THE customer insight hack that top-notch product managers use
Multiply your insights without overtime with indirect customer feedback channels
Your influence and impact as a product manager comes from knowing your customer as good as he knows himself.
That edge as a PM comes at the price of investing time and effort in gathering customer input.
To get results like 1%-PMs do, means to use all sources of information you have at your disposal — to their full potential.
One source which is easy to tap but hard to use effectively is indirect customer feedback. Some sources include — first and foremost — Sales, Service and Support.
When you start in product management, you’ll want to build up your network to these departments. When you’re more established, they will have become used to contacting you with requests.
What’s great about using indirect feedback
You have a network of people which are much closer to the customer than you are. Some of them spend nearly all day, every day, with customers. This gives them a much better access to information:
- In quality — When their customer network trusts them with information they might find out more real issues than you.
- In quantity — By spending a lot of time in the field they soak up every move and challenge of your customers.
When you use that network of colleagues you can multiply the potential channels of customer insight. And the great thing, if you know how to use them effectively, the are easy on your time and effort.
What sucks about using indirect feedback
- It can be based on misunderstandings, as in: it is not really a customer need. Your colleagues are not as well versed in getting to the real need behind a customer wish. A customer might also not be truthful with your colleague if their relationship is not based on trust. This means there is room for interpretation — and for error.
- Content can be filtered and influenced by the middlemen. Sometimes the “need” is really a solution that Sales already promised and now needs you to deliver. Or Service might want to sell an idea as something they were told by the customer.
- It can also be skewed in importance: the “pain of the day syndrome”. When a customer talks to Service or Support, he might greatly exaggerate the pain. This is a natural phenomenon as those departments are contacted by emotional customers when your product fails.
How to use indirect feedback with ultimate impact
→ Invest time to understand how your colleagues work to understand what their focus is and how they may (unintentionally) skew the feedback
→ Invest time to brief your network in basic product management skills. For example, what the difference between a customer need and wish is. This makes their feedback much more usable.
→ Use them as multipliers by meeting up with them from time to time. You’ll want to challenge them with questions they can bring to the customer.
→ Make use of your network’s network by meeting with customers directly. This makes sense as you’ll get the chance to verify feedback directly and build up a direct network to customers.
→ Be wary of indirect feedback as it is prone to bias. Don’t blindly accept input, rather make sure it’s a real problem. Try to verify and challenge yur assumptions — always!
Daniel Sontag connects the bots:
As Industry 4 lead and manager for connected products, he does what he loves — tying business to tech, and theory to practice.
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