Recently we wrote a post that described how LiquidPlanner customers improve our product in which the author, Haley wrote, “Customers provide imperative feedback.” I thought I’d expand upon this powerful little statement and give you an inside look of what we do when we get customer feedback.

Call it a Who-What-Where-When-Why-and-How of our customer feedback lifecycle.

Who provides feedback to LiquidPlanner?

• Existing customers
• Future customers (prospects; people who are evaluating us)
• Website visitors

What is feedback?

• Extremely valuable information about our product.
• It ranges from functionality questions, to what’s not working for a customer, to feature requests that would improve a customer’s planning process.

Where is feedback generated from?

• Phone calls
• Emails to support@liquidplanner.com
• Emails to various members of our Sales and Marketing teams
• Contact form on our website
• Feedback form on the Help tab within the LiquidPlanner app
• Bug report form on the Help tab within the LiquidPlanner app
• Responses to the survey that gets sent when a support ticket is marked “solved”
• Questions asked after webinars
• Blog comments
• Tweets
• Facebook posts

When do we get feedback?

A better question is: “When don’t we get feedback?” Answer: Not very often. Our customers are highly engaged.

Why do we get feedback?

People are passionate. They’re passionate about their work, and about project management. They’re passionate about doing things more effectively and fluidly, and about saving time and money and increasing productivity. For these people, LiquidPlanner brings everything together and they want us to hear about what they care about.

How do we manage feedback and what do we do with it?

• We enter it into a task. Here at LiquidPlanner, we eat our own dog food. In other words, all of your feedback is diligently transcribed and put into a task in LiquidPlanner for safe keeping. Your feedback might actually get appended to an existing task, but when you send us a brand new idea we add a new task to our Inbox. This gives us a way to handle, organize and keep track of everything.
• We have a meeting to discuss all requests and feedback. Twice a week, representatives from the Support team meet with our developers to discuss everything from miniscule bugs to fully-formed feature requests. In those same meetings we mull over both criticism and kudos. All of this helps us make the important decisions about which features are important to our customers, to us, and where they all fit on the LiquidPlanner roadmap. Then, we assign and estimate the work (tentatively), and file it in the appropriate feature area (project) and location (package).
• We seek out feedback. From time to time we call customers and interview them about upcoming features in order to make sure we’re on the right track. Other times, we’ll show customers mock-ups and ask brief questions via email. Sometimes we put information on our forums and hope you’ll weigh in. If you’re a customer, you might have noticed that we respond to your support tickets not only with answers, but also with questions in order to gain insight on your use case. Your answers enable us to add your story to a feature request already in the works.
• We provide feedback status: We do our very best to follow up and make sure that you know you’ve been heard. We are as honest and transparent as possible and will even tell you if there’s something we know we absolutely cannot do. On the flip side, as Haley wrote in her blog post, “fulfilling customer requests doesn’t end with introducing the feature and high-fiving one another for having completed it.”

When we do implement new features and fix bugs thanks to your feedback, we let you know – via email, follow up tickets, company announcements, blog posts, release notes, updated forum posts, and even social media. We’re always looking out for you!