How do I get honest product feedback, not just from friends or my WhatsApp group?
Answer
Ask people who fit your buyer, have used the product in their own routine, and gain nothing by being nice. Friends, staff and your own customers already like you, and people often soften what they say to someone’s face. Their feedback is still useful, but it can’t tell you what a stranger who has never heard of you would think.
Why the people closest to you are kind
Everyone you can easily ask has a reason to be gentle.
| Who you ask | Why their answer leans kind |
|---|---|
| Friends and family | They don’t want to hurt you |
| Your staff | The product is their job, and you’re their boss |
| Customers on your WhatsApp | They already chose you, and they’re talking to your team |
| People who leave reviews | Mostly the happiest customers choose to write one |
That’s ordinary politeness, the kind anyone shows when asked to their face. The longer version, for brands that collect feedback on WhatsApp, is in Is WhatsApp feedback enough to know if your product works?
Kind signals are a weak guide
A product can collect a lot of kind words and still not be the better product.
When researchers compared Amazon star ratings with expert quality scores, the product with more stars was the better one only 57 percent of the time, and when the gap was under 0.4 stars, it was a coin toss. (de Langhe, Fernbach and Lichtenstein, Journal of Consumer Research, 2016) Kind answers feel like proof, and that’s what makes them easy to over-trust.
Three things honest feedback needs
Honest feedback comes from the right people, after real use, with nothing to gain from being nice.
The right people means people who fit your buyer, including ones who would never have picked you off the shelf, because those are the people a launch has to win. Real use means the product lived in their routine for a while, not a first try at your stall. And nothing to gain means praise and criticism are worth exactly the same to them, so they can tell you the soap dried their hands without feeling rude.
What you can do this week
You can make the feedback you already get more honest, starting today.
- Ask what they’d change first, not whether they liked it. It gives people permission to criticise.
- Say plainly that a complaint helps you more than a compliment, and mean it when one arrives.
- Have someone other than you, or the person who sold it, do the asking.
- Ask after a couple of weeks, not on delivery day, and ask whether they’d buy it again at your price.
What this means for your brand
Keep listening to the people close to you, and add people who owe you nothing before a big decision. Foydy hears from people who fit your buyer, using your product at home for two weeks, and they earn the same whether their feedback is positive or negative.
Sources
- de Langhe, Fernbach and Lichtenstein, Journal of Consumer Research (2016) (opens in a new tab), the validity of online user ratings.