Customer feedback analysis is the bane of many user researchers’ work life. But it doesn’t have to be.
In this simple and straightforward guide, we’ll give you the ins and outs of customer feedback analysis. We’ll provide you with a list of GPT-powered tools that can assist you in your endeavor, and help you plan ahead so that you aren’t a walkin’, talkin’ pile of dread when the time comes.
What is Customer Feedback Analysis?
Before we get into the nitty gritty details, what the hell is customer feedback analysis?
For the uninitiated, customer feedback analysis is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s the part of user research where you analyze the customer feedback to create easy-to-understand, actionable insights. Present them to your product teams and shareholders to move the product development forward in exciting new ways.
In short, it’s the final hurdle for user researchers. And arguably, the most important. After all, if you collect the most insightful data that could radically change the product development process, but your analysis of said data is all over the place, nobody is going to give a sh*t. All your hard work will be for nothing. Don’t fall at the last hurdle. Don’t be this guy.
Why Should You Analyze Customer Feedback?
If you don’t listen to your customers, you won’t have any. Success in the world of business largely depends on how well you listen to your customers and how much you can convince them to return. If they feel ignored or there are clear problems that aren’t being addressed, they will go elsewhere. Wouldn’t you?
By analyzing customer feedback, you can gather a wide range of data that can be used to drive positive change for the business.
It could be something as simple as the position of a button, to something more direct like the lack of a free plan or trial to test out a software. This can put users off ever getting started with your product. Something you’ll want to reverse at all costs.
With customer feedback analysis comes actionable insights that empower you to grow and change and connect more deeply with your target audience. These insights may evolve into new features – but hopefully they won’t be as scary as Tom’s.
@tldv.io This one is for our product manager friends out there #tech #productmanager #agileteams
♬ original sound - tldv.io - AI Meeting Recorder
Benefits of Customer Feedback Analysis
To make it abundantly clear why customer feedback analysis is important, here are five benefits that you can’t ignore.
1. Connect with the Customer
Take your customer relationship to the next level. By understanding customer concerns and acting upon them, you make it clear that their voices are valued. Amplifying the voice of the customer is one of the sure-fire ways to increase customer loyalty.
It sounds too simple to be true, but simply thinking from the mind of a customer can help this. Do you like businesses with active and supportive customer service, or do you prefer those that ignore you or send you down a rabbit hole of nonsense rather than address your claim or complaint? I think we both know the answer.
When the customer feels like they’re treated as a human being, they appreciate it so much more.
2. Competitive Advantage
Want to stand out amidst the sea of competitors? Listen to your customers and implement their feedback. Customers are far more likely to return to a business that listens to them than one that does what it wants. This can lead to higher rates of customer retention than your competitors.
3. Brand Reputation Management
By analyzing and addressing customer feedback, you’re able to mitigate potential damage to your brand image that may be caused by ignoring negative comments or complaints. Your brand will be seen as one that truly cares about their customer, as opposed to one that just cares about profit.
Similarly, leveraging positive feedback helps you build a strong reputation and attract new customers.
4. Detecting Issues
Problems can’t always be spotted from the inside. When you’ve been staring at something for so long, it takes an outsider to show you what’s missing, or an error that’s been staring you in the face the entire time. The same goes for writing. That’s why proofreaders and editors are a thing. They look at text with a fresh eye and can more easily detect mistakes.
Your customers are able to spot things that you might not have noticed. When spotted early, this can allow you to make changes without too much hassle. This is particularly useful for beta testing feedback.
5. Continuous Improvement
Who doesn’t want to continuously get better? By analyzing customer feedback regularly, you create a feedback loop that drives continuous enhancements and optimizations. This iterative approach helps you stay responsive to customer needs and evolving market dynamics.
How to Conduct Customer Feedback Analysis
There are a number of ways in which you can analyze user feedback. Which ones are right for you will depend on your specific needs and your type of business. Here are the three most popular methods of customer feedback analysis.
- User interviews
- Customer reviews
- Surveys
1. User Interviews
User interviews are king. When you want to gather customer feedback, this is one of the best ways to do it. Directly ask your customers what they like about your product and what can be improved. If you make them feel comfortable and that their opinion is valued, then they will be honest with you.
One thing to keep in mind with user interviews is that you should never ask leading questions. That’s a fast track to bias town. You want to reduce bias in your user research as much as possible.
To do this, you can employ strategies like the Mom Test. Simply put, if you can get unbiased answers from your mom, then you can get them from anyone. This strategy shows you how.
Side note: there’s some super important customer feedback tools that are perfect for conducting user interviews and organizing the results so that you can easily analyze them later.
We’ll delve into the number on customer feedback software for user interviews later, but for now I’ll let you drool over the fact that you can conduct user interviews remotely, record both the video and audio, timestamp the important parts, and even tag your colleagues in at the part that’s relevant to them with a simple click.
After all your user interviews are finished, and you have a library of interviews racking up several hours or more of content, you can easily search for key parts in the meeting by utilizing the AI-powered search function that scans the meeting transcripts for keywords and highlights exactly when they’re said.
With this customer feedback software, you can even create reels, highlights and clips from all your user interviews. Amalgamate the best and most insightful customer feedback into one short reel and use that in your UX research report.
Oh, and by the way, all of this is free. tl;dv: remember the name. We’ll get back to it later.
2. Customer Reviews
User interviews run the risk of being slightly biased. People may not always feel comfortable telling you how they truly feel about their product. They might hold back their true feelings so as not to hurt yours.
What these types of customers don’t realize is that, as user researchers, pain is your middle name.
Without hard truths, you’ll never uncover what your customers truly desire. If they think your design is garbage, you need to know. With customer reviews, users tend to be a lot more honest. They get straight to the point and don’t hold back.
Check G2, Trustpilot, and Trustradius. These third-party sites are there to build a stack of reviews. If people have issues with your product, you’ll find out here. Keep an eye on them regularly so you can address new concerns that arise.
In the case of bad reviews, you can also personally reach out to dissatisfied customers to address their concerns one-to-one.
Another thing to remember about customer reviews is that they are often core drivers of sales. Most future customers will look for reviews of products or services before buying. Understanding the reasons behind negative reviews and making efforts to resolve them is crucial for growth.
3. Surveys
The two most popular types of survey for customer feedback are NPS surveys and CSAT surveys. These types of surveys help you understand your users’ motives and decisions at scale.
It’s worth noting that NPS surveys are receiving backlash recently for being biased and unscalable. A good way to improve NPS surveys is by adding a qualitative follow-up question so that customers can expand upon their score.
Organize Your Findings
Customer feedback analysis can be a nightmare if your findings are all over the place. That’s why we recommend building a dedicated UX research repository where you store all things customer feedback-related.
For small-scale operations, something as simple as Excel can work. But for larger research projects, or continuous research, you might want to find a dedicated customer feedback software to store your findings.
Categorize Your Feedback
Customer feedback analysis can be difficult to perform if your data is all over the place. To get the most out of your insights, you’ll want to color-code your data or find some other way to distinguish it. This will help you quickly highlight certain things.
For example, you may color all issues relating to the UI in orange. That way, you know just from a quick glance what the topic is. Similarly, you may have problems regarding the customer journey which may be blue. You pick the colors. You pick the different types. The point is: make it easy to scan.
Present Your Findings
The culmination of all your hard work: the customer feedback presentation.
The aim of your presentation is to use data-driven insights to convince your product teams and stakeholders that action should be taken to resolve issues that have arisen during your research.
Show them what the issues are, how you came to that conclusion, and which steps should be taken to remedy them.
Use voice of the customer tools to speak to your audience with the customer’s voice. Literally. There’s no better way to convince stakeholders than by using the authentic voice of their users.
Customer Feedback Analysis Tools
There are hundreds of tools out there that claim to help you with your customer feedback analysis. Not all of them are good.
We’ve compiled a short list of great tools (all of which are integrated with state-of-the-art AI) to help you with your user feedback. From conducting the research, to analyzing and organizing it, to presenting it, these four customer feedback tools are approved by us!
1. tl;dv
We briefly introduced you to this gem earlier. tl;dv slaps an unbeatable free plan down on the table and displays a jaw-dropping array of top-of-the-range features like it’s no big deal. That’s because – for tl;dv – it isn’t.
In short, it’s a fantastic online meeting software that transcribes, translates, and detects speakers with ease. It empowers you to upload files and transcribe their audio too. Just give it a few moments and voila, the transcript is yours.
Its powerful AI can automatically take notes, summarize meetings, and help you search transcripts by keyword. It provides automatic speaker labels and accurately detects who’s speaking at all times. In the near future, there will even be an internal tagging system to further enhance meeting organization, making tl;dv the ultimate research repository. In a way, we hope the AI doesn’t get too much more advanced else it simply takes over altogether…
@tldv.io Written by ChatGPT #inception #chatgpt #ai #openai #meeting #corporate
♬ original sound - tldv.io - AI Meeting Recorder
Talking of which, if you’re committed to customer feedback analysis, tl;dv is the software for you. Free to download, you can get started today with your user interviews. Even if you’ve already recorded a few, you can still upload the files and transcribe the text, adding them to your meeting library so that you can easily search for keywords and create reels or highlights out of them.
As if that wasn’t enough, it provides transcripts in more than 25 languages, making it super easy for you even if you’re interviewing in different languages. As the visual aspect of user interviews is often just as important as the words, you’ll be pleased to hear that tl;dv is one of the only online meeting transcription tools that records both audio and video for free. It’s the remote UX research tool of your dreams.
Critically important for businesses, tl;dv integrates with all your favorite work tools. From Notion to Slack, Salesforce to Hubspot, you can easily export videos, clips and reels to your favorite platform. You can also tag colleagues and have an email sent directly to them, including a timestamp so they can jump immediately to the part that’s relevant to them and their expertise.
tl;dv takes mere moments to get set up. You can be recording videos and creating transcripts in the next ten minutes if you really wanted! And there’s absolutely no commitment to paying anything either. There is a paid option for professional teams that want to maximize the benefits of their transcriptions, but tl;dv’s most common features are completely free. Forever.
Pros
- Records, transcribes, and recognizes speakers in both Google Meet & Zoom calls
- Accurate speaker recognition
- Top of the range AI
- Makes recordings and transcripts accessible as soon as the meeting ends
- Timestamp moments during the live meeting to jump back to that moment whenever you want
- Automatic speaker labels in transcription
- Searchable transcriptions in 25+ languages
- Create clips and reels out of longer recordings with such ease that it physically hurts to think about not doing it that way
- Integrates directly with Slack, Salesforce, Notion and all your research repository tools
- Smooth and easy onboarding
- Intuitive, easy-to-use, and scalable across your entire organization
- Best freemium plan in the industry, allowing for unlimited recordings and transcripts, plus tons of other free features
- Coming soon: automated labeling of meetings, according to your internal tagging system (a feature powered by GPT-3 – just one of its many use cases for product managers!)
Cons
- Not available for MS Teams, Skype, or Webex (yet!)
Pricing
You can get started with tl;dv’s free plan today with no strings attached. Plus, depending on which region of the world you’re in, you can get up to a 40% discount on the paid plans!
Free Plan Features
- Unlimited recordings
- Record Google Meet and Zoom
- Transcribe Google Meets and Zoom calls
- Transcribe in 20+ languages
- Set timestamps and highlights
- Create and share clips
- Set recording automations
The paid plans offer more integrations, analytics, downloadable recordings, customizable share settings, as well as priority customer support. This is recommended for larger teams of user researchers.
2. Kraftful
Utilizing advanced AI, Kraftful is a product feedback tool that’s trusted by Google, Netflix, Kayak, and other industry giants. It lets you save hundreds of hours analyzing customer feedback with its GPT-4 powered solution. It uncovers user needs in a fraction of the time and lets you see how often users mention topics and quickly find original feedback in context.
Pull feedback directly from sources like Google Play, App Store, Zendesk, and Intercom to gather your data in one place and get near-instant analyses.
Pros
- Super easy to get set up
- Saves a lot of time
- Provides clear visibility on user necessities
- Fantastic integrations
Cons
- Some features are only available in subscriptions and aren’t able to be tested before committing
- Analytical features are still being built and improved
Pricing
Kraftful follows a credit-based system. Your free plan already nets you 200 free credits per month, but if you want a usage plan, then they’re only $0.15 per credit. The next step up is $300 per month which includes 2,000 credits, among several other things such as up to 10 seats, and a cheaper rate for more credits if you run over ($0.12).
Free Plan Features
- 200 credits* / month
- Daily, weekly, and monthly product insights
- Issue frequency report
- 20 chats with our AI assistant for a deeper dive
- CSV file upload
- Daily support ticket sync & analysis
- Weekly app store reviews sync & analysis
- User interview notes, call transcripts, and other document analysis
- Curate your own lists from AI summaries
- Download PDF/CSV to share with your team
- Up to 5 seats
As you can see, the free plan is pretty special. While it lacks a large amount of credits, it’s certainly enough to get you started with the software and to learn it so you know whether or not it’s right for you. With the capability for 5 seats, it’s also great for small teams to try out.
3. Canny
Canny allows you to capture, organize, and analyze product feedback in one place to inform your product decisions. Trusted by Ahrefs, Loom, Mercury and others, Canny captures product feedback all in one place, analyzes it so you can make impactful decisions, ranks features by priority and creates a roadmap on your behalf, and can even be used to announce product updates to increase engagement and customer retention.
The intention for Canny is to close feedback loops and continuously innovate. It’s a great system for those that are constantly capturing and analyzing customer feedback. All it does is automates and streamlines the process.
It integrates with your favorite tools like Salesforces, Slack and Zapier, and it features a simple free plan so you can check out what it’s like before you dive in headfirst.
Pros
- Clean and responsive user interface
- Great for organizing and analyzing customer feedback
- Actively increases customer engagement and shows users that you care about their feedback
Cons
- Roadmaps are public which may not always be desired
- Price plans are a little inflexible
Pricing
Canny has a decent free plan to get started. However, the first paid plan is a bit of a leap. It’s $360 per month when billed annually. It includes a lot of features that aren’t available in the free plan, like custom domains, private boards, and priority support. Some people may be put off by the price tag when they have been unable to try out these features in advance.
Free Plan Features
- 3 owners/managers
- Unlimited contributors
- Unlimited end users
- 2 boards
- 1 roadmap
- All core features
- Roadmap prioritization
- Changelog
As I said earlier, it’s a decent plan to get started with and try it out. The fact that all core features are included is good, but the limits will certainly kick in fast if you’re running any kind of in-depth user research.
4. Gamma
Gamma is a presentation tool powered by AI. If you want to find a way to quickly and cohesively display your user research, Gamma’s templates can help you. You don’t need to fiddle around with formatting and design work if that isn’t your forte. You do the research, Gamma does the presentation.
Whether you want to generate a powerpoint, a pitch deck, or a whitepaper, Gamma quickly summarizes and condenses your research into the most important aspects and creates a visually stunning presentation so that you can focus on what you’re good at.
Of course, you can edit the presentation afterwards to manually add extra insights, infographics or other stats that you feel are relevant. Treat Gamma as a starting point for your presentation and you’ll save yourself a ton of time.
Pros
- Beautiful presentations, web pages, and other graphics automatically generated from your prompt
- Lots of templates to choose from
- Good free plan (subject to change)
- State of the art AI
Cons
- Can take a while to load the final product
- Can be buggy in non-Chrome browsers
Pricing
Currently, Gamma is available completely for free to everyone! Hurry though, as the paid plans are going to become available in the near future, restricting the amount of free stuff you can do!
Get Analyzing
Customer feedback isn’t going to analyze itself. Pick one (or all!) of these tools and start bringing together your research. It’s time to make an impact!
