The (subliminal) Benefits of Customer Feedback

Few would argue that customer feedback is extremely valuable. But how do companies really make use of it? We have a feedback link in our application and a support email from our Help section that we monitor on a daily basis. Customer feedback has increased by a factor of 3 since our last release, corresponding to a jump in signups and usage. This surge prompted me to spend a little time thinking about the role of customer feedback in the product development process. I came to the following four conclusions:

1. Use customer feedback to help prioritize features and enhancements

We get great feedback from our customers on improvements they'd like to see to the current features and additional capabilities they want added to the product. Almost all of these requests correspond to features and enhancements that are on our product plan. The volume of requests for a certain feature helps us prioritize and stack rank, perhaps bumping one feature up and another one down as we plan the next release.

2. Don't rely on customers to set vision

Customers have their own jobs, so of course we shouldn't expect them to do ours. If they take the time to give feedback, it's most likely going to be an idea on how we could incrementally improve what they're using now. It's our job to have a vision for our product and to innovate ahead of the market, the competitors and ahead of what our customers might think is possible.

3. Don't let the product plan be hijacked by a single customer

In a low risk, cost-effective SaaS model like ours, we don't have the situation where a few big enterprise customers paying $X million a year unfairly influence what gets developed. That's a good thing (though if someone wants to pay $X million, we'll listen). Instead, we aggregate feedback from a large number of customers and use it as one of 3 key sources of input, alongside our vision and competitive/market analysis.

4. Tap into the subliminal benefits

Using our tool, I think we've stumbled upon the perfect way to share customer feedback with our development team. We track customer feedback in a Smartsheet. Most of our developers get a daily or weekly notification of changes to the Customer Feedback sheet (more info on our notifications feature). So at the end of every day or week, they take a quick scan though the latest feedback. Whether the influence is truly subliminal or not, I don't care because we've had this scenario play out repeatedly:

Developer: "You know, I saw Feature X mentioned more and more by our customers and I got to thinking about what we could do there and spent an hour or two last night and knocked it out."

I suppose traditional product managers might worry that the planned features in development would get sidetracked by this type of scenario, but not me - I love it. Our guys know not to spend hours and hours on unplanned features. And I know that some times your mind needs a break from the problem at hand to think about something fresh. It's great to know our developers (and their big brains) get regular insight into what our customers are thinking.

Our customers often tell us that they appreciate our timely responses to their feedback submittals. I hope they believe us when we say we track their feedback and use it as part of our prioritization process for each new release. I assume they'd be even happier if they knew that their feedback directly (subliminally?) influences our development team!