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How To Drive

Product Innovation
From Customer Feedback in Your Community




        a publication of
How To Drive Product Innovation
From Customer Feedback In Your Community

Ask any product manager what drives product innovation, and they’re likely to give you all
kinds of answers: market research, leadership direction, brainstorming processes, innate
feel for the market and space, the list goes on.                                                                           Contents
No matter the product or driving force behind it, the goal is ultimately to meet the needs
and desires of your customers. It follows, then, that their feedback, communication,                      •	   How To Drive Product Innovation 	
                                                                                                               From Customer Feedback In 	
                                                                                                               Your Community......................................1
and perspective should be taken into consideration along every step of the product
development process, from brainstorming, to evaluating existing products, to examining
those from your competition.
                                                                                                          •	   Asking For Feedback: How To 	
                                                                                                               (And How Not To)................................... 2


We already released a white paper about how to solicit great feedback, but any feedback                   •	   Asking For Feedback In Your
                                                                                                               Customer Community........................ 4


                                                                                                          •	
is only as good as what you do with it. Which brings us to the topic of this e-book: how to
                                                                                                               So You Have Feedback. 	
drive product innovation from customer feedback you gather in your community.                                  Now What?................................................. 5


                                                                                                          •	   Closing The Feedback Loop............ 7


                                                                                                          •	   Conclusion............................................... 9




                                                                                              How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community        1
Asking For Feedback: How To (And How Not To)

Before we dive into what to do with your customer feedback once you have it, let’s take a
crash course in asking for feedback. Follow these five tips to get started collecting great,
actionable feedback:
1	 Define your goal FIRST. If you want clear feedback that you can base decisions on, you first have to define
   the decisions you’re trying to make with it. Do you want to improve conversions from your website?
   Create a more intuitive product? A more effective pricing structure? Clearly answer that question for
   yourself before turning it over to your customers, and be sure not to give them feedback-fatigue by
   asking about every goal you have all at once—a good feedback structure will bring you in constant,
   seamless contact with your customers. It allows you to ask different questions and receive different
   feedback regularly; it does not blast your customers with the burden of fulfilling all your feedback goals
   in one heavy-handed session.
2	 But leave room for open-ended responses. This tip may seem to contradict the first, but in reality it actually
   compliments it. You need to be specific with your customers to lead them in the direction you’re
   interested in, but you also want to provide them a with a place to tell you their open-ended thoughts,
   criticisms, and praise. You can’t know what you don’t know, so unless you encourage them to tell you
   anything else that might be on their mind, you could be missing some crucial feedback.
3	 Ask in a way that encourages customer conversation for exponentially more interesting feedback. It’s one thing
   to ask your customers what they think about your latest product and to listen to their unique responses
   one by one. But ask them in a community of customers, and you’re likely to notice something powerful
   emerge. One customer poses a product suggestion, for example, and their fellow customers jump in to
   agree, disagree, or piggy-back on top of the original idea to propose an even better one. Unleash the full
   potential of customer feedback by encouraging this conversation to unfold.
4	 Don’t expect your customers to come to you. Meet them where they are for the best feedback. Depending on
   who your customers are, you’re likely to encounter them in different places: on your Facebook wall, on
   your website, on Twitter, in search, or on their mobile devices. When you ask for feedback where they are
   (instead of expecting them to come to you, your survey link, or your phone call), you show that you really
   care about them. And isn’t that why you’re asking for feedback in the first place?
5	 Your feedback is only as good as what you do with it. Don’t forget to close the feedback loop. Are you
   considering suggestions proposed by your community? Let them know. Implemented a customer idea
   already? Sharing that is guaranteed to make your customers feel heard and appreciated—feelings they’ll




                                                                                                                    How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community   2
remember when they’re choosing between you and your competition the next time around. What about
suggestions that don’t make sense or that you don’t have the resources for? Sharing this transparently
(and tactfully) will make your customers feel heard, respected, and will encourage them to come back to
you with all of their feedback in the future.




                                                                                                      How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community   3
Asking For Feedback In Your Customer Community

There are a number of ways you can solicit this feedback, but it should be a regular part
of you business. Branded customer communities give you a place to be in constant,
seamless contact with your customers, asking them for feedback Anywhere they are—
on your website, ecommerce product pages, social networks, in search, and on mobile.
In addition, customer communities foster conversation between your customers while
making it easy for you to jump in to moderate, contribute, or inform the conversation with
the latest information.

These rich community discussions can provide you with invaluable insight into what
your customers think, expect, and want from you. In many ways this ebook is specific to
feedback gathered from customer communities, but many of the tips and suggestions
presented here can be widely applied to feedback collected from in person conversations,
online surveys, phone polling, etc.



         TechSmith Launches a New Product While Driving Down Cost By Crowdsourcing To Their Community
 TechSmith is the world’s leading screen capture and recording software company, providing services for individuals and professionals in
 more than 50 countries. Originally, TechSmith almost exclusively developed products for Windows users, but as its popularity grew, the firm
 decided to develop a version of its popular product, Snagit, for Mac users. Over the ten-month public beta process, more than 100,000 people
 downloaded Snagit on Mac, over 445,000 people engaged in dialogues on their Get Satisfaction community, and about 1,200 unique topics
 were generated by users.
 The customer community allowed TechSmith to engage its entire user base to play an active role in the product innovation process. In addition
 to producing a better product, TechSmith saved $500,000 by crowdsourcing to the Get Satisfaction community. TechSmith hasn’t needed
 to hire a technical support person, for example, because members of the community answer questions daily, and customers can self-serve
 by seeing if their problem or question has already been addressed. Furthermore, the marketing team uses Get Satisfaction to test and refine
 marketing messages before taking them public. As a result, going into the official product launch, they were more confident in their feature set,
 messaging, usability, and software stability.




                                                                                                     How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community   4
So You Have Feedback. Now What?

First things first: prioritize, prioritize, prioritize!

Odds are, your customers have a lot to say, all of which is valuable and should be listened                                      Timbuk2’s Community
and responded to. But even the biggest, most successful companies have limited                                                     Suggests A Great
resources, so you have to be strategic and selective when it comes to acting upon that                                               New Product
feedback. There are a couple ways you can get started narrowing down the most urgent,                                        Timbuk2 started out as a one-
actionable feedback you find in your community:                                                                              person messenger bag company
1	 Stats. This useful section of your dashboard will help you get a good sense of the priorities of your
                                                                                                                             in 1989 in San Francisco, where
   community, identify your most active members, and gauge the overall sentiment they have towards                           they still do much of their
   you and your products. Scroll down to the Active Topics section to see which topics have the most                         manufacturing today. As the
   engagement in your community. This is a good place to get a sense of what your customers view as the                      years have passed, the firm
   most pressing issues, praise worthy features, or improvable aspects of your product. Click on each topic                  has expanded into several new
   in this view to see the conversation surrounding it specifically.                                                         product lines, some of which have
                                                                                                                             been driven by customer and
2	 Management view. This view allows you to see the most recently posted feedback, to give you a real time
   view of what your customers are thinking and feeling about your brand. It also allows you to filter by tag,
                                                                                                                             community feedback.
   comment type, status, emotion, and product type.                                                                          Back in 2007, a customer posted
    Filter by product type to see product-specific feedback, which will help guide you when you’re focusing                  on the company’s Get Satisfaction
    on specific topics. You can also use the tag system to allocate responsibility to different teams or people,             customer community site asking
    or filter by Sentiment to get a sense of which parts of your business are causing the most unsatisfied                   about Timbuk2 diaper bags.
    customers.                                                                                                               Diaper bags were not, at that
                                                                                                                             time, a part of Timbuk2’s product
Dive Into Your Topics, Sherlock                                                                                              roadmap, but the idea got lots
                                                                                                                             of response from community
Now that you’ve examined popular topics in Active Topics and gotten a more specific
                                                                                                                             members. Less than a year
perspective with the Management View, it’s time to dig a little deeper and start making                                      after the enquiry, a prototype
sense of what you’re seeing. It’s not enough to know what topics your community is                                           of the diaper bag was made and
talking about. You’re going to want to put on your detective hat, and analyze the feedback                                   ultimately launched as a new
                                                                                                                             product, delighting customers and
before taking action.
                                                                                                                             Timbuk2 employees alike.




                                                                                                                 How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community   5
There are two kinds of data you want to pay attention to:

Quantitative. How many people have commented on the topic in question? How many
employees responded? How many of each of the four Sentiments has any given topic
been tagged with? Topics with the most community engagement are probably gaining
traction for a reason, so it’s important to have a good sense of which they are. The Active
Topics section will be helpful in defining this.

Qualitative. Just because there are a lot of comments on a product suggestion, for example,
doesn’t mean it’s popular in your community—in fact, it might mean exactly the opposite!
You’re going to have to get in there and actually read the comments if you want to develop
a true sense for what your customers are asking you for. You can also pay attention to
the sentiment indicators on the left side of your dashboard to get a sense of the mood of
community members talking about various topics.
You have Feedback. Now what?

Your feedback is only as good as the people who see it, so you want to make sure that you
get it in front of the right eyes. All moderators in a Get Satisfaction paid community have
the option to share a topic with employees. Just scroll down the page to the “Share with
employees” function located on the right side of the page, select the employees who you
think should be notified about the feedback, and they will receive an email with an optional
note—if you choose to write one. From there they can document, consider, and reply to
the feedback.
To incorporate more accountability in the Share function (when counting on different
teams to reply to different feedback, for example) you can tag the topic with an
employee’s name, so it’s visible. Standard plans have the option to tag this publically, so
all community members can see the tag. Enterprise communities can tag these privately,
so only internal community members can see it.




                                                                                              How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community   6
Closing The Feedback Loop

Feedback in your Get Satisfaction community comes as one of four categories:
Questions, Ideas, Problems, and Praise. All should be responded to, though it’s important
to prioritize your replies in order of most urgent: Problems, Questions, Ideas, and then
Praise.

It’s important to reply to feedback to let your customers know how much you appreciate
the time they spent telling you how they feel. You can also set the status on each topic to
indicate whether a suggestion is active, pending, rejected, or complete. These categories
help you to organize internally and make it quick and easy for your customers to keep up
with the status of various product innovations.

Once you implement a feature update or product suggestion that was requested by your
customers, be sure to post a community update letting them know and thanking them
for the suggestion. That simple post will go a long way towards fostering warm, fuzzy
customer feelings.
What If It’s Negative?

This is a fear we hear often in this industry: “what if my customers express negative
feedback in my community or social media?” It can be scary to open yourself up to public
criticism, but in this social age your customers are talking about you publically whether
you condone it or not. They are Tweeting about their experiences with your customer
service representatives, posting on Facebook about your newest product, and blogging
about how you compare to your competition.

By providing them with an open, transparent place to provide you with their observations,
thoughts, and feelings about your brand, you’re fostering their trust and giving yourself
invaluable access to great information. By definition it is more fun to receive Praise




                                                                                              How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community   7
than hear Problems or negative feedback—but don’t forget, the latter tend to be more
beneficial for driving product innovation and company direction.

There is another benefit to asking for this feedback in your public community. Most of
us have experienced the sting of criticism that comes over online channels. It often feels
harsher and less tactful than feedback that would be delivered in person. By showing
up and proactively engaging your customers before they have a major issue with your
product, you’re humanizing yourself, your business, and your brand. That doesn’t mean
you won’t still receive negative feedback, but it will make most people think twice before
unleashing an entire year’s worth of pent-up frustration out on you.




                                                                                             How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community   8
Conclusion

Your customers are having conversations about your product all the time, whether you’re
paying attention or not. A Get Satisfaction community brings those conversations to
the center of your attention. Asking your customers for feedback regularly, making sure
that feedback gets to the right teams and people, analyzing it carefully, and keeping your
community up to date about the status of their suggestions, will allow you to develop
transparent conversations and loyal relationships with your customers. By engaging
in regular conversations in your community, you can leverage your customers to
continuously improve your business. After all, who knows your product better than the                  Have questions?
people who use it every day?                                                                           Feel free to email
                                  Try a Demo!                                                       sales@getsatisfaction.com
                                                                                                        or, you can call
                                                                                                          877-339-3997
                                                                                                               and talk to a
                                                                                                               real human.




                                                                                         How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community   9

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How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback

  • 1. How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback in Your Community a publication of
  • 2. How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community Ask any product manager what drives product innovation, and they’re likely to give you all kinds of answers: market research, leadership direction, brainstorming processes, innate feel for the market and space, the list goes on. Contents No matter the product or driving force behind it, the goal is ultimately to meet the needs and desires of your customers. It follows, then, that their feedback, communication, • How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community......................................1 and perspective should be taken into consideration along every step of the product development process, from brainstorming, to evaluating existing products, to examining those from your competition. • Asking For Feedback: How To (And How Not To)................................... 2 We already released a white paper about how to solicit great feedback, but any feedback • Asking For Feedback In Your Customer Community........................ 4 • is only as good as what you do with it. Which brings us to the topic of this e-book: how to So You Have Feedback. drive product innovation from customer feedback you gather in your community. Now What?................................................. 5 • Closing The Feedback Loop............ 7 • Conclusion............................................... 9 How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community 1
  • 3. Asking For Feedback: How To (And How Not To) Before we dive into what to do with your customer feedback once you have it, let’s take a crash course in asking for feedback. Follow these five tips to get started collecting great, actionable feedback: 1 Define your goal FIRST. If you want clear feedback that you can base decisions on, you first have to define the decisions you’re trying to make with it. Do you want to improve conversions from your website? Create a more intuitive product? A more effective pricing structure? Clearly answer that question for yourself before turning it over to your customers, and be sure not to give them feedback-fatigue by asking about every goal you have all at once—a good feedback structure will bring you in constant, seamless contact with your customers. It allows you to ask different questions and receive different feedback regularly; it does not blast your customers with the burden of fulfilling all your feedback goals in one heavy-handed session. 2 But leave room for open-ended responses. This tip may seem to contradict the first, but in reality it actually compliments it. You need to be specific with your customers to lead them in the direction you’re interested in, but you also want to provide them a with a place to tell you their open-ended thoughts, criticisms, and praise. You can’t know what you don’t know, so unless you encourage them to tell you anything else that might be on their mind, you could be missing some crucial feedback. 3 Ask in a way that encourages customer conversation for exponentially more interesting feedback. It’s one thing to ask your customers what they think about your latest product and to listen to their unique responses one by one. But ask them in a community of customers, and you’re likely to notice something powerful emerge. One customer poses a product suggestion, for example, and their fellow customers jump in to agree, disagree, or piggy-back on top of the original idea to propose an even better one. Unleash the full potential of customer feedback by encouraging this conversation to unfold. 4 Don’t expect your customers to come to you. Meet them where they are for the best feedback. Depending on who your customers are, you’re likely to encounter them in different places: on your Facebook wall, on your website, on Twitter, in search, or on their mobile devices. When you ask for feedback where they are (instead of expecting them to come to you, your survey link, or your phone call), you show that you really care about them. And isn’t that why you’re asking for feedback in the first place? 5 Your feedback is only as good as what you do with it. Don’t forget to close the feedback loop. Are you considering suggestions proposed by your community? Let them know. Implemented a customer idea already? Sharing that is guaranteed to make your customers feel heard and appreciated—feelings they’ll How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community 2
  • 4. remember when they’re choosing between you and your competition the next time around. What about suggestions that don’t make sense or that you don’t have the resources for? Sharing this transparently (and tactfully) will make your customers feel heard, respected, and will encourage them to come back to you with all of their feedback in the future. How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community 3
  • 5. Asking For Feedback In Your Customer Community There are a number of ways you can solicit this feedback, but it should be a regular part of you business. Branded customer communities give you a place to be in constant, seamless contact with your customers, asking them for feedback Anywhere they are— on your website, ecommerce product pages, social networks, in search, and on mobile. In addition, customer communities foster conversation between your customers while making it easy for you to jump in to moderate, contribute, or inform the conversation with the latest information. These rich community discussions can provide you with invaluable insight into what your customers think, expect, and want from you. In many ways this ebook is specific to feedback gathered from customer communities, but many of the tips and suggestions presented here can be widely applied to feedback collected from in person conversations, online surveys, phone polling, etc. TechSmith Launches a New Product While Driving Down Cost By Crowdsourcing To Their Community TechSmith is the world’s leading screen capture and recording software company, providing services for individuals and professionals in more than 50 countries. Originally, TechSmith almost exclusively developed products for Windows users, but as its popularity grew, the firm decided to develop a version of its popular product, Snagit, for Mac users. Over the ten-month public beta process, more than 100,000 people downloaded Snagit on Mac, over 445,000 people engaged in dialogues on their Get Satisfaction community, and about 1,200 unique topics were generated by users. The customer community allowed TechSmith to engage its entire user base to play an active role in the product innovation process. In addition to producing a better product, TechSmith saved $500,000 by crowdsourcing to the Get Satisfaction community. TechSmith hasn’t needed to hire a technical support person, for example, because members of the community answer questions daily, and customers can self-serve by seeing if their problem or question has already been addressed. Furthermore, the marketing team uses Get Satisfaction to test and refine marketing messages before taking them public. As a result, going into the official product launch, they were more confident in their feature set, messaging, usability, and software stability. How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community 4
  • 6. So You Have Feedback. Now What? First things first: prioritize, prioritize, prioritize! Odds are, your customers have a lot to say, all of which is valuable and should be listened Timbuk2’s Community and responded to. But even the biggest, most successful companies have limited Suggests A Great resources, so you have to be strategic and selective when it comes to acting upon that New Product feedback. There are a couple ways you can get started narrowing down the most urgent, Timbuk2 started out as a one- actionable feedback you find in your community: person messenger bag company 1 Stats. This useful section of your dashboard will help you get a good sense of the priorities of your in 1989 in San Francisco, where community, identify your most active members, and gauge the overall sentiment they have towards they still do much of their you and your products. Scroll down to the Active Topics section to see which topics have the most manufacturing today. As the engagement in your community. This is a good place to get a sense of what your customers view as the years have passed, the firm most pressing issues, praise worthy features, or improvable aspects of your product. Click on each topic has expanded into several new in this view to see the conversation surrounding it specifically. product lines, some of which have been driven by customer and 2 Management view. This view allows you to see the most recently posted feedback, to give you a real time view of what your customers are thinking and feeling about your brand. It also allows you to filter by tag, community feedback. comment type, status, emotion, and product type. Back in 2007, a customer posted Filter by product type to see product-specific feedback, which will help guide you when you’re focusing on the company’s Get Satisfaction on specific topics. You can also use the tag system to allocate responsibility to different teams or people, customer community site asking or filter by Sentiment to get a sense of which parts of your business are causing the most unsatisfied about Timbuk2 diaper bags. customers. Diaper bags were not, at that time, a part of Timbuk2’s product Dive Into Your Topics, Sherlock roadmap, but the idea got lots of response from community Now that you’ve examined popular topics in Active Topics and gotten a more specific members. Less than a year perspective with the Management View, it’s time to dig a little deeper and start making after the enquiry, a prototype sense of what you’re seeing. It’s not enough to know what topics your community is of the diaper bag was made and talking about. You’re going to want to put on your detective hat, and analyze the feedback ultimately launched as a new product, delighting customers and before taking action. Timbuk2 employees alike. How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community 5
  • 7. There are two kinds of data you want to pay attention to: Quantitative. How many people have commented on the topic in question? How many employees responded? How many of each of the four Sentiments has any given topic been tagged with? Topics with the most community engagement are probably gaining traction for a reason, so it’s important to have a good sense of which they are. The Active Topics section will be helpful in defining this. Qualitative. Just because there are a lot of comments on a product suggestion, for example, doesn’t mean it’s popular in your community—in fact, it might mean exactly the opposite! You’re going to have to get in there and actually read the comments if you want to develop a true sense for what your customers are asking you for. You can also pay attention to the sentiment indicators on the left side of your dashboard to get a sense of the mood of community members talking about various topics. You have Feedback. Now what? Your feedback is only as good as the people who see it, so you want to make sure that you get it in front of the right eyes. All moderators in a Get Satisfaction paid community have the option to share a topic with employees. Just scroll down the page to the “Share with employees” function located on the right side of the page, select the employees who you think should be notified about the feedback, and they will receive an email with an optional note—if you choose to write one. From there they can document, consider, and reply to the feedback. To incorporate more accountability in the Share function (when counting on different teams to reply to different feedback, for example) you can tag the topic with an employee’s name, so it’s visible. Standard plans have the option to tag this publically, so all community members can see the tag. Enterprise communities can tag these privately, so only internal community members can see it. How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community 6
  • 8. Closing The Feedback Loop Feedback in your Get Satisfaction community comes as one of four categories: Questions, Ideas, Problems, and Praise. All should be responded to, though it’s important to prioritize your replies in order of most urgent: Problems, Questions, Ideas, and then Praise. It’s important to reply to feedback to let your customers know how much you appreciate the time they spent telling you how they feel. You can also set the status on each topic to indicate whether a suggestion is active, pending, rejected, or complete. These categories help you to organize internally and make it quick and easy for your customers to keep up with the status of various product innovations. Once you implement a feature update or product suggestion that was requested by your customers, be sure to post a community update letting them know and thanking them for the suggestion. That simple post will go a long way towards fostering warm, fuzzy customer feelings. What If It’s Negative? This is a fear we hear often in this industry: “what if my customers express negative feedback in my community or social media?” It can be scary to open yourself up to public criticism, but in this social age your customers are talking about you publically whether you condone it or not. They are Tweeting about their experiences with your customer service representatives, posting on Facebook about your newest product, and blogging about how you compare to your competition. By providing them with an open, transparent place to provide you with their observations, thoughts, and feelings about your brand, you’re fostering their trust and giving yourself invaluable access to great information. By definition it is more fun to receive Praise How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community 7
  • 9. than hear Problems or negative feedback—but don’t forget, the latter tend to be more beneficial for driving product innovation and company direction. There is another benefit to asking for this feedback in your public community. Most of us have experienced the sting of criticism that comes over online channels. It often feels harsher and less tactful than feedback that would be delivered in person. By showing up and proactively engaging your customers before they have a major issue with your product, you’re humanizing yourself, your business, and your brand. That doesn’t mean you won’t still receive negative feedback, but it will make most people think twice before unleashing an entire year’s worth of pent-up frustration out on you. How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community 8
  • 10. Conclusion Your customers are having conversations about your product all the time, whether you’re paying attention or not. A Get Satisfaction community brings those conversations to the center of your attention. Asking your customers for feedback regularly, making sure that feedback gets to the right teams and people, analyzing it carefully, and keeping your community up to date about the status of their suggestions, will allow you to develop transparent conversations and loyal relationships with your customers. By engaging in regular conversations in your community, you can leverage your customers to continuously improve your business. After all, who knows your product better than the Have questions? people who use it every day? Feel free to email Try a Demo! sales@getsatisfaction.com or, you can call 877-339-3997 and talk to a real human. How To Drive Product Innovation From Customer Feedback In Your Community 9