How do I discover what existing customers think about a current or potential product feature?

Challenge

An HR software company had added a performance review workflow to its latest product release and tracking showed customers actively using it. Given this initial success, product managers wanted to improve the feature. How could it determine the best ways to do so?

The company had been relying on focus groups, sales meetings, in-person conversations with customers, and competitive intelligence to plan features. However, these methods tended to deliver anecdotal rather than systematic data, and couldn’t provide fast answers for timely decision-making. Product managers wanted quick input from a wide cross-section of customers who already relied on their promising new feature.

Solution

Usage Intelligence can deliver targeted HTML or plain-text customer surveys from within any instrumented software. Using these surveys, the company asked users of its performance review feature for feedback, and asked them to vote on possible improvements. Customers could answer in just moments, from within the application. Usage Intelligence could automatically feed the responses into the company’s own data collection systems (or into a third-party tool such as SurveyMonkey). Customers’ answers were linked to data about customer hardware and software environments, so software providers could identify differences in viewpoints amongst different kinds of customers.

Make better product decisions to increase customer adoption and satisfaction.

Results

Since surveys can be instantly displayed when users open the application (or use the feature in question), the company achieved high response rates, rapidly collecting valuable feedback for improving its feature in subsequent releases.

Building on this success, the company now uses ReachOut in-app surveys extensively, to increase speed and agility, and reduce the cost of integrating accurate customer input into product roadmaps. The result: significantly tighter alignment between R&D investment and product value to actual customers.