Product Experience

Understanding the ROI of In-Product Surveys: Boosting Engagement and Profits

Manoj Rana
September 8, 2024
5
min read
Understanding the ROI of In-Product Surveys: Boosting Engagement and Profits
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Returns and revenue are the primary concerns of every business. In today’s competitive market, the hidden yet ultimate goal of every business is revenue, which is clearly visible in its ROI.

Return on investment is a crucial parameter that every business monitors based on its investment.

I think that ROI is directly impacted by the quality of service a brand provides. There are many examples, like Kodak, Nokia, Sega, Blackberry, etc., that clearly prove that without innovation and customer service, organic business growth is tough.

Now, the quality of customer service is significantly dependent on the quality of the company's products and services.

Furthermore, innovative user engagement strategies are what make the products more desirable. This leads to higher revenue and business growth.

Now, the question arises: what powers a good product or service?

The quick answer is that it has features that users like. And the only way for the brand to know this is via feedback. So, in this blog, we will unravel how in-product surveys influence revenue.

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Unravelling the Hidden Value of Customer Feedback!

While some brands might not take customer feedback seriously, like the one that I recently had an issue with, there are some who consider it as pure gold.

Customer feedback is the fuel that powers the product improvement process.

Now, talking about the means of customer feedback, in-product surveys are an awesome way to collect feedback.

However, keeping the ROI factor in mind, they can be expensive. But, if they are implemented in the right way and with the right data, the risk can be worth it.

Do you know?

It takes a lot of time, effort, and money to launch an in-app survey, as there is a need to store all the necessary user activity and data for analysis and precise targeting. This uploading and storing of data requires money, which makes it expensive. Moreover, if the sample size required for your survey is high, the cost increases.

When I talk about user feedback, it is not just about analyzing the NPS, CSAT, and other scores.

There is much more to customer feedback that can significantly enhance customer experience while simultaneously affecting ROI.

Besides standard feedback scores, it is also crucial to analyze customer pain points, churn risk factors, and feature ideas, if any.

With tools like Qwary, businesses can easily analyze these aspects.

It offers several relevant features that help unravel more than explicit customer feedback.

  • Session recording: This feature enables you to analyze how the user browses your website or app. You can look for patterns, such as user clicks, rage clicks, reversals or u-turns, etc. Based on this, you can analyze certain areas of your website that require improvement. For example, if a person is not able to change the payment method, rage-clicks can indicate that.
  • Trigger surveys: In-product surveys have this awesome feature where you can trigger a survey to the user based on their actions or triggers on the app or website. For example, if a person makes a purchase and moves on to the payments page, the survey can ask something like, how accurate was the product recommendation? Or which feature made you pick the product?

Based on the answers, businesses can analyze how well their recommendations are working and what features are more provoking. These insights can be used to optimize product pricing and nurture ROI.

  • Churn risk: NPS and CSAT scores can provide you with a brief idea about the churn risk, but they don’t show you the entire picture. With AI analysis of user feedback, including survey answers, user comments, online reviews, social media communication, customer support interactions, etc., you can accurately predict churn.

The best thing about churn is that you can accurately predict your ROI. Churn analysis predicts the number of customers that may leave your brand.

Therefore, you can plan advanced user retention strategies to manage your business ROI.

You can learn more about churn risk here!

Note: Revenue churn and customer churn are two different things. Customer churn directly impacts revenue, but revenue churn may not affect customer churn.

Based on the deep analysis of customer feedback via these methods, accurate ROI can be calculated, and strategies can be formed for better returns.

Essential Steps to Assess the ROI of Implementing In-Product Surveys

The hidden value of customer feedback can help you unravel a lot of areas where your app or product lacks.

Based on that, a precise ROI analysis can be performed. Furthermore, there are some more ways that I think help in assessing the ROI of implementing in-product surveys.

Here is a brief overview of those ways!

  • Expand the scope beyond surveys.

While our primary focus is on in-product surveys here, if you aim for better ROI, you need to expand your horizon past just surveys for better conversion rate optimization.

While in-product surveys can provide you with a more reactive and impulsive response from the user, there could be many things that the customer might not recall to convey at that moment.

Hence, it is necessary to go beyond that and flip to other sources of user feedback.

The other web sources that you can check for more feedback information are official website reviews, e-commerce website reviews, social media reviews, etc. Social listening tools can be used for the same!

Analysis of data from these sources can help businesses complete the customer feedback loops by acting on their feedback.

I found a great example of this.

Southwest Airlines uses customer feedback on social media to power its customer experience. The brand has a special social media listening center that monitors social media interactions like tweets to understand customer travel concerns.

The special team of the brand fixes customer issues like lost baggage or rebooking of a flight by monitoring the mention of Southwest Airlines.

  • Leverage the power of customer complaints.

Customer complaints, whether they are highlighted in the in-product survey answers or in the online reviews, are the clearest way for your customers to say that this is what you need to fix.

Keep an eye on the aspects or features or problems that are highlighted in the customer complaints.

These complaints can help you understand the things that you need to improve without any hassle of finding them for yourself.

Overall, customer complaints can make it easy for you to increase your ROI percentage.

As per a report by Return on Investment of Effective Complaints Management, every dollar invested in complaint management will yield an ROI of 1000%. And this ROI is backed by product/service improvements that are made from the complaints.

  • Data representation is necessary.

The availability of deeply analyzed data is not enough. If there are no means to clean and present it, assessing ROI can be a pretty challenging task.

Moreover, data should be available to all the necessary personnel in the organization, including stakeholders, designers, developers, researchers, and marketers.

The collective analysis of well-summarized and categorized data via interactive dashboards and reports can help identify areas for improvement.

Furthermore, businesses can develop proactive strategies for customer experience enhancement.

Successfully Measuring the ROI of In-product Surveys!

I know that several types of costs go into building and implementing an in-product survey.

Some of them are survey tools subscription costs like Qwary, integration and development costs, design and UX costs, data analysis tool costs, ongoing maintenance costs, and incentives costs.

All these costs are compared with the obtained revenue to calculate ROI. The more revenue there is the higher the ROI ratio.

However, the question that arises here is how to measure ROI. Well, there are several ways to successfully measure ROI.

  • Link ROI with in-product surveys

In-product surveys provide you with a number of user engagement metrics, such as churn rate, NPS, page views, and more, to understand the issues with products and services.

Before you launch your in-product survey, align the goals of your business with them. Moreover, also factors in the aspects that affect ROI, such as conversion rate, churn, user satisfaction, etc.

The factors will help you measure ROI successfully.

  • Cost savings

Completing the customer feedback loops will surely reduce the support tickets; product returns will decrease, more positive reviews will be there, etc.

This will ultimately lead to cost savings. Make sure you keep these aspects in the loop while measuring the ROI of your business.

  • Estimate revenue growth

With in-product surveys implemented well, you can estimate the revenue of your business easily by calculating the number of units sold, returned units, more high-value customers, etc.

Now, revenue is not the ROI; ROI is calculated using the following ratio!

ROI = (Revenue - Net Expenditure/ Net Expenditure) x 100

For example, if the net expenditure is $10,000 while the revenue is $30,000. The ROI will be

ROI = (20,000/10,000) x 100 = 200%

Keep track of the revenue growth by keeping an eye on the in-product surveys, session recordings, and other features of the survey tool you are using.

  • Track customer satisfaction

How successful your user engagement and user retention strategies have been is denoted clearly by your CSAT, NPS, repeat purchase rate, and other user engagement metrics.

Now, you need to analyze these aspects closely to measure the ROI of your business. You can leverage the power of AI to swiftly and comprehensively analyze these factors.

How Can AI Be Useful in ROI Assessment?

Well, the use of AI is everywhere today. Even in surveys, AI is used to generate faster and more accurate surveys.

Furthermore, AI is also leveraged to analyze survey data, social media listening, data cleaning, insights generation, and more.

With AI, accurate survey results can be generated in no time with valuable insights. Hence, marketers can understand what strategies are working and how.

Therefore, AI can directly help in complete ROI assessment.

Learn about how Converse AI can be helpful in your business.

Conclusion

In-product surveys are one of the most effective ways to collect organic user feedback. With this organic feedback, brands can focus more on conversion rate optimization, churn reduction, product improvements, etc.

But, if ROI assessment is the concern, you need to go beyond in-product surveys. In-product surveys can help you estimate ROI, but not accurately, as there are several factors that play a key role in the ROI other than the aspects filtered by the surveys. You need to make your research horizon wide, research deeper, and focus on consumer feedback.

For better analysis, you can use AI tools like Converse AI and other VOC analysis tools by Qwary.

FAQs

  1. How do we calculate the ROI for in-product surveys?

The process of calculating the ROI for in-product surveys depends on several factors, such as survey tool costs, design costs, UX costs, incentives cost, net revenue, etc.

Once the entire expenditure and revenue are known, the ROI formula can be used to get the final value.

  1. What factors are necessary to estimate the ROI?

The total expenditure factors that include all the costs required to create and implement in-product surveys are necessary to estimate the ROI.