Start-ups! Do you value your customer feedback?
Startups utilize a bundle of technical methods to measure success, for example, industry benchmarks, dashboards, and productivity measurement. Nevertheless, there’s one more thing that is more valuable than anything else, your customers’ feedback. Most of the world’s best products are built on the feedback analysis. Startups are changing so fast and influence whole industries dramatically because their working culture is focused on developing something basic and functional, then making it better based on the feedback.
To grow a business, you have to know why customers are leaving. To understand why customers are moving to other products, you must talk to them. All the metrics in business will not explain you why they’re unhappy, but a conversation will. However, a 10-minute talking to customer can answer the “why” questions that data cannot solve.
Looking for the “why” people use your product, you have more chance to develop something tailored to their needs. Their responses are the vital key to unlock a better experience for future customers.
Taking decisions fast with users feedback
Decisions are hard. Do you know that feeling when there are too many ideas what to do next in your product? When you don’t know what features should be added or what to change in already existing ones? You can just implement it, but will it work for users? Will it make you money?
Well if you are not sure — lets ask the customers!
This may look like this is easy, but in reality, it is very hard. There is a couple of channels that companies use to communicate with their customers nowadays. It was done with the help of an email, but now there are also:
- LiveChat and Skype calls
- Feedback features implemented inside applications
- Social media posts & comments
- Communities and Forums
- Conferences talks with customers in reality
To make our decision more accurate, we have to take feedbacks from all those channels into technical analysis.
Timecamp Feedback Solution
Timecamp is the “timesheet integration to track and bill time spent on projects, the computer time monitoring, the incredible customisation and the granular reporting”. With a huge number of users-“10,000 teams use TimeCamp every day”- feedback is the vital key that help Timecamp develop their softwares much better. Timecamp knows that they have many different ways of collecting feedback, but they felt that sometimes it is not good enough to analyze. On the prioritisation meetings they didn’t have enough time to through the whole list of potential things “to do”. So, Timecamp decided to gather the information into one place. Seems easy? Well, it is not, cause the collected feedbacks are different from channels and source types. Let’s imagine that putting Skype notes and LiveChat conversation into one table, you just can’t do that. This data has to be unified. Also, not all data can be taken by some script. Some information needs to be enriched by people. For example, the feelings of the person who gives us advice — anger, negative, positive or neutral.
Here’s what Timecamp has done:
- Use the Google Spreadsheet as an interface for all of this data.
- Ask people to enrich data with some tags, for example, tags negative/positive, channel, feature request/bug and some more.
- Use Sheetsu to gather the data from sources like LiveChat, email and in-app feedback features straight to Google Spreadsheet.
- Use this Spreadsheet on the meeting to analyze data they need to make important decisions.
Here is the example:
Why spreadsheet?
It is in the wild for a loooong time. Everyone knows what spreadsheet is and how to use it more or less. New people don’t have to spend the time to understand it. Imagine that building a new interface to handle this task — nightmare.
Why additional people?
To make a decision faster! You don’t need to read the whole email to figure out what the emotions of the customers were (anger or neutral). You don’t need to read entire LiveChat conversation to know that this is a feature request. Also, you want to see all feature requests? With that information in Spreadsheet, you can see it in seconds.
Why Sheetsu?
It’s a lots faster to make this integration. You don’t have to maintain a massive amount of code you would have otherwise. Developers can spend time on other things that are also important.
Feedback matters, don’t waste it
We often take decisions taking into consideration problems from only a few people. But the overall scope matters. With the approach you have just read, you will be able to make decisions accurately, and it will minimize the risk of failure.
Feedback occurs, individual elements are needed to ensure its effectiveness. A big stack of responses from many channels such as LiveChat, Intercom, Skype Call or Email, etc. isn’t much good, though. We are necessary to format it up and turn it into useful data. Making use of customer feedback is an essential for any startup looking to provide clients with the products they require. But how?
- First of all, gather feedbacks from every channels we have such as Live chat, Social Media comments, Email responses and even customers usability on our dashboard, etc.
- Categorize and analyze feedbacks. This sounds not easy, but it is just as simple as manual work by managing data from Google Sheets and Sheetsusolution.
- React to our customers feedbacks by our product improvement. Let’s show our users our capacity always meet their demands incessantly.
Doesn’t matter how you collect the data, it’s how you act on feedback that really makes the difference
“Every day, companies solicit feedback from customers, yet only a few translate that feedback into meaning. An even smaller fraction of companies actually take action or close the loop with the customer, to let them know their voice was heard,” says Whitney Wood, managing partner of the Phelon Group, a consultancy that focuses on helping companies better relations with customers. “If you handle it right, the dialog between you and your customers can become the lifeline of your business. To establish and maintain a healthy flow, customer feedback must result in change your customers can see. Change is the most powerful currency to reward vocal and consultative customers.” It’s crucial to act on customers feedback but each startup or other companies should create their own process that has value for them.
Drop us an email at team@sheetsu.com. We are happy to talk with you.
Happy Hacking ^^!
