Product Development via Customer Feedback

customer feedback
Photo by meg
There are certain companies I am a huge fan of and others, well, they just cant seem to get of their own way sometimes. how to measure a companies potential success in the market place? How quickly and how well a company responds to customer feedback. Integrating and implementing the feedback into making their product or service better is the true value proposition for any company.

Market and Customer Feedback helps a company balance costs with features actually valued by customers. Market feedback and external verification allow you to see what investments are necessary for new products or features and whether the business can afford them.

With Market and Customer Feedback, you can set planning goals and score carding metrics for variables such as:

  • Suggestion cost and value-added score ($ and #).
  • External verification score (#).
  • Implementation difficulty score (#).

You can analyze these goals and metrics by a number of dimensions to find the hidden gems behind performance in the data:

  • Fiscal month / year.
  • Market segment.
  • Brand and product line.
  • Priority rating.
  • Return on investment

Using Market and Customer Feedback

You set targets based on your goals and metrics in Market and Customer Feedback. You monitor your success by looking at how you measure up against your objectives. Dive into your results and what will make better performance through the management of market and customer feedback.

  • Suggestion cost ($): What is the cost of development versus potential sales revenue or competitive advantage?
  • External verification score (#): What is the product proposition in the market right now? Will a change in price points shift purchasing behavior?
  • Implementation difficulty score (#): Are we over-engineering this product feature? Do we need to fail fast?
Real life analysis
Here’s how this played out yesterday for Wordstream and their free keyword research tool which I had worked with before but was really putting through it’s paces now. I noticed a simple yet effective modification to their existing system that would greatly enhance the product and usability. With a quick tweet to them I made my suggestion.

wordstream 1

Most importantly they sent back a note acknowleding my tweet and expressing their appreciation for my suggestion.

wordstream 2

Even better, they thought it was such a good suggestions they immeadiately ran it up the flagpole to the engineering and product development group.

wordstream 3

In the end this company now continues to hold my admiration for the product and the company as a whole.

wordstream 4

Saying thank you costs a company nothing. Customer feedback that can make your product or service even better?

Priceless.

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