In the not-so-distant past, product development efforts in tech gravitated towards the compulsive hype of engineering novelty. Under this tech-centric approach, Research & Development teams followed technical milestones without taking into account a strategic factor to long-term business growth:
What are customer needs.
Today, it has been proven that meaningful innovation can only truly emerge from a customer-centric vision where user experience (UX) plays a prominent role. In this scenario, understanding the user comes across as the most important source of information to design, develop, scale, and refine solutions better and faster, generating higher revenue cost-effectively.
Market-leading companies like Amazon, Netflix, Tesla, and Apple are at the forefront of showing how collecting and analyzing customer feedback is the keystone to crafting attractive and functional solutions. Even further, brands like LEGO have raised the bar by trusting their users’ voices enough to build sustainable two-way product development collaborations.
Let’s dive into the backbone of grasping the power of customer feedback.
The Gains of Hearing the Voice of the Customer
According to research by McKinsey that tracks financial and operational metrics across nearly 200 growth-stage SaaS businesses, the top-quartile-growth performers are the ones investing appropriately in a business model that fits customer needs.
To do so, fast-growth companies continuously collect customer feedback to improve their digital support and seamlessly integrate product evolution into their user’s journey, asking customers about key business benefits, technical and feature shortcomings, and customer service, among other relevant topics.
Hearing and empathizing with the voice of the customer -what they share about their circumstances, expectations, and pain points- before, during, and after the usage of a solution helps to:
- Test new product concepts and ideas.
- Refine user personas.
- Stay ahead of potential issues .
- Measure customer satisfaction.
- Design spot-on product features.
- Increase customer retention.
In a nutshell, integrating customer feedback recollection as part of your product development strategy allows you to solve deployment challenges in advance and craft great products while lowering implementation costs and keeping a close look at how customers relate to your brand.
Increasing Revenue with an Iterative Approach to Customer Feedback
The usual first move of tech and SaaS companies when thinking about growing faster is trying to acquire new customers. But the truth is that stable customer satisfaction and loyalty is what sets apart market leaders from their competitors.
In this sense, iteration is all-important. Customer acquisition is a part of revenue growth, but a less obvious and more critical driver is customer success (a.k.a. high retention rates). If you gain customer attention but then lose it on a poor interaction with your product, churn will be your worst headache.
According to Gartner, nearly 80% of companies that perceived positive revenue growth use customer surveys to collect CX data, and 75% can relate an increase in revenue with customer satisfaction improvement.
Therefore, developing an MVP, testing it, and continuously gathering customer feedback ensures the process is on the right track. Setting an iterative circle of insight-based new features and adjustments will lead to an agile operating model that can easily escalate into other markets and product lines.
How to Collect Customer Feedback
There are a lot of methods to gather customer feedback. A proper choice would depend on the type of project. In general, companies use a mixture of moderated and unmoderated techniques to ensure consistency and reliability. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of them:
- Moderated techniques
In this type of collecting data approach, researchers and users share a common space (physical or virtual), allowing for conversation and observational behavioral monitoring. Moderators not only gather users’ straightforward answers but can also make follow-up questions and take notes on qualitative data like body language and tone of voice.- Interviews: This is one of the most popular moderated techniques to collect a customer or group of customers’ opinions. It allows more personal interactions, building trust, and facilitating dialogue.
- Focus groups: In this method, customers meet in a room and are asked to share perceptions about a product or service. Participants can openly talk with one another allowing researchers to tap into group behavior insights.
- Unmoderated techniques
Here, moderators are out of the equation. User opinions are provided by researchers’ demand or in an unsolicited manner without further mediation. Unmoderated techniques lack intervention but allow feedback collection from a much larger user group, faster.- Surveys: While more simple and less expensive than conducting interviews, online or in-person surveys require a careful questionnaire design to get useful answers.
- Social media and online customers review: Through these channels, you can access unfiltered insights and conversations about how customers feel about your product.
Streamlining Feedback Collection and Analysis with GenAI
When the content of customer feedback is too voluminous and unstructured, Generative AI can assist in capturing, analyzing, and even responding in a systematic way to optimize the CX life cycle.
This technology not only helps in transcribing voice calls into text, but it also comes in handy for summarizing comments or categorizing content into specific topics to determine behavioral patterns.
Moreover, GenAI can be very useful at sentiment analysis – differentiating into positive, neutral, and negative comments- with great precision levels.
Case Study: Leveraging Customer Feedback to Increase Public Safety
At Making Sense, we truly believe in the importance of utilizing customer feedback to iteratively enhance products and deliver exceptional CX. That was our goal when we created DigitalBlue’s mobile app to help police officers on the field communicate with their support network during a crisis.
With that purpose in mind, we gathered information by interviewing patrolling officers about their day-to-day activities and what were the typical problems they faced. Additionally, we supported the user analysis with other resources such as collaborative design thinking workshops with stakeholders, proto-personas to identify user types, and journey maps to understand touchpoints.
The result? A citizen-centric software that reduces cognitive load, facilitates the receipt of near real-time emergency alerts, and provides special features for officers to communicate more effectively while working safely on both day and night shifts.
To sum up, customer feedback can turn into the growing engine of your company, driving improvement in your overall product, your value proposition, and your delivery model. Are you ready to leverage all the power of a customer-centric approach to business expansion? Contact us!