December 18, 2023
How To Involve Customers When Building Products
Published in
To build something that's guaranteed to succeed, involving customers is imperative. Modern customers are educated and demanding expecting personalized solutions that cater to their unique needs, tastes, and preferences.
That's why, without bringing them in, you can't get your hands on valuable insights into their needs. Insights you need to build something that's amazingly customer-centric and ready to sell.
Why is Customer Involvement so Important?
Before discussing how to involve customers when building products, it's important to understand the significance of customer involvement in product development.
Customer involvement is a process of engaging customers throughout the product development lifecycle to gather feedback and insights on product performance, preferences, and experiences.
Involving your customers is crucial for the success of any product. It allows you to understand your customer's needs and preferences. This way, you can understand how to build a product that meets their expectations. By involving customers, you can gain valuable insights that validate your customers' needs and wants, make informed decisions, remain customer-centric throughout product development, and allocate resources accordingly.
Finally, when you involve customers in your product-building process, it also allows you to build a relationship with them. When customers feel that their opinions are valued and that they are being heard, they are more likely to remain loyal to your brand. This can lead to increased customer retention and revenue.
Benefits of Customer-Centric Product Development
Build What Sells Itself
By involving customers in your product development process, you get a better understanding of your customer's needs and preferences. This helps you deliver a more customer-centric product, leading to a higher level of customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty. When your product is customer-centric, it can help you stand out in a crowded market and ensure that your product remains relevant.
Stay Up-to-Date
Customer-centric product development also helps you stay up-to-date. By frequently engaging with your customers, you can identify new trends and opportunities, and bring new features or entire product lines around these new trends.
Reduce Costs
Also, a customer-centric approach to product development can help you reduce costs and increase efficiency. By focusing on what your customers want, you can avoid spending resources on features that are not important to them and instead focus on delivering features that provide value.
Risks of Not Involving Customers
Not involving customers in product development can lead to negative product feedback, increased customer churn, and wasted resources.
If your product doesn’t meet customer expectations, it won't perform well in the market, which can result in lost opportunity and revenue. And this becomes a continuous cycle of building products that don't sell.
Also, not involving customers can lead to missed opportunities for innovation. If you don't engage with your customers, you may miss out on new trends and opportunities that you need to help you create new products and grow your business.
Finally, not involving customers can lead to a lack of trust in your brand. Customers want to feel that their opinions are valued and that they are being heard. If you don't involve them in the product development process, they may feel that you don't care about their needs and lose that emotional attachment to your brand. Business relationships should be treated like "relationships" to build brand loyalty.
Identifying Your Target Customers
The first step to involving customers when building a product is to identify your right target customers. You must have a clear understanding of your customer's demographics, roles, interests, needs, and choices. The lack of such an understanding is a major hurdle in creating personas of your ideal customers making it even harder to build something useful for them.
One way to identify your target customers is to analyze your current customer base or the users of your closest competitors. Check review sites and search for their roles. Find a lot of secondary data from different sources. Based on it, you can almost reverse engineer a pretty accurate persona of your potential customers.
Creating Customer Personas
To reiterate what we just discussed, customer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customer that are based on their characteristics, demographics, roles, behaviors, and goals. Build a customer persona according to your potential customer's needs and expectations in detail and then design products that cater to their needs.
When creating customer personas, it's important to consider factors such as their goals, pain points, and motivations. For example, if you're creating a product for busy professionals, you might want to create a persona that represents a time-strapped executive who values efficiency and convenience.
Conducting Market Research
Conducting market research always helps to gain insights into customer behavior, trends, and preferences. It provides an understanding of what your customers truly need and also helps you identify gaps in existing products.
Market research can take many forms, including surveys, focus groups, and online research. By analyzing the data you collect, you can gain insights into your target audience's requirements and use this information to create products that click.
It's also important to keep an eye on industry trends and changes in consumer behavior. By staying up-to-date on the latest developments in your niche, you can ensure that your products remain relevant and appealing to your target audience.
Gathering Customer Feedback
Gathering feedback from customers is an essential part of the product development process. It's the first step in understanding the needs and preferences of their customers and making improvements to their products or services accordingly.
There are several methods and channels to gather feedback from customers, with their own pros and cons. Here are some of the most effective methods commonly used:
1. Customer Feedback Portal
The most popular method these days to get in touch with your customers and involve them in your product-building process is maintaining a public feedback portal.
A feedback portal provides you with an idea board or a feedback board where customers, employees, and other stakeholders come and share their feedback and ideas.
A good feedback portal also comes with a couple of other features like a product roadmap and a changelog. By maintaining a feedback portal, you always close the feedback loop and stay customer-centric throughout your product-building cycle.
There are many tools in the market but we take pride in what we've built after engaging with hundreds of customers. FeedBear provides you the same along with many other features like commenting, and idea voting for feedback validation.
This is extremely important to make sense of what's important and demanded by most users. FeedBear also comes loaded with a customizable product roadmap and allows you the ability to control the visibility of your customizable roadmap, that's minimal and extremely easy to maintain.
It also comes with a changelog tool that's extremely useful in closing the feedback loop. Once a feature request or a bug fix has been shipped, in a matter of a few clicks, you can announce it on your changelog. Imagine using a single tool to run this whole operation intuitively and easily. FeedBear helps you do that.
Get customer and team feedback easily with FeedBear! Centralize and prioritize feedback, ideas and feature requests. Try FeedBear for free and see how it improves your product development.Sign up now for a 14-day free trial!
2. Surveys and Questionnaires
Surveys and questionnaires are widely used to collect feedback from customers. They are easy to create and distribute (digitally), and they can help in gathering specific and targeted feedback from your customers. You can use online survey tools to create surveys and questionnaires and send them to your customers via email or social media channels.
Surveys and questionnaires can help identify areas of improvement and provide insights into customer satisfaction, preferences, and behavior.
However, it is essential to design your surveys and questionnaires carefully to ensure that you are asking relevant and meaningful questions. You should also keep your surveys short and simple to avoid overwhelming your customers with too many questions.
Compared to a feedback portal, it's not a continuous and engaging process. Rather, it requires a campaign-like operation.
3. Interviews and Focus Groups
Interviews and focus groups are in-person or remote discussions with customers to collect detailed insights about their experiences, opinions, and needs. By talking to customers directly, you can gain deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences. You can use this information to develop better products or services that meet your client's needs better.
But conducting interviews and focus groups can be time-consuming, exhausting, and expensive. You also need to recruit participants carefully to ensure that you're getting feedback from your target customers. Besides, you need to have skilled moderators who can facilitate the discussions and extract meaningful insights from the participants.
4. Social Media and Online Forums
Social media and online forums are another major resource. People use these platforms to connect and share their experiences. They offer plenty of information to help you gather feedback and insights from your target customers. You can
- Monitor social media and online forums to see what people are saying about your products or services.
- You can also participate in these platforms to engage with your customers and get their feedback.
However, these social channels can be challenging to manage, and there is a risk of negative comments and feedback that can go viral. You must always have a strategy in place to handle negative comments and feedback and respond to them promptly. You also need to ensure that you engage with your customers professionally and respectfully.
Summing up, gathering customer feedback is crucial if you want to develop products or offer services exactly or close to what your customers want. Out of several methods to gather feedback from customers, each method has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. You can use a single feedback portal and run an easy, customer-engaging feedback process, or you can combine multiple other processes to collect and utilize feedback. It's up to you. But to be able to do this continuously in a sustainable way should be your priority.
Implementing Customer Feedback in Product Development
Gathering customer feedback is just one part of the equation. What's crucial is implementing it so that it satisfies not only future customers but also the ones who gave their input and helped you build it.
Customer feedback provides valuable insights into how your product is perceived in the market and how it can be improved to better meet the needs of your target audience. Once you've gathered it, what's important is to take action and implement the feedback in your product development process. Here are some effective ways to implement customer feedback:
1. Prioritizing Customer Needs and Wants
One of the most important ways to implement customer feedback is by prioritizing customer needs and wants. By doing so you can align your product-building process with customer expectations. It helps you create features and functions that resonate with your target audience.
Using FeedBear, you can do this easily. It comes with a feature voting that allows users to vote on ideas, feedback, and bug reports with just a simple click. With a couple of clicks, you can filter out the most-voted feedback and get a clear picture of the most demanded requests.
For example, if your customers have expressed a need for a certain feature or functionality, prioritize it in the development process. It will help you create a product that caters to the unique needs of your target audience.
2. Iterative Design and Prototyping
Iterative design and prototyping are effective ways to implement customer feedback. This approach allows you to test as you go, continuously improving the product according to feedback from customers. This helps in creating products with fewer errors and better user experiences.
For instance, you can create prototypes of the product and test them with a group of customers. Based on their feedback, you can make changes and improvements to the product before launching it in the market.
3. Collaborating With Customers
Collaborating with customers throughout the product development process is another effective way to implement customer feedback. This ensures that the product aligns with customer expectations, and helps you create end-to-end solutions that cater to the unique needs of your target audience.
As we discussed earlier, feedback comes with an easy-to-use and customizable product roadmap. This keeps your customers involved with the feedback they provided throughout the building process.
Improve how you handle feedback from customers and your team. Picture an easier way to gather, measure, and rank their feedback, ideas and feature requests. Try FeedBear for yourself to see the difference. Sign up now for a 14-day free trial and see how feedback helps you build better products!
Co-Creation and Customer Collaboration
Co-creation and collaboration can help in creating long-lasting and meaningful relationships with your customers. In today's world, customers are no longer passive recipients of products and offers. They want to be actively involved in the building process, and companies that understand this fact are the ones that succeed.
1. Crowdsourcing Ideas and Solutions
Crowdsourcing involves collecting ideas and solutions from a large group of people. This method helps you gather a range of solutions to a specific problem and can identify innovative and unique approaches that may have been missed otherwise. Crowdsourcing can take many forms, such as online surveys, focus groups, and social media campaigns. By involving your customers in the ideation process, you can create a sense of ownership and loyalty towards your brand.
FeedBear as we discussed provides a very simple idea board that product builders can use anywhere from dedicated portals on custom domains to inside their web apps. The idea board allows us to push feedback and feature requests in seconds. It's very easy, and users don't even have to log in or share their identity when pushing any request.
2. Customer advisory boards
Customer advisory boards are groups of important customers who provide feedback and insights to companies. These boards can help you understand your customer's perspectives and provide a platform for discussing new ideas and concepts. Some companies even provide remuneration and benefits for the customers who join the board, and in return, get access to first-hand insights and customer connections.
It's a powerful tactic but requires careful understanding and execution.
3. Beta testing and early access programs
Beta testing and early access programs allow customers to test the product before the official launch. This helps in identifying bugs and provides critical feedback that can help in refining the product before the final launch. This way, you can create a sense of excitement and anticipation toward your product.
For example, a company that develops video games may create a beta testing program for their new game. They can invite customers to play the game before the official launch and provide feedback on the gameplay, graphics, and storyline. This feedback can help the company improve the game and create a better experience for their customers.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, involving customers in the product development process is critical for creating products that resonate with your target audience. By understanding the importance of customer involvement, identifying your target customers, gathering feedback, and implementing feedback in the product development process, you can create innovative and customer-centric solutions that meet your customer's needs.
Struggling to manage feedback coming from all places? Consolidate customer and team ideas, feedback, and feature requests using FeedBear. Try it out for 14 days, no credit card required.
Get customer and team feedback easily with FeedBear! Centralize and prioritize feedback, ideas, and feature requests. Try FeedBear for free and see how it improves your product development. Sign up now for a 14-day free trial!
