With the right approach, product feedback can be used to grow every aspect of digital products. It results in more web traffic, positive customer experiences, and a greater return on investment.

However, without understanding that feedback, product managers might end up with mounds of worthless data. To truly use your user feedback effectively, you need to know how it works.

What is product feedback?

Product feedback is user-based data that provides valuable insights into a specific product's customer journey and experience. It's used to identify pain points, potential improvements, and user satisfaction related to your product engineering practices.

What’s the difference between product feedback and customer feedback?

Not all feedback is product-centric. Sometimes, the more general category of customer feedback applies.

Feedback is more customer-centric when directed toward problems related to business. For example, if a customer shares a negative customer service experience, it might have nothing to do with the product experience per se.

Sometimes, when you collect customer feedback on purpose, this can lead to further information on user experience. Perhaps the person contacted your customer support service team to solve a problem with your product.

It's essential to separate the two feedback forms. You want your product direction to come from something other than customer conclusions that have nothing to do with the product.

To help with this, always be sure to analyze customer reviews with a discerning eye. Ask yourself if the customer is frustrated with the service, the company, or the product. By separating this data, you can make effective product development decisions.

Through primarily open-ended questions like the ones above, you'll better understand the customer experience.

To turn this qualitative feedback into quantitative feedback, you can have your customers answer on a scale of one to five or ten. Providing a value makes it easier to use the data, which is a feature included across many survey platforms.

Even so, you'll still want to provide customers with a means of giving open-ended feedback, as you might only get some critical data if all the questions are yes/no answers. People will offer more information if you give them full control over how they answer the question.

You'll also want to take care to avoid leading questions. For example, asking "How awesome do you think our product is?" implies that you want people to think of the product as excellent.