How to leverage customer feedback to build the best products | #customersupport #supporticket

“Customer needs serve as the ‘north star’ for most product leaders”, especially those who are always striving to leverage customer feedback to build the best products.

An important part of this customer feedback naturally lands in support tools like Freshdesk, but your company actually has as many feedback channels as you have customer touchpoints and internal teams. And customer feedback can quickly become a mess…

At Harvestr, we talk with support and product teams on a daily basis and we realized that, although customer feedback is critical to delivering the best user experiences, it hardly ever makes it to the product team. 

Most often, customer feedback gets lost or unexploited. At best, it will end up in complex and time-consuming spreadsheets or inefficient feedback boards, where teams fail to get a comprehensive view of customer needs and are lost when it comes to prioritizing those needs. If you are managing a support team or building a product, you certainly know what I’m talking about.

Failing to properly manage customer feedback does not only mean that you will fail to understand your customer needs. It also means that your customers will never hear back from you and that they will have the terrible feeling that their voice is simply not being heard. Pretty bad, huh?

But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!

In this article, you will learn the 4 step process of setting up the Freshdesk – Harvestr integration to implement a state-of-the-art feedback management process and provide your customers with an amazing product experience. 

1. Identify your customer feedback channels

Your very first step is listing all your customer feedback channels, to get an idea of the volume of feedback you get on each channel. Here is a list of some channels you might want to consider:

• your customer support and live chat tools
• your CRM
• customer interviews
• product and customer satisfaction surveys
• social networks
• internal ideas from your teammates

The most actionable type of customer feedback is the one you already have stored in the different business tools and applications you are using. It gives you the original discussions and context that will help you understand the underlying problem of your customer. In your support tool or CRM, you will even have access to the customer’s contact details, making it easy to reach out to him/her and dig deeper into the problem.

2. Build a central customer feedback repository

Now that you have identified your main feedback channels, you can start building a central feedback repository and to consolidate this feedback in order to identify product improvement opportunities.

List all these feedback messages with details such as feedback content, customer information, date of event, and the link to the original message to keep the context and easily close the loop with the customer. With the Harvestr – Freshdesk integration, it will take support agents a simple click to push a feedback ticket to your Harvestr feedback repository.

You then want to group these feedback messages into common problems before thinking about solutions. It is not because a customer is asking you to add a specific feature to your product that you should do it. Ask yourself why they would need this feature and what problem they are  trying to solve. Why? Simply because the feature your customer is requesting is based on their particular use-case, might not be the best solution to the problem and because a given feature can solve several problems at once. 

You should now have something like :

• Problem 1: Feedback 1 / Feedback 2 / Feedback 3 
• Problem 2: Feedback 4 / Feedback 5 / Feedback 6…

To keep things clean and easily searchable, you can also group the problems you have identified into categories. According to how you like to organize things, you can group problems by product sections/features, corporate projects, product initiatives, etc. With the Freshdesk – Harvestr integration, you will get all your feedback organized and grouped into common problems in no time.

3. Prioritize feedback and customer problems in your product roadmap

The process described in steps 1 and 2 should not be a one time action. Being able to iterate constantly on customer feedback to improve your product is key to success. At the core of fast product iterations is the customer feedback loop: a continuous process that consists of gathering feedback to identify customer needs and pain points, prioritizing those problems in your product roadmap, and finally delivering a solution that offers value to your users, is easy to use and is technically feasible.

Prioritizing the customer problems you have identified is one of the trickiest parts and there are many methods available to you. To start with, you can use criteria such as feedback volume, impact/ease scoring or even customer segmentation. With Harvestr, you can evaluate all your problems and feature ideas according to these criteria and prioritize them accordingly. 

After you ship the most promising features, gather feedback on what is released to start the iteration again. 

4. Close the loop with your customers to deliver an amazing customer experience

The feedback black hole is your enemy, especially if you are working in customer support or product teams. If you do not follow up on the feedback your customers send you, they will simply be discouraged to send you feedback again.

That’s why you absolutely need to get back to your customers in order to show them that their voice is being heard. Let them know that their feedback has been sent to the product team. Let them know when a problem they raised influences the product roadmap, and thank them for their input. Most importantly, announce the good news when a feature they are interested in has been shipped!

By doing that, you will enter a virtuous cycle – higher customer satisfaction meaning more feedback meaning better products meaning higher customer satisfaction. And last but not least, closing the feedback loop will truly set you apart from the competition!

We hope that this article will help you leverage customer feedback to build the best products for your customers. If you are looking to streamline this feedback management process in Freshdesk, you should definitely have a look at the Harvestr – Freshdesk integration.

As Ash Maurya said, “Life’s too short to build something nobody wants.”