How do I Motivate my Product Users to Provide Feedback?

Digital solutions help you achieve a successful feedback system. Here are five practical tips on how to establish a better bond with your product users.

MedTech and pharma companies require user feedback for a variety of reasons. Many companies are obliged by the EU MDR and IVDR to conduct more post-market user experience surveys in order to provide ongoing data that underpins the performance and safety of their products. Whether this takes place as a result of regulations or voluntarily by companies who see user feedback as a chance to identify innovative treatment opportunities, the focus on the patient is always the primary concern.

But getting high-quality feedback from product users comes with its own set of challenges: Who are my product users? How do I get in touch with them? I know my product users, but how do I motivate them to actually provide feedback? These are just some of the questions that many manufacturers ask themselves, so it’s time to shed some light on the matter. Here are five practical tips that have proven effective when it comes to getting user feedback.

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1. Digital solutions

Paper and/or Excel spreadsheets are unfortunately still the status quo for clinical data collection in many pharma and medtech companies. The reason for this is often not the benefits of paper-pencil surveys, but reservations about electronic data capture (“EDC”). The top reservation cited is often the cost of EDC, and yes, EDC software will initially cost you a higher investment than the paper you would need for a paper survey that you subsequently transfer to Excel and analyze. But how much effort, i.e. personnel costs, do the manual data entry, the necessary follow-up checks for transmission errors, the distribution and collection of paper questionnaires as well as paper and postage costs require? Our PMCF cost calculator shows that manufacturers can save costs even on smaller studies by using EDC solutions. In addition, many product users are significantly more willing to complete a short online survey than to fill out a paper questionnaire – which brings us to our next point:

2. Know and understand your users

One thing many manufacturers painfully learn when they don’t get enough user feedback is that in the end, it’s the users who decide whether they want to provide feedback or not, and they will only do so if the type of feedback survey is adapted to their needs and is comfortable for them. Therefore, you should know your target group well and design the survey in a way that your product is immediately recognizable (e.g. by inserting a company logo) and offer your users the opportunity to give you feedback on the survey method itself as well (e.g. by leaving a contact option within the survey). Many users are quite willing to give their feedback; you just need to involve them properly.

Fig. 1: High user-friendliness in Climedo through responsive surveys that work on any device.

3. Keep the effort for your users as low as possible

You are probably not the only manufacturer asking your users for feedback. Especially in the clinical and medical trial environment, the number of feedback requests your users receive is high and continues to rise steadily as many companies are required by the MDR and IVDR to increase PMS and PMCF activities.

To summarize: Keep the effort in your surveys as low as possible! The fewer clicks, the better, and the more precise you are in asking for the information you need, the better. EDC software is ideal for this purpose, as dependencies can be used to minimize the effort for your users. Based on the answers of your user, subsequent questions can be automatically shown or hidden. This saves your users valuable time and motivates them to complete the survey to the end.

4. Reward feedback submission

When you think of rewards, you may first think of monetary compensation that you provide to your users for giving feedback. Indeed, this can be an effective strategy when all other attempts have failed, however, there are far more approaches you can take to incentivize your product users to give feedback. Users are usually quite willing to give feedback and the most important reward you can offer them is to make them feel listened to and that their contribution matters.

How can you put this into action? Similar to the previously mentioned dependencies, you can have a specific reaction appear after a response, such as “Thank you so much, we appreciate it!” or “We’re sorry to hear that! Please leave your contact information so we can get back to you.” This turns a dry feedback survey into a short interactive exchange that users can enjoy and they feel like their answers won’t just disappear into some Excel spreadsheet once the survey is completed.

Fig. 2: Validations are a powerful way of encouraging product users.

5. Use automation

Recruiting participants for feedback surveys can be very stressful, and in clinical practice, doctors or healthcare professionals unfortunately still have to spend a lot of time and effort collecting missing survey questionnaires. You can avoid this by using automations in your EDC software and by sending automatic reminders to participants who have not yet completed their questionnaire. For participants, an automated reminder is often more welcome than a personal message because they don’t feel pressured to participate, and you save yourself unnecessary effort and stress!

Fig. 3: Automated reminders mean you don’t need to manually chase users for their response.

Many factors can motivate product users to provide high-quality, comprehensive feedback on your medical devices. Since the feedback process can be very time-consuming, the key to success is to keep efforts as low as possible on both the manufacturer and user side. Knowing your user group and making feedback surveys as convenient as possible for them will help you achieve this. There are also numerous ways in which you as a manufacturer can also benefit from digital solutions (e.g. EDC). Schedule a free demo of the Climedo software now and find out whether our tool can help you with the implementation of your surveys and studies as well! We look forward to hearing from you.

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Whitepaper: 5 Tips for Incentivizing Your Product Users to Give Feedback

Our whitepaper outlines five simple tips to achieve better engagement with your product users, including:

• Going digital
• Knowing and understanding your product users
• Making their life easy
• Rewarding them
• Leveraging the power of automation

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