This is How we Systematically Incorporated The Customer Feedback Loop Into Our Company’s DNA

There are several moving parts in building a product company. The heart of this is building a solid feedback loop with your customers and teams. This feedback loop is much easier to establish when starting out with less than a handful of team members but becomes complex fast as the size, scope, and number of teams grow within the organization. A common denominator across a majority of successful customer-centric companies is they’ve figured out a way to scale this feedback loop with their customers and their teams.

Through the journey of building Ukko Agro Inc., a customer-centric digital ag-tech startup, we’ve attempted a number of ways to establish this customer feedback loop. Some worked much better than others. In this blog, we hope to share the lessons on what worked well.

Build a proactive rather than a reactive culture of listening to your customers

A reactive culture is listing when things are less than ideal for your customer. A proactive culture is collaborating with your customers from early on from concept to release and after. With this proactive approach, our customers felt invested. Even when things were less than ideal, they’ve worked with us as we solved one problem at a time, starting with what mattered the most to them. This customer collaboration has been the key to our growth.

Establish customer success early on and set them as an intelligence-gathering function

Even when you are a very small team, it is crucial to have a dedicated customer success person. When customer success is set as an intelligence-gathering function, beyond supporting their customers onboard, support, etc., the entire company benefits from it. Such an intelligence-focused customer success function can save bandwidth for your product and engineering teams. In our case, our customer success champions regularly connected with our customers with the goal to collect and sort through intelligence to answer two key questions:

A. What do we need to act on now and why?

B. What should be focused on next and why?

The approach has enabled us, as a company, to learn fast about our customers and their goals/challenges while testing our ideas with zero to minimal implementation. Most importantly, this has enabled us to build a strong and collaborative relationship with our customers.

Centralize customer feedback collection for both qualitative and quantitative analysis

While it’s a little easier to collect and organize lagging indicator customer analytics on mobile/web application usage, it is crucial to follow a singular centralized way to collect qualitative data through various touch points with customers. Understanding customer patterns by combining qualitative data and quantitative data will unlock the leading indicators of success with your customers. Another key benefit of such centralized qualitative data collection is it becomes the basis for creating user stories with a clear link to the customer(s) who may be able to give direct feedback on your minimum viable feature approach before any time or resource commitment.

Enable your customers to give feedback on each key function(feature) of your application

Between the outcomes that a product is trying to deliver and the actions your customers/end-users have to take both outside and inside the context of your application (mobile app in our case), there are a few key functions (or features) that are critical to the core value of your product. It’s a good practice to enable your customers to provide feedback on how they “feel” about these core functions. The real value kicks in when the changes/updates you are making to the product result in an overall positive shift towards how customers “feel” about these core functions (or features) and, hopefully, a correlation with increased revenue. A word of caution here is to incorporate these feedback-feeling questions without annoying your customers. Like any other data, this also needs to be combined with both other qualitative and quantitive data sources to understand “so what”.

In Ukko Agro Inc.’s journey, with the goal of scalability and efficiency within our operations to manage the growth we are experiencing, our teams have developed an internal customer success dashboard. The aim of this is to better categorize feedback intelligence that gives us insights into interaction patterns enabling us to learn where iterations can be made to positively impact the user experience. Stay tuned to learn how this internal dashboard is designed to enable us to do more with much less without missing a beat on our customer’s feedback and providing preventative troubleshooting with our applications.