How to Use Customer Feedback to Innovate Software solutions

How to Use Customer Feedback to Innovate Software solutions

Collecting and analyzing customer feedback data is critical to understanding if the plan you have for the next year for your products and services will set you up to be the leader in your market.

Before we talk about how to use the Customer Feedback data, let’s review what the common customer feedback information is usually gathered or available to document and incorporate into your internal strategy.

The main customer feedback data points are as follows:

• Time to Value

• NPS

• CES

• CSAT

• Product Usage Data

  • Logins

  • Product Usage (by feature/function)

  • Product Usage frequency and time

  • Product outputs (#elements, #reports, #docs, etc)

• User counts and growth

• Post Implementation Reviews

• Executive Level Reviews

• Customer Case Study interview

• Customer Tour Interviews

• Beta Test Feedback

• Customer Advisory Board

• Customer Forums & Communities

Customer Feedback that drives Product Roadmap

The customer feedback data that helps the product teams understand the customer perspective fall into a few categories:

• Ease of Use

• Usage value

Customer Ease of Use data helps Product Management understand how easy the product is to setup, use and/or utilize the reporting and analytics as applicable. The stats that provide the high level perception are:

NPS, CES, Customer Forums/Communities, and Customer Advisory Board.

Product Management uses these metrics to assess how the majority of the customers (80/20 rule) find the product easy to use, navigate, configure and operationalize intuitively. These will reveal how big is the gap between what the product can enable users to do out of the box versus requiring human intervention in order to get some basic valuable uses from the product.

Customer Usage Value data helps the Product Management team understand how the customers are using the product. What are the more popular areas of the product that are utililzed and why? Do these areas create more value faster for the customers?

For the areas of the product that are not utilized by the customer, the Product Management team would want to interview customers that are in their Beta program already as well as additional customers across the various target markets to understand why they do not use these areas of the product. Do these features and functionalities not provide any value? Is the effort not worth the value? Is it too complicated to use? or Does it not work as expected therefore their is no value to be had by the customer?

The stats that are the most helpful to the Product Management team for evaluating the customer usage behavior that produces the most value are:

• Product Usage Data

  • Logins

  • Product Usage (by feature/function)

  • Product Usage frequency and time

  • Product outputs (#processes, #elements, #reports, #docs, etc)

• User counts and growth

• Customer Tour Interviews

• Beta Test Feedback

Customer Feedback that drives Services Roadmap

Customer feedback data that helps drive the services improvements and future roadmaps fall into a few categories:

• Timeliness of Service

• Quality of Service

• Value of Service

Customer Timeliness of Service is measured through some internal SLA metrics but the feedback from customers will come through the following stats:

CSAT by type of service, Time to Launch and Time to Value, Customer Tour Interviews and Executive Reviews

Customer Quality of Service is measured by some internal KPIs for each type of service offered, but the main customer feedback stats are the following stats:

CSAT by type of service, Post Implementation Reviews, Customer Tour Interviews and Executive Reviews

Customer Value of Service is measured by baseline KPIs and key metrics used by the customer at the start of the engagement and tracked over time post launch to trend the improvements in these KPIs and key metrics that are already tracked by the customer. These would provide data to calculate hard ROIs.

However, there are also soft ROIs that the customer will find valuable around productivity improvements, cycle time and error reductions and many others. In some cases, the customer will be able to qualify the value and in others it will simply be acknowledged as the processes, cycle times, errors, etc. have improved.

The customer feedback data that are most commonly used to evaluate the Value of Service are the following:

• Post Implementation Reviews

• Executive Level Reviews

• Customer Case Study interview

• Customer Tour Interviews

• Customer Communities

These reviews can be captured using various survey tools or databases to capture customer testimonies as well as other databases. Due to the fact that these are more interview style with open ended questions to elicit more details from the customer on what they constitute as value required to continue to expand and invest further in your solution, this data is harder to do statistical analysis and reporting on. However, with the use of ALS and AI solutions, this type of data will be able to be analyzed to find patterns and common areas where the service is not providing the value expected.

I used these reviews to find the 80/20 rule in listening to customers share what services were the most valuable and why. For the services they did not find as much value in, I like to dig in and find out what we could change in these services to provide more value.

For example, one of the areas that showed up at Workfront in my Customer Tour Interviews as a service the customers expected more value from was our online Customer Support Center. So we dug into this area and sent out a specific survey across all our customers asking them what information would provide the most value for them within our online Support Center. We also added a prominent FEEDBACK button on every page of the website to encourage more users to provide there feedback. We received hundreds of inputs that helped us to redesign the website and the content as well as add specifically requested content in an easy to use interactive website to improve the value. The results in our next month google analytics showed a tremendous improvement in user engagement in the online site as well as longer times on the new pages and content we added. Our CSAT specific to our online Support Center was at 100%.

Where and How to Solicit Customer Feedback

There is definitely a correlation to quality and quantity of customer feedback and the vehicle used to solicit the feedback.

The highest quantity of feedback comes from surveys and feedback buttons within the product. Specifically, if these buttons are easy to access while the user is in motion with using the product to conduct standard operations and processes or reporting that are frequently used.

When the feedback opportunities are in product, you are meeting them where they are active in utilizing your solution and can provide more accurate feedback and more often easily. The response rate in product goes up to as high as 40-50% on average across the user base over an annual basis.

Email surveys are the next best option for soliciting feedback and has about a 20% response rate with customers post launch.

The quality of the feedback is best provided during in person interviews, case studies, beta test programs and post launch reviews across a variety of user types. This is because it provides the opportunity for you to ask more indepth questions and add the “Why” behind the customer feedback. For example, if the customer doesn’t find the reports to be valuable, you can ask “Why?” and “What would be a more valuable report?”.

A Customer Feedback Loop process established early in a software company’s growth will help define the standards for your Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs and dashboard metrics to ensure you maintain the pulse of your customer at all times to help you drive not only your annual strategic plan, but your quarterly goals to shift when and how you need to in order to be the leader in the market.

As always, I welcome your feedback. Please subscribe and share the Newsletter with your friends and colleagues.