The Role of Customer Feedback in Digital Strategy

If you say you care about user feedback… but you don’t act on user feedback… you don’t care about user feedback. You just care about collecting data. CEO’s have a vision for their company, which is important. But that vision can become a roadblock when it prevents the company from adapting to meet the needs of users. Feedback from users needs to be the force that guides strategy if the company wants to stay relevant. Here’s a real-world example: I’m working with a company focused on a specific population. They care so much about understanding their user, they’ve partnered with a large nonprofit that’s helping us refine the product for them. We didn’t just whip up a survey and call it good. Before we go national with the survey, we’re interviewing individuals from this population to test it out. We’re asking follow-up questions and digging into their feedback. We’re using science to refine our tools so that when the survey is distributed, the data we collect will be meaningful and actionable. Compare that to what I see too often, which is companies making minor tweaks that don’t go deep enough or skipping the feedback altogether. If you just guess instead of truly understanding, you end up with a product that doesn’t meet user needs. This user feedback process takes time and resources, but the payoff is a product that is built with users, not just for them. It’s an ongoing cycle—listen, learn, adapt, and grow. That’s how you stay competitive. #userfeedback #sciencestrategy #fractionalcso

Over the last several weeks, Tipalti has hosted several customer advisory boards across the globe. One in NYC for US clients (by Far our best attended ever!), one EU CAB in Amsterdam, and our first-ever internal CAB with key customer-facing subject matter experts. CABs are an excellent way to engage with and deepen client relationships, but the real objective is to get deeper, more contextualized customer feedback to better inform your product and other business-related decisions. Here are a few insights I have garnered from our recent experiences: 1. The Impact of Listening: The power of Active Listening (aka #reflecting) can never be understated. Hearing first hand feedback from a customer while you look them in the eye, asking questions to clarify understanding, and then expressing that you are genuinely considering that feedback into your decision-making helps to improve your business while making customers more loyal. These conversations also help ensure your team is putting the customer at the center of their decision-making. 2. The Power of Human Connection: There is a distinct difference to capturing feedback in-person vs digital methods of capturing need. Businesses often prefer to use spreadsheets to make decisions and that is very important. But relying too heavily and solely on this, without getting the deeper understanding of Why clients care about certain things and without fully appreciating the Emotion and excitement or frustration levels tied to the feedback can lead you off track. There is an important place for human-to-human interaction in business and those who get that will ultimately run a more successful business imo. 3. The Value of Collaboration: These CABs are, by nature, cross-functional efforts to pull off. Customer marketing may pull the event all together, customer success and account management helps to recruit attendees, product guides much of the content and conversation, and customers may also help to inform the topics and agenda too. At the event, everyone is engaging with one another. After the event, these different groups need to synthesize the input, prioritize it, share the learnings with business leaders, and action the learnings. These are big undertakings but they pull the entire company together to focus on the customer as their north star and that alone is transformative. Thank you to Leslie Barrett, Paola Johnson, Veronica Wynkoop, Irina Musteata, Reut Golan, Gil Vind Picciotto and everyone involved in making these 3 CABs a great success!

Without a continuous improvement practice, the business has no place for customer experience feedback to land. 🛬 Regular feedback and data on our customer's service experience helps to guide and inform how our business strategy, service strategy, and operations need to improve in order to deliver better value to the customer. But if you don't have the operational mechanisms in place in your organization to intake that customer feedback and put it into practice in a continuous manner, then it's not going to change anything, and XD will continue to be disconnected from the business. You have to design the internal processes for reviewing the feedback, determining validity, priority and potential impact, and then have the process defined to navigate solutioning and decision-making (what should change internally to improve the customer experience?), and measure the impact. Without this operational structure in place, your feedback will hit a dead end. This is why service design, process improvement, and business analytics work hand-in-hand, and it's the cross-disciplinary, integrated methodology that my team employs in our work with clients. ⚡ Business leaders - Don't just collect user data and feedback. Discovery is great. But if you don't have the pathways to do something with it, you are not ready to see ROI on your discovery investment and you have not set up your XD teams for success. ⚡ Designers and design research teams - You have to work with your business partners to ensure that there is a soft landing for the feedback you are gathering. Our scope needs to go beyond the customer experience and stretch into the business to help our organizations change their culture and practices to ensure better integration of XD into the core of the business. We do this by promoting continuous improvement mindset and practice. It's not easy. But it's the path forward, and this is why service design is actually design leadership. #servicedesign #experiencedesign #designresearch #continuousimprovement #processimprovement #design