What do you do if your career in Enterprise Software is affected by client or customer feedback?

Negative feedback in enterprise software is common due to its complex architecture and the need for customization. Customers expect high performance due to associated workflows. While feedback presents improvement opportunities, addressing customization issues is easier than static system functionality concerns. Consulting platform experts before subscribing is vital as system limitations are challenging to change post-subscription.

In this business, you must ensure that every action your team takes is tightly aligned with key customer success criteria. We refer to it as 'Customer For Life' at my company. It entails ensuring that every step of the sales cycle ensures our customers experience a successful journey. From our customer's first engagement, we must understand their business challenges, and how can our solutions help. We provide industry and persona insights, along with customer references, that resonate and accurately provide a roadmap for success. We present our customers with compelling financial business cases and points of view to establish value. We ensure solutions are implemented on time, and that post-production issues are resolved quickly.

If client or customer feedback affects your enterprise software career, engage actively by listening, taking ownership, and seeking solutions. Use feedback as a catalyst for continuous improvement, honing your skills and knowledge. Communicate transparently with clients, sharing progress on addressing their concerns to build trust. Through consistent delivery of quality solutions and responsiveness to feedback, establish a reputation for reliability and excellence in the industry.

In my experience many times this issues occur when we don’t use Change Management correctly or at all. Our customer’s or business partners want a Lamborghini but only want to pay for pinto! I have heard I am good with change as long as you do it for that division and leave my division along.

As previously discussed, there is often room for customization, and many enterprises opt to further tailor their enterprise software platform after its initial implementation. In such cases, enterprise partners can significantly contribute by collaborating with key stakeholders from the client or project sponsor, emphasizing documentation and workshops to preempt any potential negative feedback down the line.

Effective project planning stands as a crucial cornerstone, serving as a proactive measure to preempt any potential negative feedback for enterprise software from clients. It necessitates substantial investment in resources and training from enterprise software partners. Despite this, the importance of this domain is often overlooked, with more emphasis placed on recruiting experienced consultants or platform architects. Yet, a competent project manager can function as a dependable co-pilot when faced with unforeseen challenges. Hence, a strategic plan, collaboratively crafted with a cross-functional team from the enterprise partner, becomes imperative to avert any adverse experiences in the foreseeable future.

While I agree with this and all the other points covering this topic. We need to figure why this didn’t happen before? Why wasn’t there true end-to-to end accountability from everyone business, executive level and IT. We need to turn the mirror on ourselves and do some real soul searching and ask some very tough questions. Until we do this we will continue to have these issues.