A better way to work with customer feedback

There is a famous saying that goes "The customer is always right.", but then again Steve Jobs famously said, "The customer is not always right." So what should you do about customer feedback?

Collecting customer feedback is a way to learn from the users. Listen to what they are saying, experiencing, and feeling when using your product. It does not mean that you should always do what they say, but it is important to understand why they are saying it. Then you can synthesize that knowledge, with your understanding of your product and user's actual behavior from analytics, and make informed decisions on how to best improve your product.

That is all great, and some might say "Sure, but we know all that already and look at our backlog, it is just a waste of time to collect more customer feedback. We know what we need to do.". Not so fast! Building a better product is not the only benefit that comes from collecting feedback, consider the following customer experiences.

1. A customer is feeling heard and respected.
2. A customer is feeling left alone and dismissed.

Who will be happiest? Who will most most likely renew for another year? Who will recommend your product to other people?

Customer feedback is not just about making better products, it is also about making your customers happy and building real and lasting relationships with them. How you execute on customer feedback is a great way to differentiate from competitors.

Open, honest communication is the best foundation for any relationship, but remember that at the end of the day it’s not what you say or what you do, but how you make people feel that matters the most. Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO

Classical customer feedback looks something like this, where you got multiple customers sending feedback using multiple channels.

Where do you put the customer feedback? How do you prioritize? How do you communicate back to the customer? Will they get informed when product feature XYZ is implemented? Do you have a public product roadmap?

A better way to work with customer feedback would be to gather feedback in an organized place where feedback can be shared, read, and refined by customers, and when the company responds to the feedback other customers can also read the response and further refine the feedback together. It's a better feedback loop, and most importantly it engages your customers and they feel heard and respected.

How would you want to be treated as a customer of your business? We built Convas to solve this problem, to help companies build better products and lasting relationships with their customers.