What does an excellent product look like?
Improving Xporter and Evolving Processes
Usually, customers look for that value addition or the problems you can solve, but also for the reassurance that you can evolve with them as their needs and issues change. To achieve this, you will need to know your customer and how to measure your successes. Alongside using volume and usage metrics, it is important that you recognise how relevant customer feedback is.
Many of the products and services we consume today strongly rely on customer feedback. When you shop for something online, you may often look at the reviews and learn about what other customers have said about their experiences. Feedback highlights what is positive and done well, but also where expectations are not met, with room for improvement. It helps both consumers and providers.
You should not assume what is best for your customers who use your product. Even with the best experience in your sector, you may not meet their expectations if you do not allow for any customer validation. The market you serve can change; in fact, we can see this in the shift that most businesses experienced during the lockdown. A lot of them had to quickly find a way to satisfy customers at home.
Product teams use good processes to collect and analyse customer feedback. This is to mainly ensure that they are delivering the right product outcomes to the customer, and know they are on the right track with their vision.
At Community Brands UK, we are focused on valuing the customer’s experience with a feedback loop back into key areas of the business for our products and services.
Best Ways to Receive Feedback
Customer Focus Groups – Inviting small groups of customers to a Q&A session with the product team to cover market leading questions.
Product Net Promoter Score (NPS) – In product or automated feedback forms sent to customers for scoring us in key areas for product and services around the product.
Trend Analysis – Looking for improvements of products from trends in customer usage and occasions we have churn with provided feedback.
There are other areas and opportunities available to retrieve customer feedback, such as workshops and direct customer meetings. Therefore, you should focus on finding the process that works best for your team and that gets the most detailed responses from your customers.
What we are working on as a result of the feedback received
With the feedback and insight from these direct customer interactions, we were able to fully understand the outcomes that we needed to achieve to meet our customers’ satisfaction.
Self-service Deployments – Enabling schools to run the initial setup of Xporter, without booking a slot with the onboarding team.
Integrated Support Portal – A centralised page to view/manage active and recently closed support tickets.
UX (User Experience) Improvements – A more intuitive experience around school management and self-service support.
Xporter is a product that continues to evolve with our customers. What once started as a bespoke on-premises setup relaunched in 2016 as a fully cloud-native education data API suite. Our focus has ranged from MIS (Management Information System) data coverage to core functionality that supports the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) that came into UK law in 2018.
Our current strategy is to keep working towards improvement. We want to ensure that we can meet the customers’ demands for scale while ensuring consistent data sync quality from the schools. To allow our customers to operate with this confidence, we need to ensure that we can support them. When inevitable problems with connections to school data arise, we aim to provide clear, concise guidance and information. Our goal is to help get them back up and running as soon as possible.
As we continue with this strategy that ensures positive customer impact, we are confident that we will deliver the absolute best service in the EdTech market for integrations with any given data strategy.
