof next to your CTAs (e.g., if someone is on the landing page of a gated content piece, they’ll be more tempted to submit their information if they hear positive words about the content).
Some companies even use positive customer stories and turn them into case studies to give other leads an idea about how they could improve a client’s results and build trust that they’d be able to do the same for their brand if they buy its service.
3. Improve customer support
Another great way to use the insights you have on hand is to edit/update your customer support.
You don’t get a better example of outstanding user experience than the SaaS unicorn, Slack. Scaling from 80 to over 2,500 employees and boasting an astonishing 98% customer retention rate, Slack knows how to keep its customers happy.
Not only do they offer their customers easy support options like a chatbot and a Contact Us page, but they also offer customer service solutions for their customers. Being in the business of helping other brands level up their customer service game is probably why their own customer service is superior – leading to that incredible 98% retention rate.
Take a page from Slack’s manual and meet your customers in their needs.
Provide a chatbot to help with simple problems and reserve your CS team for more complicated issues. Enhance your customer support teams’ scripts with customer insights to ensure they don’t miss the mark.
The same goes for sales and other customer-facing teams, too. Use the insights you have on hand, find different talking points to address your customers’ issues, edit your scripts to improve their experiences, and you’ll have happier customers in no time.
Get the best insights from your reviews
Let’s be real. Despite the benefits SaaS product reviews offer, they can also seem like a heavy-duty task.
So, the question does arise—what happens after you’ve generated user feedback, collated it, managed it, and used it to improve your SaaS product? How does your audience see the ways your product has been improved? And what can you do to bring more attention to your new features?
The answer is simple: You can attract software buyers by requesting a product review on Comparecamp. Our review will highlight your product’s key features, pros, cons, and value propositions.