The importance of customer feedback & feature requests in dynamic industries
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A short tale from our past
Many SaaS businesses start to solve complex workflow tasks within a very wide range of industries. Receptive was created from our last SaaS business which provided stock & order management solutions for eCommerce & warehouses.
That business in turn had come to life from our software agency. A prospect approached us to help solve the stock & order management problems they faced and it was at this time that SaaS was just beginning to take off. Always up for a challenge and excited by the opportunity, we embraced the project and started our first SaaS company working closely with customer #1.
It was an invaluable experience. Time was spent in specification meetings, visiting the premises, exploring their Point of Sale system and understanding the relatively new world of retail & eCommerce.
So our first SaaS business was born and we began acquiring more customers ranging from hundreds of small users to those on much bigger price plans. We found that as the business scaled, it was increasingly difficult to capture and understand all of the feedback & feature requests we were receiving from our diverse customer base, yet we knew that the key to building a successful product was in understanding the ongoing, day-to-day requirements of our users.
Complex workflows in a dynamic industry = (fun & interesting) challenges galore
We had gone from working with one customer where we had a flow of communication and an understanding of the everyday actions to one where each customer had slightly different requirements and many had never implemented any sort of software-based system. We stopped having a close relationship with the day-to-day pain points of an industry and this presented many challenges.
Our story seems to be quite common in SaaS. Products are created because of a close relationship with an initial customer or they are created because of the founder(s)’ direct experience in another industry. In the beginning, you are there…in the day-to-day experiencing all the problems and gaining invaluable insight into how you need to build your software solution but that quickly changes…
Where you were once on the ground, you’re now building a SaaS product where it’s hard to keep up with the changing requirements of a fast-paced and complex industry. It becomes all too easy to fall out of touch with day-to-day experiences that gave you the insight you needed to start your SaaS business in the first place.
This is why a mechanism for collecting and understanding feedback & feature requests from your customer base is so valuable. The customer is now you…the person on the ground…the one with the day-to-day experience who has no choice but to evolve with the demands of their industry where workflow best practice and new regulations will push your product to develop at an astonishing rate. If you don’t capture their knowledge and insight, you are seriously missing out.
And let’s be clear, this isn’t about letting your customers control your product roadmap, allowing them to dictate what you build or how you do it. You need to be the expert in how to deliver and build great software but your customers know the pain points and use cases that you quickly find yourself removed from.
It’s time to move from a we know best, hands off our roadmap customers!
mentality to one where it’s recognised that the solution provider and the customer are an inseparable team both owning one side of the story. It’s not us versus them
but a marriage of software expertise and industry insight.
