The Importance of Customer Feedback on the Product Roadmap

Successful business owners know that customer support is crucial to achieving your goals. So it’s no surprise that customer feedback is one of the most valuable tools in a company’s product development arsenal. Not only can your buyers provide commentary on your products and services, but they can also suggest opportunities for improvement, helping you correct weaknesses before they impact your bottom line. To support this endeavor, you need to offer easy ways for customers to submit their feedback while ensuring development teams stay open to input and suggestion. Below, you’ll learn more about product roadmaps and how to ensure your business receives the feedback and insights needed in order to succeed.

Understanding Product Roadmaps

Product roadmaps are a key part of any business venture. A plan of action for both business leaders and product managers, the roadmap details the vision and goals of a product over time. Along with functioning as a visual summary, this document offers insight into the product’s long-term evolution providing your team a clear understanding of what they’re creating and why. 

While having a detailed internal roadmap for your product is vital, savvy companies also recognize the importance of soliciting feedback from customers and potential customers. After all, creating products is both time consuming and expensive, and identifying what your customers need and value will help ensure your time and money are well spent.

Many digital or SaaS companies, including Centage, incorporate a product-led growth (PLG) strategy where the product is the primary way to attract, convert, and retain users. The goal is to deliver consistent innovation and enhancements that are reflective of customer usage and adoption.

The Value of Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is important in any industry. However, those working in the B2B technology space recognize that speaking to the buyer is especially critical. After all, technology is constantly evolving, and companies have to stay cognizant of their clients’ needs today and in the future. More than just constructive criticism, it reveals the true pulse of the customer including both their wants and needs, which helps to propel a product to evolve and improve. 

Failing to take constructive criticism into account doesn’t just prevent your product from growing to fruition, it can also promote an environment where your stakeholders’ ideas are the only ones being heard.

Of course, not all the feedback you receive on a product is useful. In some cases, a customer’s analysis will just be relevant to their particular concerns rather than those of the majority. In other cases, feedback is too vague or confusing to apply. Finally, businesses may opt not to implement feedback in certain cases. It’s important to stay true to the vision of your product and refrain from making changes that overburden your team or don’t support the product’s long-term goals. 

Tips for Providing and Acquiring Constructive Feedback

Whether you’re a long-time business owner or a new entrepreneur, you’ve probably realized that not all feedback is created equal. In general, the most useful and constructive advice includes visual aids, such as screenshots, so you can see exactly where the issues originate. Additionally, the best feedback reveals both what customers are trying to achieve and what enhancements will help get the product to surpass expectations

Wondering how to go about generating feedback that’s both productive and constructive? Here are some questions to ask yourself in service of developing top-quality products:

• What pain point are you hoping to solve with these product improvements? 
• In what ways does the product currently hinder your ability to achieve your goals?
• How would enhancing the product make your life easier (or your business more successful)?
• How would improvements add value to the product?
• How would improvements save you time in your day to day tasks?

Keep these questions in mind when deciding what customer feedback is most actionable.

Customer Product Feedback at Centage

At Centage, we care about customer feedback and find it an invaluable part of our product innovation process. With that in mind, we recently introduced a submit feedback button to give users an opportunity to share insights. Not only does the feedback tool enable customers to submit enhancement requests while they are in product, it provides a streamlined method for collecting feedback, rather than multiple avenues, where it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. From there, the feedback is collected in a database where we are then able to review each enhancement request, discuss and prioritize, and then implement in the most efficient manner possible. 

Helping Our Customers Succeed

At Centage, we’re passionate about meeting our customers’ needs. To that end, we take feedback seriously and go above and beyond to enable customers to provide their thoughts as they use the solution. Once we’ve collected customer feedback, our team of experts carefully reviews the data to determine where and if changes should be made. Our goal is to continue enhancing our current products so they meet the changing needs of modern financial teams. 

A leader in modern budgeting, planning, forecasting and analytics solutions, Centage created its state-of-the-art tool Centage with a goal of helping customers budget and plan more effectively. Our goal is to assist businesses in streamlining and simplifying the FP&A process. Utilizing our formula-free design, companies can create more advanced models and execute sophisticated analytics. With help from Centage, your company can keep pace with the industry without blowing your budget. Contact us today and discover how Centage can help you to achieve more FP&A with less complexity.