Getting the Most from Customer Feedback of your MVP
#product strategy
MVP feedback is essential to improve a minimum viable product and customers are integral to this process. Here, we will consider everything you need to know about getting customer insight to improve your MVP. User opinions pinpoint what the user experience is and how to improve the MVP in the next iteration. Getting input from customers helps you to maximize learning. There is a wealth of information that you can get from customers that will ensure your MVP moves in the right direction.
This article explains:
How to ask for customer opinions
How to collect and organize them
How to analyze them
How to respond to them
How to Ask for Customer Feedback
Knowing how to ask customers for their input helps make sure you get the information you need. Ideally, you should be doing this as part of a continuous development loop that underlies your development process. Asking the right questions will secure the most useful information from your customer base. One of the key questions you should ask is whether the customer will buy, based on what they’ve seen or used so far. Understanding if the customer will buy or otherwise act is important. If they will not buy, that is important to know as well, and you need to know why. You will also want to get general opinions on what users think of the product and how it might be improved. Questions to consider include:
How can the MVP be improved?
What parts of the MVP do you see a use for?
Which parts are not useful?
Does this product solve your problem? If not, why not?
Does the MVP solve the product in a better way compared with how you solve the problem now?
Can you think of any other groups that might find this product helpful?
Do you have any worries about this product? What and why?
Is the product worth the price?
Did this product meet your expectations? Why, or why not?
Collecting Customer Feedback
There are a number of ways to collect customer thoughts on your MVP. These include:
In-app surveys
Interviews
Focus groups
A/B testing
Landing pages
Crowdfunding campaigns
Each of these is now covered in turn.
In-app surveys
Using in-app surveys is a helpful way to access user input on your MVP. Some of the best tools of this type include:
In-app survey name | What it does | What you learn from it |
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) | This survey questions customers about their satisfaction with your product. | Depending on when you use it, you can get an idea of what customers think after they use the main features or after onboarding, among others. |
Net Promoter Score (NPS) | This survey simply asks the customer if they are likely to recommend your product to a colleague or a friend. | You will learn more about who might promote your product, those that are neutral about it, and those that will speak badly about the product. |
Customer Effort Score (CES) | This survey gauges how easy/hard it is for customers to use the product. | When used strategically you can find out what customers think about new features or after they have received support, among other opportunities. |
Interviewing / Focus Groups
Interviewing and focus groups also present excellent opportunities to get customer opinions on your minimum viable product. From contact information gathered on sign-up, you can get in touch with customers and ask them what they think. When doing this it is best to ask open questions (How, Why, What, Which) rather than closed questions that lead to yes/no answers. Focus groups are interviews with a group of customers all at the same time. These can be useful because you can gain deeper insight from customers by listening to them debate questions about your MVP. The advantage of interviewing / focus groups over surveys is you can gain more in-depth information from customers. However, they can be quite a time-consuming way to collect data.
A/B Testing
You might consider using ad campaigns and A/B testing to review what customers think about different versions of your product. When customers interact differently with the various versions, this tells you which they prefer. You can also run tests to examine which product components interest them the most.
Landing Pages
Another option is to use a landing page. This can be used to explain simply what the product is and how it works. Customers can be invited to sign up if interested. By measuring clicks on information such as pricing it is possible to get an idea of whether people might pay.
Crowdfunding
MVP insights from customers can also be gleaned via crowdfunding campaigns. Here, you can learn whether customers are interested in your MVP or not. If people contribute, they are interested. You can also include pre-order information to understand the interest in greater depth. The use of a form to collect some data about contributors can help you understand who your customers are and their interests.
How to Organize Customer Feedback
There are two ways to organize the input you receive from customers: by product feature or by customer type. The benefit of organizing the information by product feature is that you have everything you need in one place when reviewing development plans. This helps prioritize development. Organizing input by type of customer can help with understanding what different market segments think about the MVP. This can be helpful for marketing purposes and deciding on strategy.
How to Analyze Customer Feedback
Information provided from customers can be quantitative or qualitative. Any data collected where closed questions have been used is quantitative. You can analyze this statistically or even visually. The latter you can do by using simple tools like Excel and creating graphs and charts. Ask yourself what the numbers are telling you. It may not always be immediately obvious. If you have collected data from interviews and focus groups, this is qualitative data. It cannot be analyzed using quantitative forms of analysis. Here, you will need to look through the themes that emerge from what customers have said about your minimum viable product. Reading and re-reading the comments and organizing them by themes helps to best understand the patterns. Analyzing customer comments can be time-consuming, but when done well it is very worthwhile. Don’t lose sight of your goal: You want to analyze the data to improve the service user experience.
How to Respond to Customer Feedback
When customers offer their comments and opinions you can use this interaction to help build loyalty. When you respond you can keep them up to date on the features that will be coming next, based on their valuable feedback. You should consider how you might change the development plan based on what users think. Customers like feeling that their opinions matter. You can also reward them for the information they offer by providing them a freebie or discount. This also helps build loyalty by showing them that you appreciate their time and effort. Sometimes companies choose not to respond to customers’ opinions. They may think that the customer just hasn’t seen the light yet. Ignoring customers is a mistake. If customers do not tell you what you want to hear, that is still useful for your development. You can avoid further development on a product that does not meet the needs. Ignore what customers say at your peril!
Continuing the MVP Feedback Loop
Developing an MVP is an iterative process. It is not supposed to stop once you have the first input from customers. From considering the information customers give you, you can refine the product strategy and the development process to deliver this. This makes sure you prioritize what is most important to customers and what will be viable financially.
Summary
The bottom line is that your product needs to help customers solve their problems better than existing methods. The only way to really know for sure if your MVP does this is by asking for customer opinions. There are plenty of ways to gather user thoughts on your MVP. Organizing this, analyzing it, and responding to it are all important steps as part of the process of improvement. The whole point of using an MVP is to understand what customers think and if they find your product interesting. If you are unwilling to listen to what they have to say, your development might take the wrong turn. How you respond to customer insights will ultimately determine the success of your MVP and Enkonix can help you with delivering the best possible MVP to impress the users. You can schedule the first call with our team right now!
