Feedback: A consultant's key to achieving high performance
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Are you a product owner, and do you need new inspiration to how you can work with customer feedback in your product development?
To help you in the right direction, I’ve teamed up with Product Owners at some of Denmark’s leading software companies and asked them to describe how they work with customer feedback in their product development.
When are surveys a good method for feedback collection? And when should you invite for a dialogue instead?
Which customer feedback tool can you use, and how do you process the customer’s feedback, once you have received it?
You can dive into these questions and much more in my blog post.
Will give you (specific) inspiration to how you can take your product development to new heights in cooperation with your customers.
What is the effect of customer feedback in your product development?
Customer feedback is of great importance to Visma DataLøn, as it’s the customers who use and understand the system. This doesn’t mean that we’re always only driven by the customer feedback, because the legislation does not always take user-friendliness into account. However, we also try to include the customers in this aspect. And it’s our job to make things as simple as possible in a complex world.
What are your best tips for feedback collection?
Our customers can provide feedback via NPS (customer satisfaction survey), user surveys and Open Mic.
NPS
The customers are presented with the NPS (customer satisfaction survey), when they use key functionality in the salary system. Here they have the option to assess the experience and write a comment about what was good and what was bad.
User surveys and Open Mic
We also send user surveys and invite our customers for Open Mic. Open Mic offers our customers the opportunity to share all their feature requests, and they are all taken into consideration. It was especially when the new Danish vacation act became effective that our Open Mic became a good method to collect feedback. We got a lot of nice features out of it.
Customer feedback has strengthened the customer relationships and in the end, we get a better product with the users in focus.
Mention 3 things that have made it easier for Visma DataLøn’s customers to provide feedback?
- The NPS the customers can answer when they use key functionality.
- The Open Mic events, where the customers are presented with a solution and can ask questions and provide feedback. Some times we also host Open Mic without a specific topic on the agenda, but where the customers have the opportunity to ask about everything, e.g. the salary.
- Phone and written contact to our Customer Service Center. Here the customers call or write with their questions or feedback, and it’s all added to a survey which is processed by our development department and customer service center on an ongoing basis. This feedback always points us in the direction of which subjects we need to add more about in our newsletters or have extra focus on.
Do you have a specific example of a feature you’ve developed based on customer feedback?
In May, we’ll launch new salary reporting and a new employee view in DataLøn. This will have a huge impact on the customers, as they are two of the main functions in the salary system.
Both have received a new design, flow and features. And all of it comes to life with the help of our customers. Last year, we invited several customers to provide their feedback on our salary reporting and the employee view, because we wanted to improve them. But it should be based on our customers’ wishes, not our own.
Based on the customers’ wishes, needs and opinions, we’ve developed the new salary reporting and employee view.
What is the effect of customer feedback in your product development?
User feedback plays a vital role in everything we do in Sleeknote. From idea and concept development of a new feature to optimisation of the existing product. We take great pride in including our users in as many relevant decision making processes as possible, as it in the end are them who decide if our product provides them with value.
It’s also a decisive factor related to increasing the loyalty towards our product. When the users feel heard and have the opportunity to contribute to the product’s development, they are way more loyal towards our product in general.
What are your best tips for feedback collection?
Make feedback part of your processes
User tests and similar tend to become an early or half-yearly event where they have a big focus. Then they slowly lose focus.
In-depth analyses like user tests are fantastic, but I recommend you build a suite of touch points, which secure a continuous feedback stream from your users.
What was relevant six months ago, might not be as relevant today. Use different channels (feedback forms, e-mails flows, surveys) in addition to more comprehensive UX research like user tests. It provides you with the opportunity to go in-depth, without you losing the touch of trends among your users.
Keep it relevant and contextual
The different user feedback collection methods each have their purpose and justification. Therefore, you need to customise the method to the context.
In-app feedback forms are e.g. an excellent method to collect general feedback and shed light on possible friction points. If you want to ensure a high answering rate and relevance to the user, you need to present your feedback form in the context where the user is best qualified to answer your question.
More comprehensive user tests or surveys on the other hand are fantastic methods when developing specific features or as basis for strategic decisions. Such methods allow you to do more in-depth analyses.
Centralisation and transparency
User feedback is relevant for every one in the company, no matter if you are a developer, customer supporter, designer, sales person, CEO or marketing responsible. The user must be central. Therefore, it’s important to keep user feedback transparent and available to everyone in the company.
In Sleeknote, it e.g. shows in a Slack channel, where feedback is shared across the company.
In addition, research from in-depth feedback is presented at quarterly “state of the company” meetings.
Mention 3 things that have made it easier for Sleeknote’s customers to provide feedback
1. Feedback via e-mail flows
At Sleeknote, we make a virtue of identifying why customers selected our product in particular, and what we can do to improve it.
We use different e-mail flows, which among other things include all new customers, where we ask why the customer chose us. We also have a customer pulse survey, where we cover what our users would do differently, if they were CEO at Sleeknote. This provides a better understanding of which needs we cover and which we should improve.
2. A centralised hub
Feedback comes in many shapes and via different channels. In Sleeknote we use ProductBoard as a centralised hub for user insights. This enables us to collect all feedback across channels like Slack, e-mails, feedback forms, Hubspot chats etc. In this way, we secure that our customers are heard no matter which communication channel they use.
3. Contextual feedback forms
In relation to optimisation of fundamental parts of our product (new campaign builder, new dashboards etc.), we have incorporated contextual feedback forms to gain insights into if we improved the experience for our users. It is among other things specifically expressed by:
- Feedback forms that are shown after a user used our campaign builder, where we ask about the experience and a 0-10 rating.
- Embedded feedback forms in different dropdowns which typically include more advanced settings. These feedback forms provide the user with the opportunity to add feature requests for features that might be missing.
Do you have a specific example of a feature you’ve developed based on customer feedback?
With the risk of sounding haughty: Everything. Everything we develop in Sleeknote is in one way or the other driven by user feedback.
One of the more notable is our future embedded campaigns feature. With this feature, the users get the opportunity to embed a Sleeknote campaign as part of their website.
It is developed not only because of, but together with our users. They were a decisive factor in the concept development and they will continue to be so as part of our beta test panel.
What is the effect of customer feedback in your product development?
Customer feedback, or rather customer dialogue, means everything to our product development.
Wired Relations grew out of a need for companies for a simpler and more user-friendly way to work with GDPR compared to what was already in the market. This need is still our focal point, and we therefore include the users in everything we develop.
What are your best tips for feedback collection?
We have a close dialogue with our customers both in relation to wishes and test of new features.
The product team participates in customer meetings, and we therefore know our customers really well. That is one of the benefits of being part of a B2B start-up.
I’ve worked at momondo previously, where we worked with a completely different amount of customers. There we were more dependent on surveys and market surveys to reach our customers, and therefore you could feel you were far away from them.
We have also sent surveys to our customers in Wired Relations, but it provides most value to us to have a meeting and the direct dialogue.
Mention 3 things that have made it easier for Wired Relations’ customers to provide feedback?
- A strong Customer Success Team: We prioritise customer satisfaction and the customer experience extremely high at Wired Relations and have therefore expanded our Customer Success team considerably this year. We use different tools to keep track of all our customer dialogue from the very first touch point, chat or e-mail contact with us.
- We participate in customer meetings: The product team participates in customer meetings. There we get a good sense of what the customers need.
- User test and beta versions: We work in an agile environment and develop new features continuously and provide our customers access to early releases, so we can collect feedback from the customers and further develop the solution.
Do you have a specific example of a feature you’ve developed based on customer feedback?
Our latest release of a management system for information security related to standards, e.g. ISO 27001 and ISAE 3000 are good examples of how we can identify an increasing need and wish to manage both GDPR compliance and information security in one tool.
We first learned about the need at customer meetings. The solution is developed and user tested by a selection of our customers, and it still develops as our customers take it into use and provide us with their feedback.
What is the effect of customer feedback in TimeLog's product development?
Customer feedback is crucial for our product development. If we don’t understand our users’ needs, we end up developing in the dark.
When we e.g. develop a new feature, we include the customers from the beginning to understand the challenges they face. Then it’s our job as experts to turn their feedback into specific improvements in TimeLog. And once we’ve done that, we invite our customers for a new dialogue to validate that the new features actually meet their needs.
We can still improve in the way we work with customer feedback. But over the past three years, we have launched different initiatives to intensify the cooperation and dialogue with our customers. It’s important for us to know how we continuously can make TimeLog a better and easier system to work in. This e.g. applies to our VIP user groups and preview features.
The close cooperation not alone provides the customers with the best user experience in TimeLog. It also increases our customer satisfaction and loyalty. Two things that are the be-all and end-all to us.
What are your best tips for feedback collection?
Get everybody onboard the ”feedback train”
Centralise the process around customer feedback collection. When everybody internally is part of the process, customer feedback turn not a common matter in your company. And in this way, you add customer feedback on the agenda for real.
In the end, it’s about creating as many touch points first the user feedback as possible to make it easier for the customers to provide feedback.
Marketing e.g. has one type of touch points with the customers, while the Customer Success team has another type. Exploit it and create transparency about your customer feedback. We e.g. have a common channel in Teams, where we share the customers’ feedback with each other.
Organise your input channels and the customers’ feedback
Gain an overview of your input channels and organize your customer feedback afterwards, e.g. with help from an online tool. We went from collecting customer feedback via e-mail and copying data into MindMeister (online mindmapping) to using a centralised tool like ProductBoard.
The benefit of a tool like ProductBoard is that it helps you organise your customer feedback in categories such as which feedback you should prioritise in your product development. And that saves you a lot of time when you get so much fragmented information from all your input channels.
Less focus on features, more power to personas and processes
Think about if you want your product development to be run by features, processes or personas.
The danger of being feature oriented is that you don’t understand how you can improve the processes to fit into your users’ work. And as a consequence you risk that your product appears less thought-through.
We changed our focus from feature driven to persona and process drive product development in TimeLog and have that as our mainspring.
The entire organisation was gathered for workshops where we defined our personas and their typical work processes in TimeLog.
We did this to ensure that we cover the processes from a-z instead of focusing on a specific feature in TimeLog. And it has led to everyone thinking about how we create value for our users in all our work from Sales to Marketing to Customer Success to R&D and PO.
Mention 3 things that have made it easier for TimeLog’s customers to provide feedback?
1. VIP user groups
Our VIP user group is for all our customers who want to add their personal touch to TimeLog’s development. Many of the things we develop take their point of departure in the customers’ feedback and input during our user group meetings.
During the meetings, we e.g. present new ideas that our customers can provide their feedback on. In this way, we secure that we listen to and understand their needs before we develop new features.
2. Preview features
Preview features are bigger functionalities that all our customers can test and provide feedback to while we still develop them. Our Preview features are divided into three levels: Sneak peek, Alpha and Beta.
The customers decide themselves which preview features they want to test, when and who from their organisation they want as test persons.
With our preview features, the customer get the opportunity to add their personal touch for bigger features in TimeLog.
3. NPS
Twice a year, all our customers receive a customer satisfaction survey, so we can receive detailed feedback on how we can improve TimeLog, and which features we should develop next.
Detractors are contacted by the leadership team so the customers know we take their challenges seriously.
Passives and Promoters receive a phone call from our Customer Success team, so all our customers feel that we listen to them and value their answers.
Do you have a specific example of a feature TimeLog has developed based on customer feedback?
We recently expanded our expense tracking in TimeLog to allow the customers to add PDF files to their expenses. This is the first customer wish we have released after implementing ProductBoard.
We are therefore really happy that the customers have reacted positively on the extension. Because it shows that features that are less complicated from a development perspective makes a big difference for our users.
