Dorie Wallace Leadership

Getting Real with Customer Feedback: A 3-Step Guide to Making It Work! 
Step 1: Kickstart Your Customer Feedback Journey

So you wanna ask your customers for ideas? Great!! You should absolutely get customer feedback in any ideation process – whether you are building a product or a customer experience. But it isn’t as easy as just asking them.

I know what you’re thinking, “Come on Dorie, don’t I just pick up the phone and ask them?” And the answer is yes – you could do that. But you are not going to get the results you want. And you are going to miss an opportunity to deepen your relationship with your customers.

Let me tell ya – in several circumstances, I have “just made a call”. For example, when I was leading Customer Support many years ago, a client posted a video on YouTube documenting our unacceptable hold times, which they were. As soon as I saw the video, I immediately picked up the phone and called the client. I didn’t have a strategic plan in place or a discussion guide. I thanked him for holding us accountable, apologized for the wait times, and committed to making improvements…which we did.

When I first joined that Customer Support team, I asked all the support leaders to call 5 clients each to learn from our customers – to find out what the customers wanted in a support experience. While customer support leaders talk to clients all day, they are usually escalations. In this case, I asked them to call a random set of clients – all sizes and types. We made a discussion guide to ensure we were all asking the same questions. Then we came together after the calls, documented our findings, and used that knowledge to create a support strategy. And we followed up with those same customers to let them know what we did with that information. Our Customer Satisfaction jumped 6 points using this approach.

Since that time, I have led several customer feedback initiatives. Most recently, I led the implementation of a commercial idea management software solution where we had over 40,000 user votes in 12 months. In this 3-article series, I will share keys to success in implementing any customer feedback initiative and specifically implementing an idea management tool. Up first, I’ll start at the beginning…how to prepare your team and your organization to seek and use customer feedback with an idea management tool.

Determine why you want to ask customers for ideas.

As Simon Sinek said, Start with Why. It is critical to understand why you are reaching out to customers for ideas. This step will help you make sure you reach the outcomes you are looking to achieve. Here are a few possibilities to consider:

• Build customer-informed solutions enabling you to differentiate yourself in the market
• Engage customers to participate in the ideation process
• Identify blindspots in your roadmap
• Help you prioritize where you should devote resources, including any blindspots
• Clarify use cases to ensure you solve the right problems
• Build trust with your users by demonstrating that you are listening to them and utilizing their feedback
• Buy time and patience by including your customers and users in the development process
• Get user feedback on what you are building at each step in the software development lifecycle; while being willing to course-correct if needed
• Quantify the needs of your customers to gain support or resources

Identify how you get customer and user feedback today. You have to know where you are today to know where to go…and how to get there.

At the least structured end of the spectrum, you may have an informal policy of collecting ideas anecdotally – through sales, support, or other client-facing teams; through 1:1 client discussions, or word of mouth. In this case, change management is easiest – you don’t have to train teams or customers to change the process. They will be ecstatic that you are creating this new process.

Many organizations utilize simple online forms or surveys to collect customer feedback. While this is beneficial to learning user needs; because it is asynchronous, you cannot easily dig in for more information or provide updates to the users on the status of their feedback. By implementing an idea portal or management tool, you will significantly improve the value of the information you receive, the experience for the client, and internal alignment. You will certainly need some change management, both internally and externally, see below. And if you have existing ideas stored in a spreadsheet or backlog somewhere, you may want to consider importing them into your new portal. It demonstrates to users that all of their past feedback wasn’t discarded and seeds the new portal so users aren’t looking at a blank screen.

You may be lucky enough to have a tool where you are already collecting and responding to user feedback. But are you using a tool that enables you to proactively manage the user feedback? Can you measure results and monitor usage to ensure you are delivering the ideal customer experience? If not, moving to a commercial application will provide you with incredible transparency and reduce friction for your users through a standardized user experience. The same change management and importing decisions from above will need to be managed.

Determine your Operating Model

This is important. Well, everything else in this article is important too. In this case, your colleagues in the Product organization and across the company are your customers – so you will need to ask for their feedback. This checklist will give you the framework to make the necessary decisions enabling you to have a successful and sustainable operating model. We defined the Why earlier, now you must determine the Who, What, How, and When.

WHO

• Who can view and/or submit ideas? This information will determine your decision to provide access. The list could include customers, employees (either for themselves or on behalf of customers), partners, and anyone in the general public (including your competitors).
• Who should review and respond to ideas? Product managers, product owners, product developers, designers, or customer support. Use a RACI to ensure everyone knows their role.

WHAT

• What do you want the experience to be? I fell in love with the phrase “vibrant exchange” during the most recent implementation. I thought it perfectly encapsulated the experience we wanted to create. We were determined to use this tool to create a conversation with our users where we could ask questions about their ideas, share wireframes and workflows to get real-time feedback, and encourage discussion about priorities. We turned it from an idea management tool to a communication tool. And our customers LOVED it. They were effusive in praising the team for their interactions and candor, including references, case studies, and NPS survey comments.
• What do you do if the idea doesn’t align with your strategy? We made the decision early on that we wanted to say “no”. To truly engage with our clients, we had to be candid. Telling our users that we were not going to implement their ideas would enable them to find an alternative solution instead of waiting for us to one day, maybe, hopefully, add the enhancement. We also decided to keep those ideas publicly available so users could continue to vote on them, committing to review any ideas, even ones we previously declined, if enough customers validated the need.

WHERE

• Where do we launch the idea management tool? Based on the “who” you decided earlier, you now need to determine where to launch the tool. Within your communities, within the software, on your main corporate landing page, or all the above.

HOW

• How do you know you are delivering the desired experience? How do you know you are getting the desired outcomes? Like with any strategy or project – “how do you know” always comes down to measuring KPIs and metrics. Here are some metrics you may want to consider; any idea management tool should be able to provide this information.
  • The first piece of ensuring a “vibrant exchange” is being responsive. We set an internal target of responding to all client ideas within 2 weeks. We measured that by comparing the idea submission date with the initial response date.
  • The second piece is the quality of the response, which is harder to measure. We spot-checked ideas regularly and publicly recognized the team members who demonstrated engaging interactions.
  • What are the outcomes of the ideas? Implemented, Considering, Not Implementing, etc. You should see a balance among the different outcomes over time. We set a goal to implement 10% of client ideas, recognizing it would take time to meet that goal.
  • And since the idea portal was new, we also measured account creation, logins, idea creation, votes, and other engagement metrics.

WHEN

• When do we tell the customers what we did with their ideas? While the initial response to an idea is critical, the ongoing updates are even more important. You don’t want your idea portal to turn into a black hole of information so providing updates and the final resolution to the submission will help you avoid that.  Encourage your team to share learnings from any research they have completed, proposed UIs and workflows, and implementation timing (when they are confident about the timing). We also set a standard that when any idea was implemented, the product manager would add a note thanking the original submitter for their idea, share when the enhancement was delivered, and include a link to any public materials such as documentation or release notes.

Get the executives on board.

Hopefully, your executives already believe in the value of listening to customers. If not, consider using this ROI information from HBR or Forbes to set that foundation. And then, knowing your executives, share the key information they will want to know such as a high-level project plan. If this is truly a new process for your organization, they are going to have lots of questions. Proactively address these points when you introduce the topic to gain their support.

• Are we not getting customer feedback now?
• What if we don’t want to do what the users are asking?
• What if we can’t keep up with the feedback?
• Will our competitors be able to see this information and use it against us?
• How will we know it is working?

You’re ready.

Including these aspects in your planning, along with your standard implementation processes, will ensure you reach your outcomes. Remember, this is an incredible opportunity to build better solutions and strengthen your relationships with your customers – WIN WIN!! Take the time to do it right.

2 More Articles in this Step-by-Step Guide!