想要有杀手锏的功能？促进开发者与用户间的沟通_AI阅读总结 — 包阅AI

In an industry as competitive as software as a service (SaaS), it’s never been more important to listen to the customer. Amid economic uncertainty and organizational volatility, development teams are facing pressure to contribute to growth. This comes despite budgets being under more scrutiny than ever.

By creating a deeper and more direct connection between product and the customers they serve, organizations can identify the difference maker that helps them succeed in an uncertain market. With a closer eye on customer data, organizations can turn feedback into innovation.

Why should organizations tightly integrate the voice of the customer into product roadmaps?

Listening to the customer can help support business goals around expansion and growth. The customer voice can help influence roadmaps, ensuring products aren’t being developed in a silo. Creating a tight product interlock between customers and engineering/product teams will help you deliver features and services customers want. Ultimately your customers and end users are the ones signing the checks. Failing to listen to and consider their input could be a critical blow to your organization’s attempts to grow.

What kinds of customer feedback should developers look for?

The process of working backwards during product development has become more common. But to really benefit from listening to the voice of the customer, organizations need a better process for collecting the right feedback, and then evaluating, validating and testing those ideas.

The key challenge is that gathering customer feedback isn’t an easy task. Organizations must collaborate across customer, operations and sales teams to gather and synthesize a balanced view with respect to feedback. The “right” kind of customer insights can come from customer surveys but also feedback given to your teams during customer meetings, such as recurring issues or problems they face. These could be specific items flagged, or just ad hoc conversations and anecdotes.

This feedback should then be collected into a central repository. This is something field chief technology officers (CTOs), customer-facing teams and other relevant stakeholders should be able to add to or flag suggestions already on the list that other customers have mentioned. From here, product development can narrow this down to the top three to five areas to focus on — either ones that match the roadmap or that have been flagged by multiple customers.

Development can also categorize other suggestions into what they do now, what they do later and what they will never do, further helping to sharpen their focus. This makes it very clear to customers that you won’t deliver anything that goes against what your core product offers.

With a focus decided, development can take ideas to customer advisory boards to validate and get feedback before investing resources into creating something that could potentially be unviable. Early-access programs can also be helpful for getting real-world customer feedback while also showing customers who may have requested a feature that you have listened to their concerns. These users may then be more invested in testing and give you richer feedback.

Customer input is absolute gold dust for informing the product roadmap. It turns guesswork into a more exact science. This kind of product interlock requires a significant cultural shift, which takes time and effort but will ultimately enable development to listen more closely to the customer and deliver customer lifetime value.

Should development still look to product metrics to influence innovation?

Product metrics have a key role to play. Listening exclusively to the customer could result in creating solutions that are too tailored to specific use cases or problems. Metrics can provide balance. And luckily, the majority of SaaS products have a vast array of metrics that show how customers use and engage with your solution.

These metrics are most valuable in the form of insights that provide critical clues for product development and strategy. For example:

• You can explore how individual customers are interacting with products to see what features are and aren’t being used, and those that customers may be struggling with. This can validate whether customer requests to improve specific problems are correct.
• You can establish whether new services or offerings are performing well and the impact they are having on revenue and growth. From a business perspective, you want to understand how new solutions improve metrics such as retention and engagement. These metrics can illustrate the benefits of listening to the customer to a broad set of stakeholders.

Working with metrics, insights and customer feedback together provides the balance needed to ensure development is working with the whole picture in the frame.

What steps can development take to adopt a customer-first approach?

Realigning customer success teams with product development would be a good first step. This will get more developers and product specialists on customer calls to hear about customer challenges firsthand. This allows them to dig into problems and make suggestions or flag ways they could improve the experience. It allows the customer to feel much more involved. Talk with your customer-facing teams every day.

Next, organizations need to capture customer feedback centrally to drive conversations on innovation and address identified defects. Having weekly calls between product and customer success can help to find a balance between customer feedback and product metrics. They can also give clarity on what to move ahead with and what ideas go on the back burner.

To drive this tighter interlock, product teams should first answer these questions:

1. How do you currently get customer feedback? Consider the processes in place and whether a new process is needed to collate it all in one place.
2. How are you listening to and advocating for customers? How often are conversations with customers happening, and how often do requests or frustrations get sent back to development?
3. How are you validating ideas with customers? Consider the processes you have in place to validate and test new features and collect feedback on how to improve them.
4. How are you closing the feedback loop in a timely manner? Customers want to hear an answer, even if the answer is not now or not ever.

This will establish a starting point that puts organizations on the path to delivering the solutions customers want, which can be the difference between surviving and thriving in today’s uncertain market.

How else can listening to the customer help?

Listening to the customer can help you adopt customer service operations (CSOps), which will reduce the unpredictability of problems affecting your customers. There is no such thing as fault-free software, and anything designed by humans is bound to have issues. But with CSOps, teams can minimize the impact of problems and maintain a best-in-class experience, even during outages.

The key to success is being able to communicate with customers. The majority of organizations today first find out about problems from their end users. This is the start of a bad experience. Instead, organizations should be able to detect and remediate problems before customers even notice. However, barriers between teams slow down incident response and leave customer service teams in the dark over the nature of the problem and progress around resolution.

Organizations need to urgently create direct lines of communication between the voice of the customer and those who can fix problems. With this comes a more predictable approach to incident response that mobilizes the right people, but also allows communication about open cases to customer teams and other internal stakeholders.

With unforeseen or unpredictable problems, CSOps can deliver a real-time, predictable way of communicating with customers that can help turn a negative experience into a positive one.

To drive growth, organizations must shift to a mindset that champions the customer and their voice. This will drive innovation, improve the end-user journey and create a more loyal customer base that cannot live without your solution.