The Gift of Feedback

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October 25, 2007 by mike

I’m going to write an article on the “Gift of Feedback”. As cheesy as this sounds, feedback is crucially important for all businesses, especially small ones where the dangers are all too clear of continuing a project or services without solid market research to back-up your ideas.

Without wanting to come across as a business guru or life coach; I want to emphasise the point to anyone looking to start or operate a business of any sort: Run your ideas across intelligent people who have nothing to gain from your success or failure. Do your market research impartially and ask your existing customers for feedback.

An example from software - if you operate a business model with downloadable software, how do you keep track and open a discourse with those potential customers who are most important to you? Any software that doesn’t ask when it is uninstalled, for comments and suggestions is missing a massive opportunity to improve.

Any business that doesn’t contact customers post-purchase with a courtesy call or email is missing the opportunity to gain goodwill by providing support to the customer before any potential issue can become a sore point and the customer has to go looking for your support helpdesk to get emergency help.

Here’s another idea I implemented last week that’s paying dividends - automated error reporting. Our software has always implemented an unexpected exception handler which pops up an “Oops, an error has occurred” dialog and provides a facility to open a new support ticket with the error attached by email. But how many pieces of software, when a failure is encountered, automatically attempt to file details of the error as an online service report? I have managed to fix almost a dozen very minor bugs in our FSX Google Earth Flight Recorder this way, without the customer even noticing a fault, we know all about it - have fixed it - and pushed an update out. Look out for opportunities to use automation technologies to make your ISV more proactive, rather than reactive.

All our products are going to inherit this technology, look out for it!

With almost 1,000 users - proactive bug reporting, fixing, building and releasing has saved me, dozens of support tickets (and crucially kept those users on board who just uninstall software without providing feedback as to what the problem was).

But if you’re not in the business of software, you can still ask for, and receive feedback.

Last week, while working on a very fustrating localization issue for our norwegian flight recorder customers, there was a knock at the door. Vicky went to answer it, and lo-and-behold, it was GreenFingers (for Interflora) our local florist with a delivery for us from one of our customers:

Vicky, Dylan and Flowers from Simple Investments

The flowers were from Simple Investments, of Godalming, Surrey, for whom we had delivered a large enterprise-level bespoke trading and CRM solution for in 2005/6, had kindly taken the time to send us some beautiful flowers! Needless to say, Vicky was especially pleased although I’m not sure what Dylan thought about them

A quick plug for Simple Investments - if you’re in the market for investment services (both investment advice and purchase/sale execution), financial planning services (such as inheritance tax) with local city slick service, you should look them up. As a business, they are always creating something new and innovative, the staff are extremely pleasant, friendly and professional. Give them a call today!