How do you optimize feedback amongst customers, product and CS?

Liz carten

In every company I've worked at, customer feedback and product ideas are funneled from customer-facing teams to product via a messy combination of JIRA, email, slack and one-to-one meetings. From there, understanding when and how the feedback is reviewed and prioritized usually feels like a black box and explaining the ''process'' to customers - a nightmare. 

If this is something you struggle with at your organization, I'd love to hear from you. I'm working with a product friend on a solution to help solve this problem and we are looking for a few CS organizations to pilot the BETA for free. Alternatively, if you've solved this problem, I'd love to know how.

I've outlined a few key features and benefits below:

Benefits for Customer Success teams 

• A dedicated central place for all customer product feedback
• Easily submit feedback to product managers
• Get status updates from product to accurately manage customer expectations
• Ability to upvote product ideas across the team
• Access to a customer dashboard with all historical and open product requests by customer

Benefits for Product teams

• One place to manage and track all ideas and feedback per product line
• Easily quantify insights for quick, informed decision-making
• Send product line updates in seconds to keep stakeholders informed

Looking forward to hearing this group's feedback!

Steve Bernstein

Hi @Liz carten -- I may be mistaken, but feels to me like there are many offerings (especially in the "Community" arena) that do what you describe, and having lived much of my life running Product Management and Product Marketing orgs I've not found this to be helpful. Especially when votes are "free and unlimited" then it's easy for people to pile on and suggest that everything is required, so you need a careful methodology to do it right. Yet customers often won't pay attention/participate sufficiently, lack root cause (only symptoms), aren't statistically identified key-drivers of the customer experience, and aren't tied to financials.

So I'd love to understand more about what aspect(s) of the problem you are trying to solve.  In my experience, I'd much rather understand what problems need to be addressed (and why, from a root-cause analysis process) rather than being given a list of product enhancement ideas. And for understand customer issues, Voice-of-Customer feedback is always a great vehicle.

You'll get 80%+ participation (response) when you communicate appropriately with the customer to provide the right feedback at the right time. This not only helps you understand what's working and what needs improvement (i.e. symptoms), but then opens the door for those critical root cause conversations that are better served through 5-10 minute interviews (what did the customer experience vs. what did they expect, and why). With a clear definition of the problem in this way, the right solutions can be developed, whether through product enhancements, workarounds or other education, or a resetting of expectations...

In other words, rather than yet another tool, why not use the VoC platform that companies (should) already have?

What do you think?

/Steve

Liz carten

Thanks, this is different than what you described and is meant to be a tool for CS teams and product to collaborate and communicate status. CSMs, PS or sales would make the requests and yes, rules can be applied to ensure the product team isn't overwhelmed. These inputs would be coming from a customer conversation with context. This is not a community for customers and is meant to be a solution for B2B solution.