Table of Contents
Compared to internal experiments, how much of your innovation comes from customer feedback?
To help you innovate through customer feedback, we asked marketing leaders and CEOs this question for their best insights. From ensuring product success to staying on top of trends in your industry, there are several viewpoints that may help you drive innovation through customer responses.
Here are eight ways customer feedback is crucial to innovation:
- Ensure Product Success
- Avoid Mistakes with Customer Feedback
- Understand What Features to Add
- Adjust Based on Customer Usage and Traffic Patterns
- Let Feedback Determine What Products to Sell
- Use Reviews to Add Products to the Development Pipeline
- Take into Account all Types of Feedback
- Stay on Top of Trends in Your Industry
Ensure Product Success
Very real input from our consumer panels is integral. Otherwise, innovation efforts will only reflect the personal feelings & choices of the product development team, marketer(s) and/or top management. Without sensory evaluation initiatives utilizing consumers, market successes will be sporadic and development timelines very long.
This implies that the timely, successful development and launch of new products depend on the manner in which decisions are reached and new product strategies are formulated. This is where sensory evaluation science reduces the risk of product failure.
When consumer needs are not addressed in the development or optimization of a product, it is unlikely that the new product will be successful if launched.
Wally Simon, SCORE
Avoid Mistakes with Customer Feedback
While the idea of innovating by “failing fast” may work in some industries, a lot of tech companies work with clients who have no tolerance for mistakes. For example, our payroll software doesn’t have the luxury of messing up things like tax filings as we tinker toward perfection. So for companies like us, customer feedback is way more important than experimentation. It’s critical for improving existing functionality and for identifying opportunities to develop innovative new features.
Elliott Brown, OnPay Payroll Services
Understand What Features to Add
As a young startup our company is constantly weaving customer feedback into our processes and SAAS platform feature development roadmap. Our architects provide the overall framework for where the platform is headed but the filling in of details is >60% dependent upon customer input.
Michelle Tinsley, YellowBird Holdings Inc
Adjust Based on Customer Usage and Traffic Patterns
As the former CMO of an optimization software company, I can tell you that customer feedback is responsible for 100% of innovation. That’s because any changes you make to your website or product, regardless of whether those changes are driven from internal ideas or customer requests, will ultimately be voted on by your users/customers, and their usage and traffic patterns will tell you whether they’re a good idea (or not). That’s customer feedback, pure and simple. The only difference is that your internal experiments are created in-house and then tested on customers, who give you their feedback, versus direct customer feedback, which is then incorporated and tested. The path to innovation is a little different in each case (internal versus external), but in both cases, it all comes back to customer preferences.
Kim Ann King, New Leaf Communications
Let Feedback Determine What Products to Sell
Our dedicated cult following of fantasy and fandom fans serves as the inspiration behind each design, so our customer feedback is of high value. For example, in the past, we’ve discontinued selling certain jewelry pieces to make way for new collections – only to begin selling the pieces again after popular demand. Further, we enjoy brainstorming new designs internally and look forward to the reaction from our audience. Our innovation comes from equal parts experimenting and considering the customer feedback of the experiment.
Breanne Millette, BISOULOVELY
Use Reviews to Add Products to the Development Pipeline
We believe that our customers’ feedback and reviews help fuel our innovation. We strongly feel that successful innovation starts and ends with customers. It is essential to understand the customer’s needs. After all, customers love it when they are heard and responded to positively. While we also conduct market research to gather customer feedback, we have a system to communicate with them directly. Our company looks into any user feature requests via Canny. Accordingly, our team then starts analyzing the feedback and works on it. Anything above 30-40 votes, we add it to our development pipeline. Our motto is simple; we ensure that our innovation responds to the customer’s needs. This is also one way of improving the company’s sales and customer relationships.
Shilpi Puri, Recruit CRM
Take into Account all Types of Feedback
Ninety-five percent of our innovation comes from customer feedback. The importance of obtaining feedback is undeniable when it comes to the success and sustainability of an organization. Feedback can either be solicited or unsolicited, meaning that customers can reach out with their thoughts on a product by submitting a comment through social media, emailing directly for help, etc., or they could not voluntarily offer up any opinions but you are able to dig in and find them through analytics tools such as Google Analytics to see what trends people may have been searching for which might indicate how well your company is doing in certain areas.
Adil Advani, MyPrep
Stay on Top of Trends in Your Industry
Just over 50% of our innovations come from customer feedback. It helps us stay on top of new trends in our industry and see where we need to put more focus going forward. When you’re innovating products with such fast turnover cycles like ours, being constantly plugged into your market research is essential for survival.
Jar Kuznecov, Water Softeners Hub
