Continuous Feedback for SaaS (a Step-by-Step Guide)

Can you collect feedback from a customer once and consider your work to be done?

Just as the market changes, so do your customers and their preferences. And even if someone loved your product once, it doesn’t mean their NPS (among other things) stays the same and that they won’t churn.

This is why companies need to collect continuous feedback from both their employees and customers. Instead of having a single touchpoint, you stay connected with them and ensure that your product delivers value and solves their pain points.

It may sound complex, but collecting frequent feedback is actually easy with the right tools and approaches. Let’s show you how. 👇

What is continuous feedback?

Continuous feedback is the ongoing process of collecting, analyzing, prioritizing and implementing feedback provided by your employees and customers.

With employees, it often involves regular check-in conversations and informal interactions between managers and employees. Continuous feedback is essential for employee growth and development, and helps organizations understand employee performance and career aspirations.

With customers, continuous feedback can come from various channels: surveys, sales calls, product feedback forms, interviews, and much more. It ensures customers feels heard and you're taking on a product vision that actually solves their problems.

Benefits of continuous feedback

Continuous feedback (as opposed to collecting feedback irregularly) is important for a few reasons:

• Better satisfaction & loyalty
  Both employees and customers who feel seen and heard are more satisfied with your company and will stay around longer. Continuous feedback performance management can build stronger relationships between managers and employees, leading to increased employee engagement and retention. HR leaders can use these insights to map learning and development paths that help employees grow while meeting critical business needs.
• Improved experience
  Your team can regularly spot pain points, bottlenecks, and issues in the UX and UI and other ways to improve the product. It can also boost the workplace quality. Instead of waiting for months to diagnose problems, you can identify them on the go with an employee feedback system like this.
• Informed product development
  ,You’ll have an easier time building a product roadmap and prioritizing features, fixes, and new initiatives. Based on the customer input (such as feature requests), you can determine what goes in the backlog and what should go straight to the roadmap.
• Improved product quality
  You don’t have to look at competitors to find ways to improve your product. Instead, users will give you meaningful feedback and regular input on how your product can better meet their needs.
• More innovation
  Timely feedback forces you to innovate and rebuild your product, even if it seems like it’s functioning perfectly at the moment. Customer feedback forces you to come up with new features and ways to solve customer pain points.
• Data-driven decision-making
  Instead of fixing problems or building out features based on gut feel, constructive feedback gives you data to guide your product decisions.
• More agile development
  No more waiting for months for the hypothesis to play out. No more lengthy research. Instead, you get feedback in real time.

How to build a culture of continuous feedback

Building a culture of continuous feedback might seem overwhelming at first, but once you establish a clear process and assign responsibilities, it becomes much easier to manage and analyze feedback from both customers and employees.

Here's how to do it:

1. Assign responsibility for feedback collection

In a well-functioning continuous feedback system, collecting constructive feedback shouldn’t fall on just one person or team. Instead, it should be a shared responsibility across departments. Implementing continuous feedback is crucial for enhancing workplace culture and performance, and it requires securing buy-in from all levels of the organization to align feedback practices with the company's mission and goals. Here’s how different teams can contribute:

• Product managers: Gather continuous feedback from user interviews, product data, and various feedback sources, translating it into actionable tasks for the development team.
• Sales Team: Collect customer objections, pain points, and comparisons with competitor products.
• Customer Support: Document and relay customer complaints and feedback from tickets, calls, and emails.
• Marketing Team: Run surveys and focus groups to shape marketing strategies and product positioning.
• Community/Social Media Team: Monitor online platforms, analyze customer feedback, and forward insights to product and development teams.
• HR Team: Collect and present employee feedback to relevant stakeholders.

Each department should have regular touchpoints to gather and share feedback, ensuring it contributes to product development and organizational growth.

2. Decide when & how feedback is collected

There are many ways to collect continuous feedback, and choosing the right method is crucial. One, because you want to be aware of all the different ways you can get qualitative and quantitative feedback. Two, because you don’t want to spread yourself too thin and cover too many options.

Understanding how continuous feedback differs from traditional feedback models is essential. Continuous feedback involves regular communication and check-ins, aligning better with business goals and improving employee engagement compared to traditional feedback methods.

Some common methods include:

• Customer feedback forms
• Surveys
• Sales and support calls
• Emails
• Social media platforms
• One-on-one interviews
• Focus groups
• Customer advisory boards

Select the platforms that align best with where your customers and employees engage most frequently. Tools like Featurebase can help automate and scale the continuous feedback model, making it easier to implement across teams.

3. Develop a continuous feedback review process

Once feedback is collected, it needs to be reviewed and organized. A good feedback management platform will centralize all continuous feedback—whether it’s from emails, in-app submissions, or social media—and group it by common themes. For example, feedback mentioning “dashboard” can be automatically categorized together.

Next, prioritize the feedback. Determine which feedback items are most critical to your product's future, which will impact customer lifetime value, and what issues require immediate attention. While tools like Featurebase can assist by highlighting feedback from high-value customers, you’ll need to establish your own prioritization criteria to decide what to address first.

4. Discuss constructive feedback in team meetings

In team meetings (e.g. sales or customer support), bring up the most commonly mentioned feedback items. What they are, who they come from, what learnings there are for the team and what should be done.

Integrating informal feedback routines alongside formal processes can significantly enhance employee performance and engagement. Casual affirmations and one-on-one check-ins can help build a feedback culture and alleviate the fear surrounding performance evaluations.

If you have the resources, it’s also a good idea to set up a cross-department meeting to discuss the most important ongoing feedback that came from your customers. Use this opportunity to align the product roadmap and the priorities for the work to be done in the future.

5. Implementing a Continuous Feedback Process

Building a continuous feedback culture is one side of the equation; implementing a structured process is the other. Start by designing an employee feedback model that includes regular check-ins and informal interactions. Make sure the process is ongoing and integrated into daily workflows.

Balancing positive and negative feedback is crucial. While delivering negative feedback can be challenging, it is essential for growth and performance improvement. Encourage open communication to foster accountability and trust among employees.

• Training employees and managers: Ensure that everyone knows how to give and receive feedback effectively. Training should cover best practices and emphasize psychological safety. This can be achieved through in-person workshops or online platforms.
• Assessing and adjusting the process: Regularly evaluate the feedback process and make necessary adjustments. Use data and analytics to measure the impact on engagement and retention, involving everyone in the process from the start.
• Managing time commitment: Continuous feedback requires time, but by prioritizing it and integrating it into daily workflows, you can manage this commitment effectively. Technology can help streamline the process, making it more efficient and less time-consuming.

By following these steps, you can create a culture of continuous feedback that not only gathers valuable insights but also drives meaningful improvements across your organization.

Create a continuous feedback model with Featurebase

Having a feedback management tool makes continuous feedback collection a breeze.

Featurebase helps you collect, manage, and act on employee feedback. You can enable anonymous features, fully brand the portal, and use gamification features. It ensures no customer or employee feels that their feedback is not heard or valued.

The setup is super fast, and it comes with a Free Plan, so there's no downside to trying it out. 👇

Start collecting and managing continuous feedback for free →