How leaders in research and design are mastering customer feedback

Navigating customer feedback can be a balancing act. When you have multiple streams of complex data coming in, making sense of it in order to make decisions that are rooted in customer needs can be a challenge. 

A couple of years ago team members at Dovetail conducted a research project to understand how different organizations made decisions and how customer inputs fed into them. Following a series of several interviews, the team found that the same problem was cropping up over and over again—teams were experiencing data overload.

“The number one challenge that we heard from them was that there is just so much data,” says Anahita Jamshidi Fard, Senior researcher at Dovetail. “There's NPS, there's advice you get from the sales team, there's user research, you name it, and product decision makers just don't know how to use this information to make good product decisions”

This challenge was the main inspiration for the team to host A Balancing Act: Mastering Customer Feedback, a panel discussion on how to make sense of complex customer data to make better decisions.

Led by research aficionado here at Dovetail, Anahita, the panel included Tamara Paulin, Senior User Researcher at Canva; Fatima Kamali, Senior UX Researcher at Transmax, and Sarah Burton, Dovetail’s Lead Product Designer. Each brought unique insights into how they handle overwhelming data to drive better product decisions.

You can check out the full panel discussion here.

So how can researchers, designers, and wider teams wrestle various streams of data into a format that clearly reflects what customers want? Here are some of the learnings from the panel.

Think of customer feedback as a puzzle—fit the pieces in the right place

For Tamara, Senior User Researcher at Canva, dividing data into the three streams of feedback coming in is key. “One is your sales feedback and your marketing feedback... One is voice of customer type of feedback that comes through social media or support tickets or little pop ups…and then the third is analytics or user research programs where we might be doing user testing or continuous discovery.”

“If you think of them as three separate streams, they have a different purpose and they fit a different part of the puzzle.”

Identifying your streams means you can easily drill down on each and still maintain perspective over where information goes and what you do with it. By treating these as distinct yet interconnected streams, organizations can better understand where their product fits within the market, what consistent pain points exist across their user base, and how specific features can be improved upon.

Embrace data complexity

Customer feedback is complex. Finding solutions isn’t always black and white. 

For Fatima, Senior UX Researcher at Transmax, forming a unified approach for dealing with data coming from B2C and B2B had posed an additional layer of complexity.

“In B2C there is a higher chance that you have a diverse type of customers and you receive lots of feedback from different channels”, whereas in the world of B2B, Fatima says that two types of research are required—research with decision makers and research with end users. And each has a unique approach.

Consolidating data from these multiple sources in Dovetail has helped Fatima to manage complexity. In relation to B2C research data, the team started using Zapier to bring conversations and feedback from social media channels into Dovetail. This process has better enabled communication and responsiveness across different departments, like marketing and product teams, who previously struggled to access and use scattered feedback.

Prioritize what matters, solve the right problems

Customer problems can vary widely, from small UX hiccups to significant issues that might impact business outcomes, particularly in B2B scenarios. While in a perfect world, teams would be able to fix all customer problems in one click of the fingers, things often move quickly, and it’s important to prioritize. 

So what can teams do when they can’t solve every customer problem in one go? Sarah, Dovetail’s Lead Product Designer says the focus should be on solving genuine customer problems, not circular problems. She describes circular problems as problems that exist solely in the language of your own ecosystem.

“I try to look for problems that exist outside of our own ecosystem or if they do exist in our ecosystem, try to solve them once instead of putting bandaids on them.”

By staying laser focused on customers, you can ensure your efforts are always aligned with broader customer needs and outcomes.

Create a culture of continuous customer insights

At Dovetail, engaging with customer insights isn't confined to specific roles. Everyone, from engineers to support staff, is actively involved in collecting and reflecting on customer feedback. This collective ownership helps transform the deluge of insights into a structured framework of universal truths about users, which aids in aligning product decisions with genuine customer needs.

It’s all about continuous discovery—a process that establishes regular touchpoints with users to collect iterative feedback. It minimizes product development risks by ensuring ideas are continuously validated against real user feedback.

For organizations, bringing together disparate sources of data into one cohesive hub is a great way to address the challenge of handling multiple streams of complex data. Centralizing insights also allows teams to access and leverage past research, ensuring they aren't duplicating efforts or losing valuable insights left by team members who have moved on.

Dovetail acts as a centralized repository where insights across various formats and feedback channels can be stored, accessed, and acted upon by any team member, ensuring a unified and accessible understanding of customer needs. Get started today.