Product feedback: Communication breakdown

Product feedback management is challenging

As organizations in all industries race against the clock to get customer pleasing products to market faster than the competition and at a lower cost, customers are clamoring to get more involved in the development process. With a high volume of customer insight coming in from various channels, feedback management becomes a stressful, time-consuming effort that can be overwhelmingly impossible to manage. One of the most important factors in managing product feedback is being able to capture, clarify the details and take action on these valuable customer insights. The most important issue is to use this product feedback to gain a full understanding of your customers’ needs.

Product feedback: Increasing or decreasing communication?

Here is a highly simplified story about a customer whose product feedback did not produce the desired results:

Roger commissioned a very well-known and busy, agency to redesign his new magazine’s website. After sending them some basic requirements, Roger receives the first mock-up of the site and shares his feedback via email, which included the following: “Please change the website background to blue.” The message is received and relayed to the agency marketing and design team that makes the requested changes. However, Roger does not like the ‘look’ the agency has chosen. After countless emails and several miscommunications Roger becomes frustrated and begins to lose patience with the Agency.

The problem: This agency has a high volume of customers who are communicating through various sources, such as, email, phone and online feedback portals that unfortunately are not managed effectively. Lacking a product feedback management system that tracks all incoming insights and communicates them to the other team members, the agency creates customer frustration and increases operational costs.

Let’s revisit this case using OneDesk

With OneDesk’s blended suite of social product development applications, Roger’s product feedback can go directly to team members who can clarify his requests before taking action and thus avoid making several unnecessary product reiterations. By using this four step process and OneDesk tools this communication breakdown could easily have been averted.

• Step 1: Capture feedback and have access to it in one place. OneDesk does this quickly, easily and in real time.
• Step 2: Easily elaborate the details of product feedback to clarify any “grey areas”, by starting a discusson with your customers directly from OneDesk.
• Step 3: Communicate and share information with other team members throughout the process. OneDesk makes sure everyone is working from the same page.
• Step 4: Integrate well defined product feedback into the rest of the development process with OneDesk’s comprehensive requirements and task management tools.

The result of this communication process is increased collaboration which creates a stellar product or service that excels in the marketplace and surpasses customer expectations (and makes Roger happy!).

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