Why customer feedback is the most underutilized product growth lever

Customer feedback is gold for product managers (PMs), especially when it comes to product analytics.

It’s like having a direct line to your users, giving you insights into what they love, what frustrates them, and what they wish was different.

But in many teams, customer feedback is often overlooked – after all, only 21% of product managers use customer feedback as a key data source.

Keep reading to uncover some striking gaps in how product teams gather and use customer feedback.

The power of customer feedback

By analyzing customer feedback, product managers can spot trends and patterns that data alone might not reveal. It helps to validate assumptions, ensuring the changes you make are truly in line with user needs.

Plus, when customers feel heard, it builds loyalty and trust, turning them into advocates for your product.

Marrying customer feedback with product analytics creates a powerful loop that drives continuous improvement and aligns your product with real user experiences.

Cindy Camacho, Director of Product Management at VivoAquatics, shares her thoughts on the power of customer feedback:

“In my role, product data is essential for informing key decisions across the entire product lifecycle. I use tools like FullStory to track user behavior, providing invaluable insights into how customers interact with our product.

“This data, combined with market research and competitive analysis, allows me to identify trends, uncover pain points, and validate assumptions.

“Additionally, I collect direct feedback through customer interviews, which helps to supplement the quantitative data with a deeper understanding of customer experiences and needs.

“By integrating these diverse sources of data, I ensure that our product decisions are customer-centric and backed by evidence, leading to greater alignment with market demand and user expectations.”

Overall, customer feedback leads to:

A customer-centric product strategy
A robust and validated product roadmap
Improved UX
Greater customer engagement and loyalty
Boosted brand reputation and advocacy
Increased revenue retention

The customer feedback gap

Despite the resounding power of customer feedback in product management, many teams aren’t making use of this valuable resource.

Here are some shocking statistics from our State of Product Analytics report:

64.5% of organizations don’t have a dedicated product analytics function.
Only 21% of product managers use customer feedback as a key data source.
Only 6.4% of PMs use customer feedback to validate new feature prototypes.
9% of PMs never speak to customers directly.

That’s right, 79% of product pros don’t use customer feedback as a key data source — this is a huge opportunity product teams are wasting.

So, if you’re looking to turn this around and make the most of your customer data, keep reading.

5 steps to utilize customer feedback to the fullest

Collecting customer feedback

To make use of customer feedback, you first have to collect it. The simplest way is to ask your marketing, sales, and customer success teams for insights.

But how frequently should you collect this data?

According to our community, 21.8% of product managers gather feedback a few times a month. While 21% do this several times a week, and 18.5% once a week.

This suggests it’s crucial to actively keep in touch with your counterparts in customer-facing roles multiple times a month.

Or you could get ultra-proactive, and gather feedback daily like 15.3% of product managers, to ensure continuous alignment with customer needs.

Collecting the right feedback

Once you’ve started regularly collecting customer feedback from your sales, marketing, and customer success teams, you might want to consider the relevancy of this feedback.

After all, if the feedback isn’t relevant to your role, you’re likely to brush it off and never look at it again. Meaning you’ll miss out on all the benefits of collecting customer feedback in the first place.

If you’re not sure where to start, 50% of product managers prioritize understanding what prospects and customers say about the product during feedback sessions. This makes sense, as this candid feedback will give you a peek into the sentiment of customers and an understanding of which features they like and dislike about your product.

Other ideas for your feedback sessions from our community include:

Discovering new ideas for your product roadmap (26%)
Ensuring the product is represented accurately in messaging (8.1%)
Validating new feature prototypes (6.4%)

Our findings suggest PMs value understanding customers’ thoughts on the product most, but are they missing a trick?

By expanding the scope of internal feedback sessions, product managers may be able to gain even more insight into customers’ needs, and use this data to validate prototypes before they go-to-market.

Talk directly to customers

Sometimes it’s best to get customer feedback straight from your customers' mouths. This allows you to ask the questions your less-technical counterparts might not think to ask.

As a result, you can dive even deeper into your customers’ feedback to discover the underlying reasons for their suggestions or frustrations.

How often you speak with customers depends on your workflows, but 30.6% of PMs talk to customers monthly, and 25% use a weekly cadence. This allows them to keep a regular conversation with customers, and discover issues early.

Plus, taking this extra step frequently adds an extra layer of customer understanding to your day-to-day processes.

These insights will allow you to proactively solve customer problems and improve the overall user experience — leading to increased revenue growth in the long term.

“While data is crucial, actually talking to our users is just as important.

“We use surveys in our app to get quick feedback, and we do longer interviews every few months to understand our users better. This direct input often reveals things our data doesn’t show.

“For instance, a user once mentioned wanting better ways to export data — something we hadn’t considered. We built that feature, and it’s now one of our most popular.

“Listening to users not only improves our product but also builds stronger relationships with them. The more we respond to their needs, the more they engage with us, creating a positive cycle of improvement.”

–Soham Sharma, Product Manager

15 questions to ask your customers

Talking to customers can be daunting if you’ve not done it before. The conversation may feel awkward or forced if you’re not sure what to say. Or worse — you could get stuck in the weeds of a small issue, instead of discussing the full-picture problem.

So, to help you get started, here are some questions our community of product managers use to structure their customer conversations:

What frustrates them?
What is their motivation to use the product today?
What new features of the product have your agents adopted?
If you could no longer use the product, how would you feel?
What additional features do you need to make your job easier?
What did you use before our product to solve the problem it does today?
What are your most used workflows?
If we could add something to the product, what would it be for you?
What problems do you need to solve? How can we help?
What’s been your experience with the product? How can we make it better?
What’s your opinion of feature X?
What is the most urgent issue to fix?
What do you like about the product?
How often do you use it personally? Is it making a difference?
Are there any pain points you regularly experience?

Analyzing and using customer feedback

Finally, to make the most of customer feedback, you need to analyze it and use the insights to inform your decision-making.

Here are some steps to analyze and implement feedback:

Organize feedback into categories — you can use AI to make this easier.
Look for topics with very strong positive or negative sentiment (this can show the most urgent issues customers report).
For negative issues, start to add them to your roadmap or keep them in mind when building. For positive feedback, ensure you hold onto these features, and emphasize them in your onboarding processes.
Prioritize fixes based on urgency and talk to customers about potential solutions as you build.
Most importantly: update customers when an issue is resolved. This improves your reputation, as customers realize you’ve acknowledged and actioned their feedback.

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