Keep Customer First ...and mean it.

Management 101, keep your customers happy. Companies have posters and pictures inscribing similar words on office walls, vision statement attests the same.

Does that mean your company's culture keeps the customer at the forefront while doing their assigned duties? Answer in most cases will be resounding "No".

Even though we as professionals know that keeping our customers happy is crucial for our business, there is a gap in our actions. This needs to be bridged to ensure that business is in sync with customer feedback and this change should start from the top. Cloud service provider AWS lists one of its leadership principles as "Customer Obsession - Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers."

This is a huge ask for typical businesses that still send out a questionnaire to customers asking how they feel about products and services. That method was appropriate at the time but unfortunately, companies still entrust in collecting feedback through yearly or quarterly surveys, an outdated approach that does not match with today's pace of technology.

As more companies move towards SaaS model in an agile setting, software updates are deployed with every sprint. In that rush for timely release of new features and enhancements, we lose the focus that we exist for our customers but we hardly turn around and ask, "How do you feel about the changes in our last release" or "How do you feel about feature X, which was released last week".

Hence it is even more important now to collect customer feedback and make it a part of the software development process. Users of our software should have an easy way to express their opinion about new features, screens, functionality. Such feedback needs to be collected, analyzed and should be made part of the project retrospective sessions. Customer-driven development is the need of the hour in the maturing industry with everyone fighting for growth.

Over the last few years, software teams have adopted new collaboration software to bring team members that work in different departments or work from different parts of the world. Tools such as Google Meet, Slack, Microsoft Team are common and are used widely in the software field. They are able to bridge the geographical gap between members, improve employee participation and engagement.

Collaboration now needs to expand from internal communication to include the customer as well. Not just a focus group that reviews a new shiny product as beta testers but involving them to have a say and building what works for them. Basecamp, Join.me, Asana are good collaboration tools that can help bring you closer to your client.

There are few software-based feedback platforms in the marketplace which can help integrate existing software easily and with less effort while bigger companies can choose to create their feedback management System. Recently the industry has realized the need for client interaction, this has led to out-of-box feature from agile management software providers like Atlassian, Zoho and Monday. Organizations can utilize these features to have clients voice be heard and made part of the sprint planning process.

Once feedback collection is put in place, results are valuable to management to understand what matters to its customers. Getting a real-time dashboard of customer feedback and trends can open a new perspective to look at products and services as viewed by your customer. Connecting your product releases with customer feedback helps understand customer concerns or effectiveness of deployed services.

Some of the data points that can be beneficial are

• Top 5 products in relation to the amount of feedback
• Number of concerns plot over time
• Number of concerns plot over the release cycle
• Customer positivity rating over time

Dashboard providing project performance as viewed by your clients closes the loop of software delivery with customer satisfaction and helps focus on areas that are most useful to your customers. Hopefully, your organization is already working in this direction but if not, advice them to include customers voice in driving your product feature.

The organization should transform itself before being forced to change by the industry.