by Chanakya Kyatham
When the majority of organisations think about the feedback management process, they generally begin and end up with feedback collection. But the reality is that feedback collection is only the first step of the broader feedback management process.
Collecting feedback is important, but if you don’t have the right process for what happens after it’s collected, it’s impossible for you to prepare valuable customer feedback that will benefit your business, your products, and your relationship with your customers.
Although there are several ways of separating the feedback management process into distinct steps, we have observed that mulling over everything from the perspective of 5 successive efforts is especially important – beginning from the collection and finishing with communication.
All things considered, the feedback process ought to begin and end at a similar spot – the relationship with the user or client that provides the information.
Below we have given a short outline of the 5 critical stages of the feedback management process, introduced successively in the order in which they ordinarily happen.
Some steps represent a conversation between your team and the customer. Others represent the internal work that your team needs to do. Together they complete the feedback score.
Although how you navigate each of these steps will be specific to your business, level of maturity, industry, product, and customer demographics, all good feedback control steps will -Focus on the efforts made through the five steps.
Feedback Collection
The first step in feedback management is to collect feedback using customer feedback software, and it goes beyond support tickets and survey responses. Every single touch points your organisation has with its employees – whether they are paying customers or not – represents a critical input into your feedback collection process.
Analysis from sales processes stored in CRM, support tickets, NPS reviews, CSAT scores supporting support, learning from QBR, app store reviews, feedback on product ratings, bug reports, feature requests, praise, results of implementing strategies for a vote…
Everyone in the feedback loop works together to ensure you have a complete and accurate view of your customers’ needs. Aggregation – even when done across multiple inputs and channels – represents the first and simplest step of the feedback control process.
Feedback Organisation
Once customer feedback is collected, the management portion of the feedback management process starts. It starts with organising and classifying that feedback. There are two vital steps that need to be taken here: first, you must get back all the feedback irrespective of its type or source into one central location.
Secondly, you need to appropriately classify that feedback. Because, if your customer feedback stays trapped in the dozens of disconnected teams and tools that first captured it, then it will be impossible to accurately measure the impact of that feedback, individually.
If you don’t create an extensible, easy-to-understand ontology to organize your feedback, you’ll have to run the gamut in the process of managing each individual piece of feedback.
The main motive of any good feedback organization process is to permit your group to precisely quantify the effect of client needs, straightforwardly track the progress toward tending to those necessities, and successfully communicate back to clients when their requirements are tended to in the most scalable way possible.
Without performing this critical step properly, other feedback control techniques are not possible at scale.
Feedback Measurement
After organizing your customer feedback, now is the time to measure their impact to see what is really worth addressing. By measurement, we mean associating an actual numerical value (or a multiple) with the needs of the customer in question.
There’s a major distinction between saying, “This CSM let me know that a client said they really need this feature” and being able to cite anecdotal data that says, “This need affects a lot of customers who, in total, are worth the money. our work.”
The purpose of the feedback measurement system is to allow you to make an apples-to-apples comparison. Instead of each group arguing for the input of different customers, a positive feedback system provides all groups with the same reliable evidence.
The metrics that work best for your organization will vary depending on your business level, business model, product, number of employees, etc., but things like ubiquity, urgency of need, and real impact on all businesses are very important.
Feedback Prioritisation
After assessing the impact of your customers’ needs, it’s time for your team to make a clear decision on what should be prioritized and when.
Feedback prioritisation is a process in which the team evaluates the impact of the various needs of customers against their efforts and as a result of the current business plan and decides what kind of value is transferred from the need.
Often, organizations will use efforts such as critical input against the measured impact of customer needs to determine whether an item should be prioritized. For example, RICE is a well-known method for creating a systematic score based on effort and impact, although there are many systems.
While each step in the feedback loop is important, teams tend to move from collection to prioritization. For instance, has your group at any point taken a customer-reported bug or product improvement request and created a Jira issue directly? Of course, you might have; we all have.
But by moving from collection right to prioritization, your team makes Jira more of a place to welcome ideas than a place to work. Without structure and measurement, feedback control systems do not work. Without proper planning, it’s impossible to measure more than an illusion. Without direct measurement, prioritization is not based on a rational evaluation of the evidence.
Communication
The feedback management process ought to eventually end where it got started – with your users. Having said that, there are essentially two kinds of communication that are remembered for this last feedback management stage: communication with your inner groups, and communication with your outside clients, particularly the individuals who initially presented the necessities which have since been tended to.
Disregarding the way that communication is for the most part characterized just like the last step of the feedback loop, actually, communication ought to happen reliably all through the whole feedback process and is itself an expected second for additional feedback collection (using a customer feedback tool).
Closing the loop with the team and external users is essential to ensure the success of your feedback process; it is also one of the best ways a business can retain customers for life.
Conclusion
Customer feedback is a valuable resource. By properly managing your customer feedback and incorporating it into your product, your product will be more valuable to your customers.
Treat them as continuous partners in the evolution of your products and services, and you will see a growing number of investors investing in the long term in your business.
