Imagine if you had thousands of people who had great ideas about how to improve your product and business - people who want to help you spot new market opportunities and ways to make your users more successful.
Not only that, but imagine if they were willing to give you all that knowledge for free.
It would be pretty hard to ignore them, right?
Yet that’s exactly what a lot of SaaS companies do every day.
CEOs and leaders in SaaS need to take customer feedback seriously otherwise they are missing a huge opportunity.
Here’s why the voice of the customer matters…
1. They Actually USE Your Product
You’ll never use your product with fresh eyes. Even if you haven’t actually coded a feature yourself, it’s your product. And that means your perspective is clouded.
A clouded perspective means a clouded judgement. It means you’re blind to any issues.
Your product teams might think that a shiny new feature is nice and intuitive but maybe that’s just because they were involved with building it.
You might think your CX choices are brilliant, but your customers won’t always agree. In fact, the top CX leaders consistently list customer feedback as their number one driver when it comes to designing an experience.
The only people who can use a feature with a clear perspective are your customers - the day-to-day users of your software.
It stands to reason, therefore, that your customers will pick up on things that you will have otherwise missed… they will give you the detailed insights you need to create a market leading SaaS product.
You can’t afford to miss out on crucial improvements simply because you chose to keep the doors closed to product feedback from users.
Customers are part of the team; welcome their comments and use their unique perspective to improve your products not only for them, but for your customers of tomorrow too.
2. They Know What THEY Want
You might have a rough idea of where you want the product to go. You may even have a very specific idea of where you want the product to go… in fact you should have. The strategy that you pass down in your organization needs to act as the guiding metric for your product teams.
Unfortunately, your idea of progress isn’t always the same as your customers’ ideas of progress. If you don’t collect product feedback and feature requests from your users, you can’t balance the improvements your customers need to be successful with the vision that you are executing on.
SaaS companies that embrace customer development and feedback are winning the race and growing faster than the competition. Customer account growth has become more cost effective than simply investing in sales teams to acquire more and more users.
The SaaS model has facilitated this shift and customer experience is now more important than ever. A Product Feedback Policy and good process around customer feedback closes the communication loop with your users and puts you miles ahead of the competition.
This little snippet is taken from The Times Enterprise Agility report released at the end of last year. A big part of what they found was that the businesses who are able to adapt by actively welcoming and acting on product feedback have a huge competitive advantage.
“The kind of businesses primed to respond with lightning speed to customer demands and feedback are those that will win the race. Short feedback loops, teams dedicated to customer experience and even customer-sourced design for products all serve to allow companies to get ahead, increase visibility and beat the competition.”
This is especially true in SaaS. Your customers, teams and prospects are demanding more. That, combined with shorter development and release cycles actually gives you a massive opportunity to get your hands on insights that will help drive growth and ensure everyone in your organization is working on things that align with the strategy you have set.
So… as much as you might want to guide the product in line with what you want you really need to be thinking about what your customers want too. It’s all about balance and, after all, they’re the people you’re building this product for in the first place.
It goes without saying that the best way to find out what your customers want is to listen to them. It’s that simple.
3. It Shows Your Customers You CARE
Customers have more and more choice. Unless you’re miles ahead of the competition then you’re going to be competing with other companies.
Brand loyalty is becoming rarer and rarer as customers simply want the best product and service for the best price.
One way to help achieve that elusive brand loyalty and ensure your customers stick around is to show them you care about what they think and truly value their opinion.
Collect feedback and feature requests, communicate back with updates, and then sit back and watch as you improve retention, decrease churn, create advocates and have product teams that know exactly where you should be placing your time, effort and money.
What better way to do that than to listen to what they have to say and then use their feedback to improve the product.
In one fell swoop you can improve your product AND develop long-lasting relationships with your customers.
It’s a win-win.
Start Listening Now
Hopefully that’s opened your eyes to why you should start listening to your customers and taking their feedback on board.
You get a fresh perspective, you can understand what your customers want from your product, and you can show them that you value their custom.
And nowadays it couldn’t be easier to open your ears and start collecting that feedback.
I’ve listed some more content below to help you take those first steps.
Do it now before it’s too late…
If you’re ready to start listening to your customers, then we can help. Book a call to see how we can help you.
