David Cummings on Startups

User Feedback

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David Cummings

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One of the most profound changes the Internet has brought to the world of software companies, besides software-as-a-service, is that of user feedback. When I say user feedback, I don’t mean just getting emails with feedback on the product, rather I mean all the different ways people talk about the product with you, with others, and on their own. Think about some of the common ways people provide feedback now:

  • Email
  • Phone
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Message boards
  • Idea exchanges
  • Blogs

The list goes on and on. Generally, the key isn’t to try and be all things to all people. My favorite strategy is to keep track of feedback in a structured fashion (e.g. inside a CRM or Google Spreadsheet) and then once a change has been made that addresses one of those ideas, reach out to the person or all the people that submitted it, and tell them we listened to their request and made the change in the product. You’ve just won a customer for life.

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One response to “User Feedback”

  1. Paul Stamatiou Avatar
    Paul Stamatiou

    “then once a change has been made that addresses one of those ideas, reach out to the person or all the people that submitted it, and tell them we listened to their request and made the change in the product.”

    I think that’s the most important part. People might listen to their users and change things based on that feedback, but without contacting them chances are the early users that told you about that annoying issue have left and long forgotten about your web app/site/et cetera. When I put a bug fix/feature request on my to-do list, I usually write down the name of the person that told me about that issue, on the same line of the to-do list (or the email ID in question.. contact form setup to have incrementing #s in subject). The goal of course being like you said – notifying that person of your changes. I try to link them up in a company blog post mentioning the fix/feature, however small it may be. They like that.

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