8 Methods or Comments for/on Getting User Experience and Feedback: How the best Crowdfunding Agencies and Marketing Companies Do It

Market Research

The key differentiator among the people and the little people (‘men and the boys’ is a tad sexist, no?) is how one approaches market research. There are certain strategies like how to identify your segments of users, how to approach or using what tools to approach your different segments, and what KPIs to follow are ideal for your different segments.

Some might say there’s value in holding each customer, contributor or investor as individuals — but there’s real value in aggregating their opinions, thoughts, feelings and actions on your platform, too. Using aggregate data one can make overall decisions that affect not only one key player but everyone else who might be (veritably) like them in all key aspects.

Market research can take many forms, but what’s really important is to properly identify and then pursue your market into smaller, manageable subsections. There are many tools on the internet poised to help you in this pursuit, and crowdfunding agencies and marketing companies might recommend a service like Intercom where you can both create these differentiating factors as well as approach your users for all sorts of automated or manual feedback cycles. Sometimes, the best customer feedback experience comes from these organizations with tailored and packaged solutions whose aim is to provide such!

Improve Product or Service

Using aggregate data, we can have an idea of where a product or service is failing to meet the expectations of our users. The data can be as simple as ‘using Zendesk, or a like helpdesk software, where are our users self-categorizing their pain points or support issues to come from?’ In these pieces of software, it’s easy to create a workflow where your users can tell you what page, feature or section of your site, product or service is failing them. Using this data in aggregate, you can see where the majority of your user’s pain is.

Aggregated Data is Actionable

The best lesson I can hope to impart on you here is that when you have all of this data and it’s coming in in numbers for you, you’re able to make decisions that affect a group or nearly all of your users — where should your product or service team focus their efforts? You can use aggregated data across platforms and means to figure this out. Where should you focus on training or retraining for your support team? Aggregated data helps here, too. We can even use scientifically proven formulae like Net Promoter Score to not only engage our users and see where they might have glowing testimonials for an organization — or where their major outstanding pain is after a support touch — or even where to give constructive feedback to our support team should we notice a trend in their (aggregate) feedback scores.

The Holy Grail: Surveys!

‘Paid internet survey’ is one of the most hot and bidded-on searches on Google, and marketing firms will tell you just how important surveys are for gathering sentiment or feedback from users or potential users. What’s more is that you can engage an existing userbase to participate in surveys for discounts, prizes, or other benefits — and you can ask a series of questions that are set into A/B tests to optimize your results, bewaring of creating a series of questions that provide the data you’re looking to prove, though! You must strive to be objective in this pursuit.

Why are surveys so important? They can gauge a userbase’s thoughts on exact issues, see where your team should focus their efforts, or who and where deserve the right amount of constructive feedback. Like all aggregate data, as I’d mentioned, it’s actionable and can allow you to go the routes that best serve your organization.

Beware — really — tailoring the results to be what you’re looking to prove. Famously, Blockbuster conducted a survey and the analysis read back that people like to go to the stores in case they run into a friend they hadn’t seen in awhile. Danger lies this way…

In Any Relationship, Communication Is Key

Check out the Government of Australia weighing in on the value of communication in interpersonal relationships, but then apply it to your organization as a whole and apply it to each and every stakeholder. If there’s a disconnect among any business unit, executive, or team member — or even the clients, customers, contributors or investors — there, my friend, lies true danger. If people are unable to follow the communication cycle, frame their thoughts, or be understood, then there will indeed be missed KPIs, missed opportunities for growth, or failures to perform.

The good news here is that refreshing or revisiting communications policies can allow an organization the ability to streamline their inner processes. If people are better or more easily able to voice concerns or have their innovation be celebrated across the organization, they are more likely to.

Where Can We Grow?

As I’d mentioned before in this article, aggregated data can allow an organization the ability to see where, when and how they’re able to grow into new products, services, offerings, or where to add resources to better handle certain barriers. When you get user experience feedback and act on it as actionable data, you can figure out more sustainable and achievable plans for growth!

Smart Decisions through Reacting to Trends in Realtime

If you release a new software update across channels or taste of hamburger across your chain, you’ll want to measure the reaction and sentiment in realtime. In effectuality, any change you make across any area of your business will create trends that can be identified and acted upon in order to better serve your stakeholders — internal or external.

The right resources and best crowdfunding agencies and marketing companies will be able to help you identify and act on these trends and create a system whereby you do a service for everyone involved whenever there’s a change that can be measured. Surveys? Tweet analysis? Other social avenues? The world is your limit!

Smarter Data, Smarter Decisions

If you optimize and streamline where you get information and how you derive importance from the abundant wealth of information, you’ll figure out ways to make smarter decisions and act on the data with more effect and affect. In a crowdfunding campaign, this enables you to fundraise more and acquire more inaugural users!