Especially when it comes to updates or extensions to current products, you will always have resistance from your existing customer base. Humans are creatures of habit, and we almost instinctively object to change. This doesn’t have to spell doom, though:

01 Expect resistance

Brace for some pushback. Plan for it. Embrace it. It’s a natural part of the process.

02 Listen to your customers

Don’t dismiss negative feedback outright. There might be genuine issues hidden in those complaints. Treat every bit of feedback as valuable data. Your agency partner will be able to help you collect and analyze this data.

03 Don’t act on feedback (right away)

Collect feedback, respond to customers, cluster complaints, but don’t act on it until you have a clear idea of where you want to move. This applies to both internal (say from your sales or back-office team) and external feedback.

04 Communicate, communicate, communicate

Tell your customers why you’re making changes and explain the benefits. A new product might make their life easier, an update to an old product might improve their experience.

05 Provide a safety net

If you’re replacing an existing product, don’t yank the old one right away. Allow users time to transition. Your agency will be able to support you in managing this process.

06 Educate and support

Consider offering educational material like tutorials, videos, or webinars to make the transition as easy as possible. Your agency partner will be able to help you look at things from your customers’ perspective. Having worked on a new product for months or even years, what might seem easy and natural to you could leave your customers hanging.

07 Celebrate the wins

Showcase customers who are successfully using and loving the new product. Peer influence can be a powerful tool in overcoming resistance and will help your team to stay motivated.

Negative feedback doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It often means you’re challenging the status quo, which is exactly what innovation is supposed to do.

The key is how you handle it. In fact, sometimes, a bit of controversy can actually be good for business. It gets people talking about your product. Just make sure you’re steering the conversation in a productive direction.

What matters most is to not lose touch with your customers, to try your best and understand their needs, their challenges, and gather their feedback early. A good agency will be able to provide you with tools to instrument your product for collecting analytics data, but also with processes to gather qualitative information through customer research and user testing.

Our take

Nobody wants to receive negative feedback. But unless customers complain about outright broken functionality, any feedback will be a direct and reliable indicator of customer engagement and extremely useful feedback for the product team. We’d even go as far as arguing that negative feedback is more useful, especially right after launch, than any praise. You’re trying to run a successful business, not win a beauty pageant. In order to continue development and keep improving your product, your team will almost require negative customer feedback.

Things tend to get dicey, however, when companies are not prepared or able to react to feedback appropriately. And reacting appropriately might also mean knowing when not to react, or at least not to react immediately. Many large organizations are well capable of releasing digital products successfully, but fall short in their ability to collect, understand, and prioritize customer feedback.

The takeaway? Treat negative feedback as an opportunity to refine your product and strengthen customer relationships. Build feedback collection and analysis into your process from the start, and lean on tools and research methods to ensure you’re listening actively. A well-prepared team can turn even the harshest criticism into a catalyst for growth.

Tommi Leskinen Product design lead, DK&A

Example

Emotions grow large and fuses short when, after months or even years, toiling away on a product the first reviews on app stores roll in. Keep your cool. Often times sample sizes are initially too small to be significant or then, as in the case of one of our customers who shall remain nameless, they tell the wrong story:

After shipping the first version of a new consumer app the initial response from customers was rather mixed. The team had poured months of work into building and testing the user experience through and through and yet – customers didn’t seem to see that. Rating averages around 2.8–3.5 stars and a bunch of comments about slugging behavior and lots of errors. As it turned out soon, the backend service wasn’t able to manage the flood of new users the new app and marketing brought but the reviewers obviously weren’t able to make that distinction. The user experience suffered and the users aired their anger in the place that made most sense to them – the app store.