Organizations often foster community to facilitate feedback loops between their customers and product team. Through feedback loops, customers report bugs (in software), request new features, and provide other input relevant to maintenance and development of the organization’s product or service. Teams within the organization use this feedback to inform their roadmap and prioritize what to fix and build next.
Robust and dependable feedback loops benefit both customers and companies, by ensuring:
- Customers’ voices are heard and acted upon.
- Companies’ products/services satisfactorily meet customer needs and wants.
I believe companies need to consistently practice the following four fundamentals, to build effective feedback loops:
- Receptiveness
- Responsiveness
- Results
- Recognition
Receptiveness
Receptiveness is about being open to feedback — enthusiastically welcoming and encouraging it. Receptiveness also involves making it easy for customers to provide feedback, via well-known and accessible communication channel(s), such as email, social media, a community platform (e.g., web forum, Discord server), a public website (e.g., Butterflye’s Idea Showcase and Roadmap), or any other of the myriad of options.
Responsiveness
Responsiveness means acknowledging feedback in a timely manner, by sincerely responding with an affirmative, “We hear you, and we will bring this feedback into internal conversations for careful consideration as we plan the roadmap.”
Responsiveness also requires an easy way for customers to receive communications back from the company — this would typically happen via the same channel through which feedback was originally delivered (see: Receptiveness above).
Results
Results are about either integrating feedback into the team’s work or not. Whether or not the feedback is acted upon, results require clear and explicit communication back to customers, to let them know what the results will be — e.g., the bug will be/has been fixed; the feature will be/has been built.
Inevitably, some feedback will not be incorporated into the roadmap. In such cases, it’s important to communicate this to customers. A decision to not build a feature, for example, is still a result, even if it’s not the result they were hoping for. Customers can consider this result when making decisions - e.g., if the feature they requested is a must-have, and they’re not going to get it from you, they may decide to look for alternative products/services that better meet their requirements. While losing customers isn’t ideal, neither is trying to retain customers whose needs you can’t meet.
Recognition
Recognition is about showing genuine appreciation to customers for devoting their time and energy to delivering feedback. When a customer feels that their feedback is truly appreciated, they’ll likely feel that their time and energy was well-spent and thus be more compelled to share their feedback again in the future.
Recognition is the through line of the foundations — a company can recognize customers when they receive feedback, when they respond to feedback, and when they deliver results. Recognition is a form of reward that positively reinforces the desired behavior of giving feedback.
All four R’s
With all of these fundamentals (conveniently remembered as “the four R’s”) in place, effective feedback loops are much more possible and probable.
It takes conscious, intentional effort by the company to instill and maintain all four fundamentals into their workflows. Every team across the organization - community, support, design, product, engineering, etc - must practice all four R’s, in order to ensure they are experienced and felt by customers.