The Value of Direct Feedback in Product Management

Adding a direct end-user Feedback mechanism to your product will be your best product management tool. 

We have recently added Slash commands to our Messaging interface to give users shortcuts to a range of tools from reminders to creating Salesforce leads in one simple action. When we began to roll out these features our Lead Software Engineer, Ismael Rivera, suggested we add a /feedback command to allow us get direct feedback from our actual end-users. “Sure, why not” I said.

It’s straightforward to use - an agent types /feedback in their message dialog box, followed by a sentence of praise or critique and it gets sent to our feedback email address.

All of technical team is subscribed to this address, but as we know developers have an allergic intolerance of email, we also pipe this feedback into a Slack channel for good measure.

Since we know how important context is, when an user types a cryptic comment like “/feedback this feature sucks”, we also receive information such as the username, customer and/or interaction identifier from where it was typed plus timestamps and URLs so that we can look at relevant logs and what was going on when the feedback was provided. Here’s an example of my favorite feature request:

It quickly became apparent that what we were getting was gold - verbatim, real-time feedback from our actual users! What you gain is:

1. Immediate feedback when an issue occurs.
2. The context of what happened.
3. The feedback comes directly from those most affected - the end users - it’s not parsed through layers of supervisors, managers and your account liason - it’s direct and verbatim.

This type of information is brilliant for Product Managers. You can see first-hand the pain points of your end users. You can hear first-hand their feature requests. And you can see how many of them experience the issue and feel the pain or the need for a feature.

To ensure that this feedback continues to come we make it a point of replying to the user via email as often as feasible - this should mean that you strive to reply to all feedback events from your end users - this will show them that you value the feedback and that something is being done about it. Every time we do a site visit or call with end users we highlight the feature and urge them to give us /feedback every time they observe something bad (or good) about the product.

From this simple mechanism we can see:

1. The specific pain points of end users - unfiltered by management.
2. A measure of the frequency of occurrence by end users.
3. A measure of the number of end-users who feel this way.

All this is product management gold - it gives you primary data from which to prioritise features and defects. Implement it, encourage its usage and listen - you’ll be glad you did.

To find out more about Altocloud, please contact us for a demo.