Your Product Team and Your Customers Should Be Working Together
Your product team is busy. Really busy. Busy making things, fixing things, occasionally breaking things. The product team is the roaring engine of the race car that is your company. They have ideas of their own on what to build.
Your customers are your true use-case experts, so aligning their experiences with the insight already possessed by the product team is a no-brainer. While it has become conventional wisdom that you can’t ignore your customers, you must also make sure to respect the insights earned by the people who bring your company’s vision to life. When you introduce a Voice of Customer (VoC) measurement and management system, you’re really evolving an ecosystem that already exists.
Wantoo provides a way to place customer intelligence in front of the teams best equipped to act, quickly and unobtrusively. You can use an Idea Board to gather suggestions that are already in your pipeline, either from your support systems (Zendesk, etc.), or from the always-on, always-loud social media channels like Twitter.
Your product team’s own thoughts and findings can be centralized with the first-hand insights of your users. Once your customers’ ideas are in one place, more nuanced discussion can take place, and certain themes may emerge throughout the process that guide you towards a more refined product effort, or in a new direction entirely.
Stakeholders (internal and external) are then kept up-to-date on the status of each idea as it comes to fruition.
A prime example of this concept in action is Emily Carr University, one of the most respected design schools in the world. When opening a new campus, the Emily Carr team reached out to a wide audience: from faculty to students to community leaders in the region where the new campus is being built. The challenge: design a curriculum relevant to the locale, locals, and student body while leveraging the University’s existing strengths.
This is the Emily Carr Idea Board, a comprehensive––and comprehensible––wish list that can actually be acted upon.
You don’t have to be major design institution or a huge company with deep pockets to benefit from a VoC tool this simple and powerful. All you need is a desire to listen, and a commitment to excellence. Give Wantoo a try for free.
