It's easy to get lost in the day-to-day of running a startup. But in order to build a product that truly meets your customers' needs, you need to be on top of their feedback. Support tickets are one of the most direct ways to get this.
When customers reach out to you, they're not just reporting a problem—they're giving you valuable insight into how they're using your product, what they struggle with, and what they wish it could do.
But with the high volume of tickets that most companies receive, it can be challenging to effectively collect and analyze feedback. So today I want to share how to make sense of this information and how to use it to improve your product and services.
How to quantify open feedback?
The main challenge comes to this: every month, you receive hundreds or thousands of support tickets. How can you identify trends and changes over time? For that, I’ve been using a 3-level tagging system.
Level 1: Type of feedback
The first thing I always do is ask myself, "what kind of issue is this?". You want to categorize what the user is reporting and I’ve broken that down into these tags:
Feature request. These can include suggestions for brand new features or improvements to existing ones. Super valuable to inform the product roadmap.
Product pain. This tag is reserved for any issues related to the user experience or user interface. If we see that lots of customers are struggling with a particular feature or setting, we'll use this tag to flag it up to our UX team.
Education pain. If a user is struggling to figure out how to use a feature or set up a workflow, we'll use the education pain tag. This feedback is super valuable for improving our help center documentation and ensuring that our users have the resources they need to succeed.
Unaware. When customers are not be aware of a feature that already exists, we track these requests too. This helps us improve our onboarding process and make our existing features more discoverable.
Billing. As with any business, it’s imperative that the payment process is as painless as possible, so we use the billing tag to track any payment-related problems.
Bugs. It’s impossible for a product to be bug-free, so we need to document it not only so it can be fixed, but also to understand the impact bugs have on Customer Success metrics.
Level 2: Product Area
After we've categorized the feedback by type, the next step is to pinpoint exactly which area of the product the feedback is related to. Take Claap, for example - as an asynchronous video collaboration platform, there are a lot of different areas where users might encounter issues or have feature requests. We need to know if the feedback is related to recording a claap video, leaving comments, sharing videos, managing the workspace, or any of the integrations we offer.
This level of detail is especially important for larger organizations that have multiple product teams. By tagging feedback according to product area, we can ensure that each team receives only the feedback that's relevant to them.
Level 3: Feature Name
This is where we get really specific about the features that users are requesting or having trouble with. In the Claap example above, this can be requesting new filters for the self camera when recording a video or reporting a bug with the video annotation feature. The tags here would be: camera_filters and video_annotation.
You don’t want to end-up with hundreds of tags, so I suggest you only create them for your main features and top requests. Then you add new ones once you notice that a particular feature is starting to become a trend over time.
Next, segment!
Implementing this tagging system will allow you to build super useful dashboards right within your support ticketing tool. You'll be able to answer questions like: What are the main reasons why users are contacting us this month? What themes are emerging in the feedback we're receiving? And even what are customers saying about the latest release?
But that's just the beginning. When it comes to analyzing customer feedback, it's crucial that you don't treat all customers equally. For example, you wouldn't want to give the same weight to feedback from a large enterprise customer who's investing $2,000 a year in your product as you would to someone who's paying just $35 a month. And you definitely wouldn't want to treat a feature request from a power user the same as one from someone who's just getting started with your product.
That's where segmentation comes in. It's just as important to segment your feedback as it is to collect it in the first place. Of course, how you go about this will depend on your specific business and what you're trying to improve. But some common ways to segment feedback include:
Determining whether the customer fits your Ideal Customer Profile or not
Identifying whether they're a paying customer or a free user
Looking at what plan they've subscribed to
Assessing how long they've been using your product
By segmenting your feedback in this way, you'll be able to prioritize your resources and make sure that you're addressing the needs of your most important customers first. Plus, you'll be able to better understand the unique challenges and opportunities faced by different groups of users.
Conclusion
Support tickets are a great way to not only help your customers, but also to gain insights on how they interact with your product, what challenges they face, and what they would love to see. By leveraging this framework, you'll be make sense of their feedback to improve your product, offer a better customer experience, and ultimately drive growth.
This is part 3 of a 4-part and very hands-on series where I share how we created our Voice of the Customer Program at Typeform.