Source | customer.io | Janet Choi
There’s valuable feedback about your product and your business hidden beneath the surface. Above the water sits the easily visible feedback: metrics you’re collecting in analytics tools, NPS survey responses, customer complaints, angry Twitter rants—and hopefully a few vocal evangelists. Often, this vocal and visible group is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease and gratitude and drives change. The problem is that this type of feedback is simply the most accessible rather than representing the reality of how people feel about your product. Two kinds of feedback tend to rise to the surface most prominently—feedback on your product’s most well-defined problems and its well-defined, helpful solutions: iceberg theory of feedback Well-defined problems take shape with a critical mass of specific and clear feedback, shining their own light on next steps for the product. Well-defined solutions attract customers and feed word-of-mouth. They should be easily identifiable as the beating heart of your product. You’ve made something of particular value for which people pay you with time, money, and attention. above-surface feedback But what about everything below the surface—all the little problems that people forget to voice or don’t even bother to complain about that, over time, drive them silently insane?
