Why you should not listen to your customers
Is their feedback relevant ?
Before releasing a new product into production / operation or during the life cycle of a product or solution it is common to ask your users / customers feedback in order to improve the service or product.
Product management of companies ask for suggestions, defects, errors, improvements, features and ideas in order to have a feel of the issues, adoption and the acceptance of a product or solution in order to be prepared for the ever changing market demand.
The question is whether the feedback is relevant and representative for you population of customers.
Those people that provide feedback are probably those who are the most negative, the most difficult, the most positive or the best outspoken of your customers.
The people at the extremities of your user population will give you feedback.
The average user, who might currently be happy with your solution, finds the balance between functions / features and the complexity to use just adequate or ideal
Those who don’t give any feedback just stay quiet and some might even quietly change vendor without letting you know.
Biased feedback requires interpretation and relevancy
There will be always customers challenging you with their negative feedback in order to get lower pricing, recognizable by their threatening to change vendor.
Others will write a feedback because they have a very specific need, not applicable for the rest of your user community.
Any feedback can be very biased for various reasons as they all have another agenda than you.
You should find out or know the real motivators of the people giving feedback.
If you pay or reward people for their feedback, then your information can be completely fake.
Feedback from your customers is to be handled carefully, needing interpretation and relevancy before taking the decision to launch into a redesign of your product or solution as your average user is not the one making the most noise or speaking the loudest.
Any redesign based upon the loudest speakers only could define a product no longer suited for your main market of average users.
Observe the behavior instead
In order to obtain feedback the behavior of your users with the application or appliance should be investigated and observed.
The goal is to find out what users actually do with the product or solution and what they don’t do or identify the feature they don’t use.
Just asking for feedback and suggestions will project a very biased image of your product or solution.
Feedback can be and is in most cases biased.
In the behavior the real and true feedback is embedded.
Hence you should observe your customers and not listen to your customers in order to avoid biased feedback that can or will lead to biased conclusions bringing the wrong products or solutions to the market.
What are the motivators for you to give feedback ?
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by LEADSExplorer: Feedback is biased – feedback has no value – http://bit.ly/aPvYYw Don’t ask your customers feedback…
Nice post. Not all feedback are qualified representation of what the customers really feel toward the product or service because of possible biases.
Definitely right. Not all but there are still some that might help. This is a great post since there are a lot of business man out there who were just starting their business and this blog might help them.