Lately I’ve been jamming on the issue of management of customer feedback[Post1, Post2, Post3].
But, management of customer feedback is not the point.
Ultimately, what matters is the value that delivered to customers. What matters is the value that the customers provide in return to the business. What matters is the pride and joy employees feel upon having been of service to the customers and the world.
To make it easy to make sense of the feedback, we end up putting in systems, tools, processes. Many teams take it further. In trying to get synthesized insights, they adopt automated tools.
While these tools, systems, processes can help make sense of the customer feedback, rarely do they add value to the customer. Thats the main difference here, between activities that add value to the customer and activities that add value to the process. Most of the time, optimizing the part does not optimize the whole.
Another problem with trying to “manage” feedback is that most feedback is useless because it is not specific or talks solution and not problem.
Even when feedback is specific and problem-oriented, current tools and systems in software teams do not enable action on it till much much later. By the time the feedback is processed, synthesized, socialized, internalized by teams, customers have either moved on or found another solution.
Most of the time and effort in grooming, recording, triaging feedback ends up being a waste. It eats into profits by increasing cost and time-to-market.
The only time when investing in management of feedback helps is when:
- there is a culture of continuous discovery, that comes about through directed-research into customer struggles.
- there is a culture of fixing problems as they emerge, instead of filing bugs, tickets and reports for use later in grooming a backlog.
Both need to work in lock-step.
Below Water Level 