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How To Drive

Product InnovatIonFrom Customer Feedback in Your Community

How to drIve Product InnovatIon From customer Feedback In Your communItY 1

How To Drive ProDucT innovaTion From cusTomer FeeDback in Your communiTY

Ask any product manager what drives product innovation, and they’re likely to give you all

kinds of answers: market research, leadership direction, brainstorming processes, innate

feel for the market and space, the list goes on.

No matter the product or driving force behind it, the goal is ultimately to meet the needs

and desires of your customers. It follows, then, that their feedback, communication,

and perspective should be taken into consideration along every step of the product

development process, from brainstorming, to evaluating existing products, to examining

those from your competition.

We already released a white paper about how to solicit great feedback, but any feedback

is only as good as what you do with it. Which brings us to the topic of this e-book: how to

drive product innovation from customer feedback you gather in your community.

Contents

•HowToDriveProDucTinnovaTionFromcusTomerFeeDbackinYourcommuniTY .....................................1

•askingForFeeDback:HowTo(anDHownoTTo) ..................................2

•askingForFeeDbackinYourcusTomercommuniTY .......................4

•soYouHaveFeeDback.nowwHaT? ................................................5

•closingTHeFeeDbacklooP ...........7

•conclusion ..............................................9


askIng For Feedback: How To (anD How noT To)

Before we dive into what to do with your customer feedback once you have it, let’s take a

crash course in asking for feedback. Follow these five tips to get started collecting great,

actionable feedback:

1 define your goal FIrst. If you want clear feedback that you can base decisions on, you first have to define the decisions you’re trying to make with it. Do you want to improve conversions from your website? Create a more intuitive product? A more effective pricing structure? Clearly answer that question for yourself before turning it over to your customers, and be sure not to give them feedback-fatigue by asking about every goal you have all at once—a good feedback structure will bring you in constant, seamless contact with your customers. It allows you to ask different questions and receive different feedback regularly; it does not blast your customers with the burden of fulfilling all your feedback goals in one heavy-handed session.

2 but leave room for open-ended responses. This tip may seem to contradict the first, but in reality it actually compliments it. You need to be specific with your customers to lead them in the direction you’re interested in, but you also want to provide them a with a place to tell you their open-ended thoughts, criticisms, and praise. You can’t know what you don’t know, so unless you encourage them to tell you anything else that might be on their mind, you could be missing some crucial feedback.

3 ask in a way that encourages customer conversation for exponentially more interesting feedback. It’s one thing to ask your customers what they think about your latest product and to listen to their unique responses one by one. But ask them in a community of customers, and you’re likely to notice something powerful emerge. One customer poses a product suggestion, for example, and their fellow customers jump in to agree, disagree, or piggy-back on top of the original idea to propose an even better one. Unleash the full potential of customer feedback by encouraging this conversation to unfold.

4 don’t expect your customers to come to you. Meet them where they are for the best feedback. Depending on who your customers are, you’re likely to encounter them in different places: on your Facebook wall, on your website, on Twitter, in search, or on their mobile devices. When you ask for feedback where they are (instead of expecting them to come to you, your survey link, or your phone call), you show that you really care about them. And isn’t that why you’re asking for feedback in the first place?

5 Your feedback is only as good as what you do with it. Don’t forget to close the feedback loop. Are you considering suggestions proposed by your community? Let them know. Implemented a customer idea already? Sharing that is guaranteed to make your customers feel heard and appreciated—feelings they’ll


remember when they’re choosing between you and your competition the next time around. What about suggestions that don’t make sense or that you don’t have the resources for? Sharing this transparently (and tactfully) will make your customers feel heard, respected, and will encourage them to come back to you with all of their feedback in the future.


asking For FeeDback in Your cusTomer communiTY

There are a number of ways you can solicit this feedback, but it should be a regular part

of you business. Branded customer communities give you a place to be in constant,

seamless contact with your customers, asking them for feedback Anywhere they are—

on your website, ecommerce product pages, social networks, in search, and on mobile.

In addition, customer communities foster conversation between your customers while

making it easy for you to jump in to moderate, contribute, or inform the conversation with

the latest information.

These rich community discussions can provide you with invaluable insight into what

your customers think, expect, and want from you. In many ways this ebook is specific to

feedback gathered from customer communities, but many of the tips and suggestions

presented here can be widely applied to feedback collected from in person conversations,

online surveys, phone polling, etc.

TechSmith Launches a New Product while Driving Down Cost By Crowdsourcing To Their Community

TechSmith is the world’s leading screen capture and recording software company, providing services for individuals and professionals in more than 50 countries. Originally, TechSmith almost exclusively developed products for Windows users, but as its popularity grew, the firm decided to develop a version of its popular product, Snagit, for Mac users. Over the ten-month public beta process, more than 100,000 people downloaded Snagit on Mac, over 445,000 people engaged in dialogues on their Get Satisfaction community, and about 1,200 unique topics were generated by users.

The customer community allowed TechSmith to engage its entire user base to play an active role in the product innovation process. In addition to producing a better product, TechSmith saved $500,000 by crowdsourcing to the Get Satisfaction community. TechSmith hasn’t needed to hire a technical support person, for example, because members of the community answer questions daily, and customers can self-serve by seeing if their problem or question has already been addressed. Furthermore, the marketing team uses Get Satisfaction to test and refine marketing messages before taking them public. As a result, going into the official product launch, they were more confident in their feature set, messaging, usability, and software stability.


so You Have FeeDback. now wHaT?

First things first: prioritize, prioritize, prioritize!

Odds are, your customers have a lot to say, all of which is valuable and should be listened

and responded to. But even the biggest, most successful companies have limited

resources, so you have to be strategic and selective when it comes to acting upon that

feedback. There are a couple ways you can get started narrowing down the most urgent,

actionable feedback you find in your community:

1 stats. This useful section of your dashboard will help you get a good sense of the priorities of your community, identify your most active members, and gauge the overall sentiment they have towards you and your products. Scroll down to the Active Topics section to see which topics have the most engagement in your community. This is a good place to get a sense of what your customers view as the most pressing issues, praise worthy features, or improvable aspects of your product. Click on each topic in this view to see the conversation surrounding it specifically.

2 management view. This view allows you to see the most recently posted feedback, to give you a real time view of what your customers are thinking and feeling about your brand. It also allows you to filter by tag, comment type, status, emotion, and product type.

Filter by product type to see product-specific feedback, which will help guide you when you’re focusing on specific topics. You can also use the tag system to allocate responsibility to different teams or people, or filter by Sentiment to get a sense of which parts of your business are causing the most unsatisfied customers.

Dive Into Your Topics, Sherlock

Now that you’ve examined popular topics in Active Topics and gotten a more specific

perspective with the Management View, it’s time to dig a little deeper and start making

sense of what you’re seeing. It’s not enough to know what topics your community is

talking about. You’re going to want to put on your detective hat, and analyze the feedback

before taking action.

Timbuk2’s Community Suggests A Great

New Product

Timbuk2 started out as a one-person messenger bag company in 1989 in San Francisco, where they still do much of their manufacturing today. As the years have passed, the firm has expanded into several new product lines, some of which have been driven by customer and community feedback.

Back in 2007, a customer posted on the company’s Get Satisfaction customer community site asking about Timbuk2 diaper bags. Diaper bags were not, at that time, a part of Timbuk2’s product roadmap, but the idea got lots of response from community members. Less than a year after the enquiry, a prototype of the diaper bag was made and ultimately launched as a new product, delighting customers and Timbuk2 employees alike.


There are two kinds of data you want to pay attention to:

Quantitative. How many people have commented on the topic in question? How many

employees responded? How many of each of the four Sentiments has any given topic

been tagged with? Topics with the most community engagement are probably gaining

traction for a reason, so it’s important to have a good sense of which they are. The Active

Topics section will be helpful in defining this.

Qualitative. Just because there are a lot of comments on a product suggestion, for example,

doesn’t mean it’s popular in your community—in fact, it might mean exactly the opposite!

You’re going to have to get in there and actually read the comments if you want to develop

a true sense for what your customers are asking you for. You can also pay attention to

the sentiment indicators on the left side of your dashboard to get a sense of the mood of

community members talking about various topics.

You have Feedback. Now what?

Your feedback is only as good as the people who see it, so you want to make sure that you

get it in front of the right eyes. All moderators in a Get Satisfaction paid community have

the option to share a topic with employees. Just scroll down the page to the “Share with

employees” function located on the right side of the page, select the employees who you

think should be notified about the feedback, and they will receive an email with an optional

note—if you choose to write one. From there they can document, consider, and reply to

the feedback.

To incorporate more accountability in the Share function (when counting on different

teams to reply to different feedback, for example) you can tag the topic with an

employee’s name, so it’s visible. Standard plans have the option to tag this publically, so

all community members can see the tag. Enterprise communities can tag these privately,

so only internal community members can see it.


closing THe FeeDback looP

Feedback in your Get Satisfaction community comes as one of four categories:

Questions, Ideas, Problems, and Praise. All should be responded to, though it’s important

to prioritize your replies in order of most urgent: Problems, Questions, Ideas, and then

Praise.

It’s important to reply to feedback to let your customers know how much you appreciate

the time they spent telling you how they feel. You can also set the status on each topic to

indicate whether a suggestion is active, pending, rejected, or complete. These categories

help you to organize internally and make it quick and easy for your customers to keep up

with the status of various product innovations.

Once you implement a feature update or product suggestion that was requested by your

customers, be sure to post a community update letting them know and thanking them

for the suggestion. That simple post will go a long way towards fostering warm, fuzzy

customer feelings.

What If It’s Negative?

This is a fear we hear often in this industry: “what if my customers express negative

feedback in my community or social media?” It can be scary to open yourself up to public

criticism, but in this social age your customers are talking about you publically whether

you condone it or not. They are Tweeting about their experiences with your customer

service representatives, posting on Facebook about your newest product, and blogging

about how you compare to your competition.

By providing them with an open, transparent place to provide you with their observations,

thoughts, and feelings about your brand, you’re fostering their trust and giving yourself

invaluable access to great information. By definition it is more fun to receive Praise


than hear Problems or negative feedback—but don’t forget, the latter tend to be more

beneficial for driving product innovation and company direction.

There is another benefit to asking for this feedback in your public community. Most of

us have experienced the sting of criticism that comes over online channels. It often feels

harsher and less tactful than feedback that would be delivered in person. By showing

up and proactively engaging your customers before they have a major issue with your

product, you’re humanizing yourself, your business, and your brand. That doesn’t mean

you won’t still receive negative feedback, but it will make most people think twice before

unleashing an entire year’s worth of pent-up frustration out on you.

Have questions? Feel free to email

[email protected], you can call

877-339-3997and talk to a real human.


conclusion

Your customers are having conversations about your product all the time, whether you’re

paying attention or not. A Get Satisfaction community brings those conversations to

the center of your attention. Asking your customers for feedback regularly, making sure

that feedback gets to the right teams and people, analyzing it carefully, and keeping your

community up to date about the status of their suggestions, will allow you to develop

transparent conversations and loyal relationships with your customers. By engaging

in regular conversations in your community, you can leverage your customers to

continuously improve your business. After all, who knows your product better than the

people who use it every day?

Try a Demo!