The wrong kind of scale.
Jump Around
When you make your first forays into the world of customer feedback, it’s easy to jump straight in without any plan of action. We get it, it’s exciting.
And so you start doing the right thing, or at least you think you are, because you’re beginning to see results.
You’re collecting feedback, you’re working on it, all is well with the world.
The trouble starts when it comes to scaling up.
As your company grows, the processes which used to work start to break down, and the world of customer feedback seems that little less inviting. It can become increasingly difficult to stay on top of all requests, understand the customer priorities and ensure that anyone who submits a request for you is kept updated along the way. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you aren’t being listened to when you’ve made the effort to reach out to a company.
This is the point of no return. Either you figure out how to scale up your customer feedback process, or you forget about it and never come back.
We know which of those we’d choose.
The aim of this article is to help you make the right choice. We’ll show you how to overcome those pesky scaling issues when it comes to customer feedback.
One System To Rule Them All
Before you even think about analyzing your data and acting on it, you need somewhere to collect and store it.
Before Scaling, which will henceforth be known as the rather unfortunate acronym: BS, you would probably get away with having your team members noting down the odd bit of feedback and feature requests. They’d add the information to a list and deal with it later or pass it on to the product team infrequently.
You can get away without a strong process when you don’t have a lot of feedback coming in (and when you are a smaller organization) but even at a small scale, without a process you can be missing out on some really valuable customer insights.
But that was BS, and this is now. Now that you’re scaling, you’ll have to deal with a lot more customer feedback so the process becomes really important; your organization will need a scalable and efficient workflow which ensures you benefit from all the amazing insights your customers will bring while simultaneously ensuring you are addressing their biggest pain points.
“My precious!” - Gollum when asked about his new feedback system.
Far and away the most effective thing to do at this stage is create a dedicated system with which you can store feedback.
This enables everyone in your organization to access the data, and update any of it. It also ensures things aren’t lost in the post, so to speak.
This system can be a Google Sheet, or Trello, or any alternative of those. That being said, if you’re scaling, you might consider software which is designed exclusively for managing customer feedback. (We couldn’t possibly comment on which one…)
Self-Service Checkout
Creating a channel for customers to leave their feedback is handy for a number of reasons. For starters, it allows customers to leave feedback at their own convenience and on their own terms.
This approach negates the problems with survey fatigue. This is the idea that people are sick of seeing the same old customer feedback forms and aren’t likely to submit accurate data when using them. Having a dedicated channel for their feedback increases the chances of them making suggestions.
It also reduces support tickets. Your customer support team can simply direct any customer who has a feedback suggestion to your feedback channel. This frees up your support team to work on actually helping those customers who need it.
The final benefit is that it simplifies the feedback process for your customers, and also gives them the opportunity to change their mind quickly and easily for whatever reason.
Setting up a channel is as easy as creating an online form or email address and then linking customers to that through your product itself, through your site, or through any correspondence you have with them.
Picture Perfect Prioritization
BS, you probably only received a handful of feature requests, and only had to deal with a few at a time. But you’re in the big leagues now, kid, and you’re gonna get a whole lot more.
So you need a way to sort through the pile of feature requests faster than the sorting hat gets through the pupils at Hogwarts.
The way forward is prioritization.
Rather than simply tallying up your feature requests, or asking customers to vote on them, there’s a far more effective alternative. Ask your customers to prioritize the requests. This lets the truly important things bubble to the surface.
And if you know what your customers really want more than anything, you know to prioritize those features on your roadmap.
As if that wasn’t insanely useful enough, prioritization also means you constantly have up-to-date data at hand, so you know the decisions you make are based on what your customers want at this exact moment.
Just Like An Orange
Of course, there are times when even prioritization isn’t enough. This is where the concept of segmenting your data comes into play.
Just like an orange, your customers can be segmented. You can split them up into high-value users, free triallers, churned users, and more. Unlike an orange, you probably shouldn’t eat them.
Receptive’s latest customer was proving very easy to segment.
The reason segmenting works so well is that you can narrow down your focus towards your overall goal.
If, for example, your goal for the next quarter was to reduce churn, you could segment your data to focus on what churned users requested and look to implement those features.
You may have to manually do this (unless you’re using a certain piece of software beginning with R) but we promise it’s totally worth it, and will help you make the best possible product decisions.
Talk The Talk
Now that you’re walking the walk when it comes to customer feedback, you need to talk the talk.
You have to close the feedback loop and communicate with your customers, ensuring that they know the status of any feature request that they’ve made or shown an interest in.
This shows your customers that you’re taking their feedback on board, meaning they’re more likely to give more feedback in future.
They’ll also think more highly of your company, increasing trust, and generally making them happy. And a happy customer is the best type of customer to have.
Rather than manually handling every customer interaction (which would take up all your time) you can automate the process by creating saved responses to send out, and by setting up email notifications.
Another good idea is to keep an updated feature log and product roadmap that your customers can access and see updated information.
Scale Away, Scale Away, Scale Away
BS, you were unorganized when it came to customer feedback. You didn’t put a proper plan in place, and you scraped by.
But once you start scaling, it’s crucial that you have a system. This helps you keep track of feedback, analyze the feedback, and ultimately act on the feedback to create a truly data-driven product roadmap.
Hopefully this article has given you some tips that you can take away and start implementing into your own customer feedback process.
Have a good one!
