Recently, I went through one of our typical feedback flows and it dawned on me how simple it had become to dig for the "why" and track feedback in an efficient and thorough manner. I'm biased, but I used to try to engage with users to capture feedback without Userfeed + Intercom. You know, spreadsheets, forms, forum/community boards, logging things in a CRM, etc. It was objectively tedious to the point where we would just neglect it or forget. When you don't track feedback in time and place, it's gone forever. So, I figured I'd walk you through a typical use case and how simple it's become for us to gather and track feedback via Intercom:
- Customer submits a feature request
- Following up with more questions
- Tracking additional feedback
Customer submits a feature request
First off, making it low friction for a user to give feedback is important. Every user is different, and gives feedback in different ways, places, and times. We capture requests in a couple different ways:
- Live chat (we capture it via our Userfeed coversation app in Intercom)
- Self-service form (via Userfeed Messenger app)
In this use case the user submitted a feature request via our Intercom Messenger app (they included a screenshot for more context) which immediately sent us an alert.
This alert empowers us to respond quickly.
Gathering feedback without follow up questions will illicit low quality data. It's all about digging until you better understand the "why" behind the request. This brings us to our next step: following up.
Following up with more questions
There are a few things to keep in mind when following up:
- Focus on getting to the "why" in as few questions as possible
- Show empathy
- Keep all conversations in a central place to document any historical activity. You likely have more than one person focused on customer requests. Nothing is worse than sending a user multiple responses or having to ask your teammates if they've already reached out.
Since our alert directed us to the new post in Userfeed, we can message them directly from that post. The Message automatically contains the submission we're referencing, and the message is sent via Intercom on the backend. This ensures we keep all communication in one place, and when the user responds, we can keep the convo going in Intercom.
Tracking additional feedback
This is where the whole process comes together and you save the most time. Now that you've kept the conversation going in Intercom, you can easily track any additional feedback the user gives you. In our case, the user responded a day later with responses to my questions.
Once I read the response I wanted to link his comments to the original post in Userfeed for context. I forgot the name of the post (we get a lot of feedback), but instead of having to go search for it in another tool, I simply looked at the the Userfeed Inbox app data to the right of my conversation in Intercom.
By tagging this comment with the corresponding Userfeed post tag (default-feedback-button-sorting:userfeed) this conversation and the user are automatically linked to the post in Userfeed (of course the user was already linked since they submitted it).
Now we can start discussing the post internally, adding labels for categorization, and tracking trends in conversations with similar feedback in the future. If we decide to prioritize this, we can start shaping the project using previous comments from our team and our customers, and push it to our project management tool to start building out the to-dos.
As time goes on and more feedback is collected, reporting starts to become a valuable tool as well. For us, Intercom reports allow us to track specific feedback requests and how they're trending in conversations over a period of time, instead of just generalized tags like "feature request." Userfeed's deep tagging integration really enhances the granularity of Intercom reporting.
We're a small team and we need every bit of efficiency, automation, and organization we can get, while making sure we give customer feedback the close attention it deserves. We hope this template is useful, and please reach out with other use cases you'd like us to cover!
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