How important are customers to your business? Seriously. If you're not listening to customer feedback, how do you know you're building what your customers want? And if you're not building what they want, how are you going to make money?
The benefits of using a feedback board
Three main points. Prioritization, communication, and building trust. Let's break them down, one by one.
1. Prioritization
If you currently collect customer feedback in some way, I bet it can be messy. Support emails, live chat widgets, tickets. Where do you put it all? How do you track the popularity of requests? In other words, how do you prioritize?
In an interview with Maxime Berthelot (Buffer, PixelMe) he shared his concerns with prioritization:
When multiple customers request a feature in a short period of time, it may seem like an important thing. But in reality, there can be a much bigger issue, only that the requests are more spread out over time. The importance of requests is not obvious.
2. Communication
From a customer perspective, "Contact us" email forms always feel like a black hole. If anybody responds, it's mostly "I will pass that to the team." The end.
I get it. It's impossible to keep track of individual requests and update interested customers as you progress.
What if I tell you it can be better? Much better, trust me:
- A customer writes you an email with a feature request.
- You post their idea on your FeedBear feedback board and reply with a link telling them they can follow your progress there.
- Now, that same customer will also vote on other ideas. Maybe express their opinion in the discussion. More feedback! 🎉
- Next time, they know where to share their ideas. No emails! 🎉
- As you progress, they automatically receive updates. Painless follow-ups! 🎉
See? I told you.
3. Building trust
This one is simple. Collaborating on your roadmap with your customers makes them trust you more. People like to know what to expect. It also gives them something to look forward to.
Customers who trust you are more loyal than those who don't. That also means they spend more money.
In summary
Listening to customer feedback is essential for growing your business the right way. Don't spam your customers begging for their opinion on the things YOU think are important.
Let them have their say. Don't act as a black hole while doing it. Reward them for their time by sharing your progress. Do it efficiently with FeedBear.
FeedBear provides you a feedback board for your customers. They can leave their ideas and suggestions, vote for their favorites and discuss them.
FeedBear automatically follows up via email and maintains a roadmap that updates itself as you assign statuses to ideas. You can create multiple boards to separate different kinds of feedback.