Understanding your customer’s needs and desires allows you to address their pain points and build products around their solutions. In a world where 95% of new products launched in a year fail, don’t you think building a new product by involving the customers in the process is essential for success?
Where most new products fail, yours shouldn’t. Deep customer research is like an antidote to product failure, and a customer feedback survey is one of the ways to understand them effectively. By knowing what your customers are thinking, prefer, and dislike, you can steer development in the right direction.
Let me help you understand how to operationalize a new product survey while sharing how we got information that matters for building a product or service.
What is a New Product Survey?
New product survey is a research tool businesses use to gather feedback and insights from potential and existing customers. Businesses run surveys before launching or after recently launching their product to know how customers perceive their solution.
The motive is to check if the product or service can satisfy their requirements and whether the features added are beneficial. A successful new product survey can also help identify a brand’s competitive advantage in the market.
A product testing survey can help you with the following;
- Record the initial impressions of the product
- The most appealing and most disliked product features
- Creating a preference matrix
- Potential product modifications before or after release
- Product’s user-friendliness
Create the survey with the pre-selected target audience group to get the best results. Don’t waste your time and resources in randomly forwarding the surveys to uninterested customers. The goal of a survey is to gauge a customer's positive or negative experience.
Knowing that 72% of customers will share their negative experiences, don’t you think addressing their concerns is essential?
Importance of Conducting a Product Testing Survey
Successful product surveys help create solutions customers actually want while assisting designers and developers with development and marketers with creating bespoke strategies.
- Product Feedback Survey
Every new product survey question is akin to accessing a direct line to customer sentiment. You will discover potential customer’s likes, dislikes, and suggestions for improvement as customers use the product which is invaluable to refining the product before launch.
- Product Development
Surveys highlight customer pain points and preferences, which means you can identify opportunities for innovation and prioritize feature development that customers want. Moreover, you will collect enough data to develop successful and user-centric products.
- Market Research
Product surveys are valuable marketing tools, bringing insights and data-backed information on customer demographics, preferences, and buying behavior. Marketers can use this information to identify market gaps while tailoring product offerings to gain a competitive advantage.
- Customer Satisfaction
Asking questions from customers may seem like extra work, but it shows your commitment to understanding the users and addressing their concerns. However, incorporating customer insights and feedback into the product development process will foster a strong bond and enhance brand loyalty.
- Competitive Advantage
Surveys can reveal valuable information you can use to make your product. They can also help identify areas of differentiation, develop unique selling points, and position your product for success in a hyper-competitive market.
What is the Right Time to Run a New Product Survey?
The launch of the new product survey depends on several factors, such as the aspects of the product, stage of product development, pre-launch, and post-launch. While these are the primary factors, others not-so-popular are product complexity, time constraints, and budget.
- Product Conceptualization
Run the new product survey when you are initializing the product idea to gauge potential customers interest and validate the concept. Use this when you think that “I want to create a product” to make the right investment and right decisions.
- Prototype Development
Prototype product testing is conducted to assess the product’s ease of use, functionality, and user experience. This is when you have the product design and ideas but need to test whether they resonate with the target audience.
- Pre-Launch
Run this survey while you are planning to officially launch your product in the market. Conduct the pre-launch survey when you want to understand pricing perceptions and gather insights into competitor’s earnings. Good product feedback means the time is right to launch the full-scale product.
- Post-Launch
An important customer satisfaction survey used to measure customer sentiment and identify areas of improvement. While there is no fixed time to launch this survey, give your product 4 to 6 months time before launching this survey.
Surveys are an integral part of enhancing product experience, and 90% of customers will readily share behavioral data if it gives them a convenient and cost-effective experience. A product manager, marketer, designer, and developer can successfully extract valuable insights from the surveys, provided you ask the right questions.
We faced several challenges while running these surveys when building Qwary. Fortunately for you, we have addressed all these aspects through our products and services. You can use Qwary to run in-product, prototyping, and product-launch related surveys. We are also working on integrating AI into the survey process to make the process even easier.
Five Major Types of Product Survey to Use
Developing and launching a successful product requires a deep understanding of the target market. Fortunately, you can use various types of product surveys to gain valuable insights.
- Product Market Fit
The product market fit survey is used to gauge how well your product aligns with the market demands. A well-designed survey with a mix of closed and open-ended questions will help you understand customer’s pain points and build a survey around those requirements.
Using this survey, you can identify the potential product gaps early on while validating the value proposition. Hence, it will streamline your product development strategy and avoid unnecessary investments into the market with poor product market fit.
Product market fit survey questions about the overall user expectations, but they fail to capture the nuances of user behavior or provide specific product feedback.
- Product Research
These surveys collect broader market insights and help you understand customer demographics before launching a product. They help identify potential opportunities and gaps in the market.
You can include questions in this survey to gather information on product features and positioning. Moreover, you can use the insights to navigate product positioning and identify your competitors.
Where you can view the market from a wide angle, this survey cannot extract specific information related to your unique product concept. A common challenge is that you will need a larger set of users to collect credible results.
- Product Feedback
Customer feedback reveals what the potential and existing customers desire, enabling you to build products that can address their specific needs and solve problems efficiently. You can use this survey after building a prototype or after releasing the early versions of the product.
Every product survey question to ask in this format must be framed to gather information on functionality and usability challenges. The goal of a customer feedback survey is to ensure that your product meets their expectations.
However, a key challenge here is bias stemming from the sample size and question structure. To help you solve this, we have templates built-in within Qwary with the relevant questions.
- Product Roadmap
Building a successful product needs a customized roadmap to deliver the solution's best possible version. You can understand customer preferences for upcoming features and functions using this survey type.
Using the answers, you can continuously build up, evolve, and develop your product to align with future needs. The user feedback collected from this survey helps you stay ahead of the competition, improve future development, and optimize marketing strategies.
I supervised the creation and execution of several product roadmap surveys during the development phase of Qwary. One of the issues I faced was a lack of nuanced data. However, my team suggested running two surveys (product roadmap and product launch) in succession and analyzing their results together.
This way, we were able to get a broader view of the product and conduct an in-depth analysis when collaborating on their results.
- Product Launch
Product launch surveys represent data and insights concerning customer satisfaction while identifying areas of improvement. Using these insights, you can identify areas of improvement and further optimization.
Run this survey after launching the product to assess initial product reception and gain valuable insights. Using the results, you can make data-driven decisions, whether the customers are happy with your product, and plan further improvements.
By creating and conducting surveys, you can build the right product. The success of a survey depends largely on the questions you ask and the methods deployed to assess results at the end of the survey.
Knowing customer preferences allows you to customize the solutions and provide personalized experiences, which is an important aspiration of 71% of customers.
Ask survey questions that will help evaluate customers' preferences, satisfaction levels, interests, and motivations. With the types of product survey understood, let me share the process we used to build and run every survey while building Qwary.
Step-by-Step Process to Conduct Product Survey
Breaking down the steps of a product evaluation survey process will help you understand it better.
- Determine Research Objectives
Discuss and decide what you wish to achieve from the survey, as it will help you identify the right type of customer survey to use. Moreover, you will get to know the best methodology to adopt for the survey and gather relevant customer feedback.
- Find The Right Target Audience For The Survey
Different types of customers may perceive your product in different ways. Don’t make the mistake of surveying everyone in one go, as it will be operationally impossible to make sense of the vast amount of information you will gather.
Instead, choose a representative audience selected on the basis of your goal. You can choose one of the four methods we deployed at different times, including;
- Randomly selecting potential participants.
- Systematically select individuals at regular intervals.
- Stratify the target audience into different groups according to pre-selected parameters.
- Use the clustered approach where you select the target audience, grouping them together into clusters and selecting one, at random.
- Include the Right Product Survey Question
Figure out the questions you should be asking from your customers depending on the type of product satisfaction survey. You can choose from a mix of rating scales (NPS survey), open-ended, close-ended, and Likert scale questions. Other product survey question examples are demographic, preference, and emotional state questions, among others.
You must involve team members from different departments to frame the questions. Or a better way is to use Qwary’s 50+ survey templates. We have put in our experience and best practices to include the most eligible questions for every survey type.
We have product research survey questions and queries related to product launch, marketing, etc. When you run product surveys with the right questions, the responses are pre-validated and lead to authentic results.
- Create the First Draft of the Survey
First, create a product survey with a list of questions and limit the number to 10 to 12 questions. With the questions selected, do the following;
- Group the questions systematically
- Design the survey according to the product design, creating a synchronized effect.
- Choose the Right Tools for Product Survey
The most crucial part is choosing the right platform to operationalize the survey. You need to choose a tool that will let you create customized and short-form surveys and enable you to run them within the product and record responses.
However, you can choose other ways to share the surveys, like sending emails, social media communication, pop-ups, etc. With Qwary, you can master this step by running in-product surveys to understand customer’s motivations and preferences better.
- Publish The Survey
Publish the survey, but make sure not to force them onto your customers and target audience. If you want authentic and honest feedback, give your users time and ask for consent.
There’s no point in using this method just to conduct product research. Focus on the time needed for a response, not the number of questions or how many responses you can get in a specific period.
- Iterate And Improve The Survey
Based on the customer’s response to the survey, make changes. Remember, I am not talking about improving the product yet; it's improving the survey. Based on the feedback and customer’s initial responses, make changes to the survey.
These can be changes made to the survey questions, design, timeline, etc. To be sure about the design, follow the A/B testing approach until and unless you can finalize everything.
- Collect Feedback and Evaluate the Result
As customers use your product, collecting survey responses from a tool like Qwary is frictionless as you will be recorded and stored within the tool. You can analyze the results through visualizations.
Act upon the results you get from the survey results to build the best product possible for your target audience.
Conclusion
User feedback collection is a continuous process taken care of by a product manager, developer, marketer, designer, etc. Using a product testing survey to build, improve, and market your product depends on your needs and goals. Where you can use different types of surveys, remember that the questions you frame for each type will also vary.
Instead of doing all the work to choose questions and then find the best platforms to run the survey, you can use Qwary. We have several product survey templates to choose from. We are also on the verge of launching an AI-powered survey creation tool to help you further cut down the survey creation and execution time.
For any additional assistance on how to use Qwary to launch a new product or add new features to an existing one, contact us right away.
