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Capturing customer input: As an entrepreneur or startup founder, your customer is everything. They are the source of market knowledge, product development and even sale. Your aim is to provide a solution which the customer finds useful. As an innovative startup, the quicker you’re able to decipher your customer needs, you’re better placed to produce corresponding products. We explore some of these thoughts in managing customer feedback for product development. Herein, I’d like to focus on productive ways to capture customer input and insights to develop your startup strategically.

Customer input can loosely be translated as the voice of the customer for the purpose of our discussion. You can use the literal definition meaning to listen to what the customer is saying. Your strategy defines how to identify what the customer says and convert it into business intelligence. In other words, it is about validating customer input.

To identify your customer input as a business, you need to identify touchpoints with your customer. Typical business touchpoints are – marketing and sales, customer care and in some cases product managers. Other touchpoints can be market research papers, common surveys and input you can gather from other sources.

Key areas of influence for a startup in using customer input are:

• Product development if you are using the MVP – Minimum Viable Product approach.
• Market survey to identify or validate your solution framework
• To understand general interest in your product set or solution frameworks
• Provide valid data for investors about genuine gap in the market
• Possible pricing brackets based on what your customers might be willing to pay

5 Key Benefits of identifying Customer Input

Here are the top 5 benefits of capturing the customer input effectively. As with everything, you can easily get inundated with lots of information. It is important to segregate valuable information and develop a process to differentiate between valuable feedback and unrealistic ones. A key strategy would be to create boundaries for discussions. Although it might restrain creativity slightly, it provides you with valuable feedback.

The key benefit areas of validating customer input are:

1. Continuous Product Development

You can eliminate a lot of wastage during product development if you are in close contact with your customer. It removes the guesswork in product feature development and resource allocation, thus reducing waste. A typical example is when you develop a feature for which a customer is not willing to pay. Such a feature will be recorded as a failure in the company’s books.

2. Prioritisation of customer needs

Gathering feedback is often very tricky. The key distinction lies in the hierarchical categorisation of these requests. You will need to achieve the balance between key customer requirements, their importance and cost-benefit analysis. A weighted ranking mechanism is often a very good way of segregating these customer requests. One such simple mechanism is the use of the MOSCOW rule for managing requirement hierarchies

3. Competitor Feature Analysis

Most often our competitor analysis is limited to direct competitors identified during market research. However, a product analysis/feature analysis ideally should tie together the best of available features. In the software sector, a customer is used to a variety of applications and features on a daily basis. The voice of customer (VOC) research enables us to understand customer requirements. It also helps us to visualise minimum expectations of a customer and gain insight into its background.

4. Mitigate Customer Churn

Customer churn refers to the loss of a customer. The voice of customer (VOC) process not only enables you to understand customer requirements but also shows the customer that you care enough. You will need to manage this relationship once you start the feedback process. But a customer is less likely to complain if their feedback/value addition is treated with respect.

5. Marketing Channels

Your customers become the messengers of your product. It is naturally hard to incorporate every feedback you gather through this process. If you are able to incorporate a few, the customers who were a part of your Voice of Customer (VOC) process become your marketing agents and will play a large role in tooting your horn.

This however has to be a  careful process and held genuinely to gain trust and the relationship with a customer in the right manner

How to capture customer input? – 5 practical tips

While we talk about the benefits of gathering customer input, we ought to talk about the practical ways in which you can identify this information. Your options vary from talking to customers, gathering surveys or even looking through your software usage logs. All these act as data entry points for your customer input. These can be used in a formulated manner to gather insight and develop products more effectively to aid your strategy.

1. Asking Customers Directly

I would be very silly to be promoting this as a groundbreaking observation. But we try to encompass the standard – surveys, feedback forms, customer interviews, focus groups, etc in this wider bracket of gathering information from the customer. Some popular tools for gathering this type of feedback include google forms, Qualtrics, Survey Monkey, etc.

Although we state these as the most popularly used format, customers are often tired of these surveys. Very few customers provide genuine or useful information via these surveys. The channels for gathering customer feedback have changed significantly and moved on from Surveys and interviews. In that respect, we move to the most common point of information collection.

2. Social Media

Social media is the most common mode of communication. We have seen customer complaints, positive appreciations, deliberations, debates etc all on this one channel. The challenge on this front is to filter out useful information. But it does provide the necessary statistics for the type of information/feedback. It enables a product development wing to quantify a customer need and place it in the overall business context.

With social media, the challenge however is in information segregation. Since there is little control or policing over the information being shared, sometimes a lot of irrelevant information is exchanged in the process. If the user takes feedback from social media with a pinch of salt, it acts as a good starting point for this information to be utilised.

3. Customer Complaints/Tickets

When customer feedback reaches the mechanism of a complaint/ticket – it naturally takes a higher position in terms of the seriousness of an issue. An issue that is tracked on a customer complaint or ticketing tool needs to automatically occupy a higher priority. Measures must be taken to ensure that these items are discussed earlier and if found relevant added to the corresponding project plan.

The ticketing mechanism is a great way of staying in touch with an individual customer but also a great way to understand what the basic requirements of a customer are.

4. CRM Systems

A common communication gap lies between sales and marketing and the product development team. This is usually resolved with an agile project planning process where the key stakeholders are involved in the development process. In a set-up where this methodology is not followed, a keen eye has to be maintained on the CRM system.

The sales team is constantly out in customer conversations where the voice of the customer is quite prominent. Any such notes are to be made on the CRM system with constant access to the product development team. This information needs to be filtered on a regular basis to capture the VOC – voice of customers and incorporate it into product development. Popular CRM systems are Hubspot, Zoho, SalesForce

5. Customer Behaviour Analysis

This would be a beautiful tool to incorporate into Voice of customer (VOC) analysis. This process allows the product development team to identify customer behaviour and a customer’s hidden needs. Not all of the customer’s needs are vocal. A lot of them are needs expressed through a customer’s frustration – such as pressing 2 buttons to perform one action or going through an annoying process of interactive voice response to talk to the right representative. Some of these never reach a company through complaints or sales meetings.

But these frustrations exist and can be identified through different means. It might be through shadowing a user, analytics of a website that monitors time spent at a particular section/page of a website. It can even be through an in-store video camera that captures customer insights. There are a few challenges to achieving this effect, but these insights can provide some incredible pieces of information which not only enables you to stay ahead of the competition but also meet customer needs.

These are our top 5 suggestions for capturing customer input. Please do share your opinions, we would love to discuss the same.