If your engineering organization craves more granular customer insights, think about trying these 3 approaches –
NPI Feedback – NPI stands for New Product Introduction. In companies with a large product development focus, a lot of highly valuable information can be collected from customers early on in their use of a new product. That information can help a company assess whether the product is living up to the “sales pitch” and helping customers accomplish what they had hoped with the product when they purchased it. An NPI-focused customer feedback process can also help identify systemic issues earlier, help assess the growth potential of new products, and gain assessments around the professional services and support provided to customers during setup and testing.
Support Case and Customer Feedback Analysis – Your organization likely already tracks the number, types, and content of support requests by major product line and uses that insight to help develop patches and new releases. But, are you feeding support-oriented VoC back to engineering? If not, this is a great place to look – find the common questions, concerns and needs for your major product lines that are raised through service/support transactional studies. Package and share that information with the product engineering teams.
VOCE, or Voice of Customer through the Employee — Build a process for your front-line employees to pass back customer feedback in a systematized way. Cataloging and mining the feedback from sales, delivery/install technicians and service professionals will yield more granular feedback about what’s working well and where there are opportunities to improve customers’ perceptions about your products.
Krista Roseberry
VP, Consulting Services
Walker
