Continuous Customer Feedback Programs, Part 3: After the Sessions

Communicating Customer Feedback

You’ve organized and processed your data. Now, determine who should hear your customers’ feedback and can do something with it.

• Find the decision makers. Who is empowered to decide what goes into your product? If you aren’t already working with these people, locate them and introduce yourself. Even better, get their buy-in and support for your user research. Ideally, you did this before you even started!
• Decide how to review the feedback with these decision makers. Determine how to communicate your findings in an effective way. Would your stakeholders appreciate receiving regular summaries, with supporting conference calls? Or are they knowledgeable about the issues and able to rely on the change management system alone? In what format would this data be most easily consumed in your organization and at what level of detail? Think about creating a framework to support your research and let you easily distill metrics and priorities from your data.
• Enable stakeholders to hear your customers’ feedback in real time by inviting them to participate in the sessions when appropriate. Hearing the participants’ thoughts first hand, they may take their own to-do’s from the sessions. Integrating team members into the sessions can also minimize the work that you need to do to summarize your research findings, because stakeholders are already familiar with the context and the issues.
• Don’t forget to reflect your customers’ feedback back to them. This lets you verify that you have understood their issues correctly and get more details, if necessary. Be sure to communicate that you’ve heard their feedback and are acting upon it. For bonus points, maintain metrics as you go. Keep a running count of the issues and themes that you’ve generated, and track how many issues have gotten resolved. How many enhancements have resulted from customers’ feedback? How many have been implemented? How many are in planning? Not only does this make participants feel gratified, it can help you to communicate the value of your research to your management team. Lastly, if you don’t own the outcomes of your findings—for example, you can’t deliver code to address them—be sure that your customers know that. In this case, clearly communicate that your role is to facilitate user experience research and pass the results along to development.

Making your stakeholders aware of your research and establishing frameworks and expectations around the resulting customer feedback helps to prepare them to make use of the results. Communicating your findings in a way that stakeholders can easily consume often prevents the need for more rework in the future and may help them to address your feedback sooner than if you had communicated it in an ad-hoc manner. Finally, communicating your findings back to the customers who participated in your research is imperative to validate your own understanding of the issues and make them feel that the time they spent providing input was time well spent. Providing metrics at any given point is especially helpful in this light.

Establishing Priorities for Development

Make it easy for development to implement your change requests by prioritizing the issues.

• If you’re keeping an eye out for emerging themes, consider prioritizing them as you go. You can use whatever priority scale works best for you and your stakeholders. We typically start by identifying frequently occurring issues versus severe issues. Look for areas where multiple customers across various industries have given you the same feedback. Don’t forget that seemingly innocuous issues can add up to a severe usability problem when they occur in the same context.
• Determine priorities from your customers’ perspectives. Use a prioritization tool to put together a prioritized list of customer issues. Remember that, during this exercise, you may be talking to members of various target audiences that have different priorities. For instance, an administrator would rank items differently from a practitioner.
• Triage the issues and review your work with stakeholders. Be ready to speak to each issue in depth, communicating both the issue and its resolution. Your goal is to clarify the requested work so you can hand it off to development.

Your research will be more actionable if you can communicate the priority levels of the work that you’re requesting. Without this, you risk developers’ seeing all of the feedback that you’ve gathered from customers as low-priority, nice-to-have issues.

Benefits of Conducting a Customer Feedback Program

Our continuous customer feedback program clearly provided tangible benefits in terms of product improvement. In one series of recurring meetings that took place over a period of four months, the group generated over 120 enhancements. Of these, we addressed more than 70 enhancements in the product’s next major release. During this time, the program’s intangible benefits also became clear. Customers were more likely to participate in usability evaluations and other collaborative endeavors after having participated in the feedback group—likely because we had established a personal relationship with them, as well as because of their knowing that we considered their feedback valuable, took action on it, and addressed their issues.

Another unexpected benefit of the sessions was that they offered a forum for users to talk to each other about their experiences using the product. Participants ranged from subject-matter experts to new practitioners, and they were able to discuss various features and usage patterns of the product with other users, in production environments for real deployments. Some participants expressed their satisfaction with this aspect of the calls several times, and although the meetings had a planned end date, they asked for the calls to continue because they were getting such immediate value from them.

If you decide to try conducting your own customer feedback program, be prepared to do a lot of work and expend a lot of time, but you’ll also gain many benefits. Just remember to engage your stakeholders, provide value to the participants, remain unbiased, and make it easy for your development team to act on the findings that result from all of your hard work.

Encouraging Continual Customer Feedback

Over time, you’ll hopefully evolve and maintain an effective method of obtaining rich, continuous customer feedback. Your product development team will come to rely on your bringing customer feedback to the team and use your research to make informed design and feature decisions. Great!

What else is there to do? If you want to further encourage continual customer feedback and design collaboration, here are a couple of approaches to try.

You’d be surprised at how much an in-person meeting can energize participants. Are there any conferences they’re likely to attend that you could attend as well? Local user group meetings? Are any of your participants local and available for an in-person visit or contextual inquiry? While limited travel funds may typically require you to obtain most of your customer feedback remotely, search for opportunities to meet customers in person. Is anyone on your team traveling to a customer site? Are there any local sales contacts who can put you in touch with their customer accounts?

Along with exploring any opportunity for in-person research, you can continue to use your customer group to generate continuous excitement and motivate them to spend more time providing feedback. While this requires going a bit above and beyond your regular sessions, it significantly improves your customer relationships, as well as their perception of the value of your work. Offer one-on-one sessions where appropriate—such as a deep dive on a particular feature or workflow or a conversation with an interested and willing developer. Whenever possible, frame one-on-one sessions as an opportunity to preview in-progress designs and influence the final user interface. Offering one-on-one usability testing sessions of incomplete implementations—remotely, if necessary—offers your customers a chance to try a new feature for themselves. You might be surprised by how enthusiastically your participants might market your research for you!

Needless to say, if you start conducting customer feedback sessions outside your regular group, it’s still important to transform the feedback into actionable issues and communicate them back to both the participants and your product development team. Obviously, additional customer communications, touchpoints, and research activities require additional work. In our experience, one-on-one conversations—whether remote or in person—can foster a more amicable relationship with your customers, encouraging them to reach out to you when they find usability issues and enabling them to freely and honestly share their feedback during the regular group meetings.