Getting feedback from your customers is a great way to understand how you can improve your business. Your customers will have opinions on what works and what doesn’t. But it’s not always clear how to take valuable impressions of your business and turn them into something tangible. So, how do you use customer feedback to improve your business?
We sat down with our research and design gurus, Kelly Jennings, Head of Research & Development and Kristina Hedberg, Product Designer, to discuss their recent award for research excellence and how someone can use customer feedback to understand and improve their small business.
This interview was edited for clarity
What is research and design?
Hi Kelly and Kristina, Thank you for speaking with me. Kelly, what does Reckon’s Research and Design team do?
Our main focus is to research with, and design for, our customers. We want to best support them as they run their business, whether they use our products constantly, or infrequently.
At the heart of what we do is understand the root cause, or problem, of what’s needed.
The best way to do that is by getting input from our customers by a variety of research methods. With new designs come change, so we mitigate change shock through communications – onboarding journeys, help articles and resources.
The importance of customer feedback
Kristina, at Reckon, we really value customer feedback. How does this feedback inform your R&D process, and how does it translate to improving our products?
Customer feedback helps us focus on solving the right problems and creating features that really matter to our users.
We use feedback throughout the entire process; to help challenge our assumptions, refine ideas, test designs, and to make sure we’re on track with user needs.
After a feature we’ve worked on is released, we keep the conversation going by collaborating with customer-facing teams and monitoring feedback channels. This allows us to make ongoing improvements to ensure the products continue to meet user needs.
Award-winning methods
Typeform is a software company that provides services for online survey building. You both have won their 2024 Research Excellence Award for your work on our Reckon Annual Customer Survey. Kelly, what was your team’s approach that snagged you the prize?
This was a really great honour from Typeform, recognising our inaugural Reckon Annual Customer Survey we sent out earlier this year. We started with our research approach, and outlined our outcomes:
- What did we want to learn from our customers?
- Where did we need input and validation?
- Where were we lacking data and insights?
For the survey itself, we really wanted to make it customer centric.
We did this by using branching logic (surfacing only relevant questions based on previous answers), adding in skippable options, using friendly and clear language for the questions, and only asking questions we intended to action on.
We were really respectful of the time we were asking of our customers to complete this survey, making it as easy to complete as possible.
Five tips on how to use customer feedback
Kristina, what advice would you give on how someone can use customer feedback to improve their small business?
Customer feedback is essential when running any business, so it is important to know what to do with it. A few tips to keep in mind are:
1) Research before you commit to change: Making changes can be expensive, so its smart to get feedback first. Before rolling out something new, ask your customers what they think. It’s a great way to test the waters and make sure the change will benefit them, and in turn save you from making costly mistakes.2) Do research early and often: Make sure you’re staying proactive – don’t wait until something goes wrong to star asking questions. Check with your customers regularly to understand their needs and preferences.
3) Track sentiment over time: Keep an eye on how your customers feel, especially after you make changes. Setting benchmarks is a great way to measure shifts in sentiment and helps you tweak things as needed to stay on track and keep your customers happy.
4) Make sure you’re asking the right questions: Time is precious, so make sure your questions count. Focus on areas that tie directly to your business goals and keep your questions actionable. The more specific you are, the better your feedback will be.
5) Acknowledge and communicate: And finally, show your customers that their opinions really matter. After collecting feedback, let them know how they have influenced your decisions. This helps to build trust and keep your customers engaged.
Celebrate your achievements
Kelly, what else are you and the R&D team proud of accomplishing outside of the award this year?
2024 has been such a big year for the team, and I’m really proud of how we’ve brought customers along on every project we’ve worked on. Alongside the annual customer survey and continuing to develop our Voice of Customer program, highlights include:
1) Refreshing the design in our flagship product, Reckon One. Running a business is challenging, so to help our customers, we focused on making our product more intuitive, user-friendly and modern.
2) Improving the onboarding experience for our customers – helping new customers better understand the product and what’s expected. Starting anything new is always a challenge. We want our customers to get right into the product and know where to begin to save time and run their businesses effectively.
3) Focusing on adding more instructional content. Self-sufficiency empowers our customers, and adding more to our help documentation lets them focus on what’s important.
4) Learning from more than 8,500 research interactions with our customers this year! From sharing early-stage designs and running surveys and polls to conducting interviews, being proactive and involved with our customers is essential to fostering a trusting and collaborative relationship.
5) Designing new features for our customers. Tending to our customers’ needs and making quality-of-life improvements are always at the forefront of our process. Giving our customers more functionality allows their business to grow.
Thank you Kelly and Kristina for your time.
When running your business, using customer feedback doesn’t have to be a struggle. Keep things simple and be curious. Not everyone who uses the goods or services you provide will leave a review or give an impression, but those that do are invested. Building a relationship with your customer base is a sure way of improving your small business and setting yourself up for success.
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