Productification

Gathering and Managing Customer Feedback with UserVoice

In the current software arena, more and more companies are moving towards SaaS (Software as a Service) model where the application is hosted as a service provided to customers over the Internet. For some companies moving to a SaaS offering also implies leaving behind the traditional methods of acquiring new customers, maintaining and listening to existing customers.

When a product is offered as a service over the net, users from anywhere can become customers and it becomes a challenge to individually get feedback from these customers. No longer it is economical and practical to meet face to face with customers and understand a.) why they are using the service and b) how can the product be shaped to meet the market’s needs.

How does a company listen to it’s customer and incorporate that feedback into the product development process as well as keeps it’s customers informed?

There are conventional methods like email, forums and survey forms. These methods require significant effort in collecting, organizing and presenting information coming from various sources.

Another school of thought proposes to read the requests and throw them away. The argument here is that the most important requests / suggestions will keep popping up and those (along with your product vision) will be the guiding mechanism for product enhancements.

Gathering feedback and collecting that feedback is very important to product organizations. The biggest payback of collecting user feedback becomes evident during the product discovery phase. This data help executives makes an informed decision as to which product to pursue and why, thus bringing products to market that their customers would love to use.

Recently, I came across a service, UserVoice that provides a consumer feedback utility for communicating with customers. UserVoice presents a very simple interface to allow users leave feedback and suggestions. The model seems very similar to Digg, where users either create a new request or vote for an existing request. The feedback is organized by popularity, where requests with higher votes bubble up. It’s a simple concept, but delivered in a very intuitive and effective way.

UserVoice reduces request redundancy by providing matches of existing requests as users type in the feedback box. In addition every user is given a fixed number of votes (they call it weights) they can use, that makes users wisely use their allocated votes. The votes get recycled as the company marks requests as completed. Users can also get more votes by providing their demographic information.

Overall, it seems a very simple and effective way to gather and record feedback, requests and suggestions from customers.