We are continually adding new features and functionality to the Alchemer platform, and over time, it has evolved to become a de facto standard at several Fortune 500 companies. Consequently, the UI (User Interface) design has evolved. The Enterprise Console is the latest development, based on feedback from our customers. It puts the most commonly used and most powerful features first.

This new console is called the Enterprise Experience, and it can be found in the Profile and Settings section of the application. The new information architecture is designed to make it just as easy to find projects, but much easier to find advanced tools, such as Account management, Design Libraries, Research Libraries, Integrations, Support, and even the new Alchemer University. It is the default for all new accounts.

Account

Enterprise teams need central management of more than just the billing. Admins need to be able to manage who has accounts and which accounts have access to sensitive information. Under the Account Tab, admins can access Account Summary, Settings, User Management (Users, Teams, and Roles), Billing, and Sub Accounts.

Here, an account administrator can manage users, teams, and roles. This allows an admin to set enterprise-wide rules and apply them to each account. Additionally, this tab makes it easy to centralize the billing and sub-account management so that cost centers and departments can keep their data and accounting separate, but united.

The Design Library

The Design Library section makes it faster and easier for survey builders to create surveys to gather the best feedback possible. Under the Design Library Tab, survey builders can access Files, Survey Themes, and Report Themes.

The Files section provides fast access to files such as logos, forms, screenshots, and photos. This makes it easy to build branded surveys and to include visuals that make it easier for respondents to provide better and more accurate information.

In addition, this tab includes Survey Themes, such as branded themes, custom themes, and video themes that make it faster and easier to build surveys. There is also the Report Themes section, where researchers can store internal, executive, and customer-facing report templates. It’s also easy to store new themes to both sections.

Research Library

The Research Library hosts those common elements that allow data scientists and researchers to compare elements from different surveys. Under the Research Library tab, researchers will find Global Questions, Custom Reports, Custom Questions, and R Scripts. Here, researchers will be able to create and save custom reports (including star ranking tests) and questions (such as those with image sliders) that are created over time, as well as more advanced R Scripts to process and analyze statistical data in an open-source platform.

Integrations

This is where we host Data Connectors (such as to Salesforce), all of the managed Domains, Website Intercepts, and Account Notifications. The Data Connectors sub-tab delivers access to all accessible integrations – both free and subscription-based.

This is the tab for managing survey Domains. Adding private domains and sub-domains in order to enhance the branded presence is done here. This is also the tab to manage Website Intercepts, which pop up a survey link while customers are using your site.

The Integrations tab is also where an admin or manager can manage account notifications for any created surveys, updates, published, or closed surveys; plus received responses.

Find it in the Preferences

Subscribing Alchemer customers can find the Enterprise console in the application by logging in and looking in the upper right corner of the window. Under Account, select Summary, then select My Preferences. The Application Themes options appear in the middle of the screen. Select Enterprise Experience (beta) then scroll to the bottom and select Save. To return to one of the other themes, look in the upper right-hand corner under the profile icon, and select Profile and Settings.

With the Enterprise Console, Alchemer customers can now find the most powerful and most often-used tools easily. In addition, the new account admin tools make it easier to manage accounts across an organization; providing the guardrails that make it safe for people to collect the feedback they need, integrate and operationalize that data, to better serve customers of all kinds.

Upgrade Today

To read more about the technical features available, visit our help documentation.  By sharing your thoughts, you’ll be helping us provide you with a platform that will continue to meet your evolving needs.  You can also see what’s new, post a question, or find additional support in our Community. Are you a new Alchemer user?  To get started, sign up for our free trial or upgrade to a paid account to see these new features.

Have you already tried the new Enterprise Console?  If so, send us a note and tell us how it has helped you!

The post As Alchemer Evolves, So Does Your Experience appeared first on Alchemer.

While online surveys are a powerful mechanism for conducting market research, those looking to gain market research insights often also consider holding focus groups to receive feedback from individuals that act as prospective customers.

In this article, we’ll delve into the differences between online surveys and focus groups and how to determine which method to use based on existing circumstances.

Using Focus Groups for Market Research

Focus groups are leveraged by businesses that want to observe behavior amongst a group of people who are participating in an interactive group setting. 

In order for a focus group to provide insights on which a business can take action, it’s best to hold the focus group session in a neutral location where the potential customers feel comfortable providing honest feedback after being introduced to your products and/or services. 

Once the business representatives informally introduce their products or services to the members of the focus group, the members of the focus group should have free reign over how they experiment with and use the products being tested.

The Advantages of Focus Groups

Focus groups are an efficient form of conducting market research because they can provide feedback to companies in terms of what customers think of their products or services with little context.

Focus groups also take group settings into consideration, as they encourage productive, interpersonal discussions. 

If one person likes the functionality of a product or service, but the rest of the members of the focus group are vocal about how much they hate it, the advocate may very well conform to the rest of the group and say that they dislike the product or service. While this bias is a result of human nature, this behavior can be predicted to occur in the real world market as well.

The Disadvantages of Focus Groups

The primary disadvantages of using focus groups for market research purposes is that the process is expensive, time consuming, and resource dependent.

Depending on the format of the focus group, members might require payment which adds to the cost that the business is responsible for. Also, each focus group requires both preliminary training so that they are aware of how the process works, and supervision throughout the process.

At the end of the day, focus groups are a way of getting personalized feedback in group settings, but they require more resources and supervision than online surveys.

Using Online Surveys for Market Research

When it comes down to it, online surveys are the form of market research that require the least investment for the largest return.

By spending some time drafting and designing an online survey, businesses can save that survey, distribute it to different groups of respondents routinely, store all of the response data in a centralized and secure location, and communicate their findings with ease.

The Advantages of Online Surveys

Online surveys are the most efficient means for receiving customer feedback without investing a ton of resources. 

Further, response data from online surveys is conclusive, instantaneous, and can be stored securely in one location and manipulated with ease to communicate findings in customizable reports.

Alchemer offers various tools that suit the needs and budgets of businesses of all sizes — from family-run businesses to large enterprises. 

The Disadvantages of Online Surveys

The primary disadvantage of online surveys is a fairly low risk.

Because a representative is not necessarily in the room with the survey respondent, there is a chance that the respondent could misinterpret what is being asked, leading to inaccurate response data. However, this issue can be effectively avoided if the people building the survey follow survey best practices.

Further, online surveys do not provide the opportunity for a back-and-forth conversation between the administrator and respondent in the same that focus groups do.

Deciding Between Focus Groups or Online Surveys for Market Research

When deciding whether to use focus groups or online surveys for market research purposes, it’s best to first consider the questions that you need answered.

After drafting your comprehensive list of questions, it should be fairly apparent whether your research requires a flexible and open-ended approach to the customers’ thought processes. If this is the case, use a focus group for your research.

If you require a more direct approach for gaining instantaneous, duplicatable, vast, and diverse responses, use an online survey for your research.

Conclusion

Both focus groups and online surveys have their place in market research.

The next time you are trying to determine which method to use for your research, consider the nature of the feedback and insights that you are after. If you’re looking for more conversational, interaction-based feedback use a focus group over an online survey!

The post Focus groups vs. online surveys: Which is better? appeared first on Alchemer.

The terms quality assurance and quality control are often interpreted differently by different people. This confusion is most likely a result of the multiple definitions for the words “assurance” and “control.”  

Let’s further explore the meanings of quality, assurance, and control.

Quality 

Quality can be thought of as a standard which is used to form a certain level of requirements, and to pursue a degree of excellence. 

When it comes to the success of a business, ensuring consistently high quality products and services offered is critical to long-term success. 

Assurance 

Assurance refers to the act of giving confidence, the state of being certain, or the act of making certain.

Control

Control conveys the meaning of an evaluation to indicate needed corrective responses, the act of guiding, or the state of a process in which the variability is attributable to a constant system of chance causes.

By conducting quality assurance and quality control practices, organizations can gauge where various levels of quality lie, and identify areas where more attention and resources are required.

While quality assurance and quality control are often used interchangeably to refer to the actions performed to ensure the overall quality of a product, service, or process, there are differences in their definitions that should be both acknowledged and considered.

Defining Quality Assurance (QA)

The International Organization for Standardization, commonly known as the ISO, develops and publishes standards that are recognized and observed around the world. 

The ISO 9000 family addresses various aspects of quality management and contains some of ISO’s best known standards. 

These standards provide guidance and tools for organizations that want to ensure their product and services consistently meet customers’ requirements, and that quality is consistently improved upon.

According to ISO 9000:2015: Quality management systems—Fundamentals and vocabulary, quality assurance consists of that “part of quality management focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled.” 

Think of quality assurance as a catch-all litmus test that all of an organization’s processes, procedures, products, and services go through. 

By performing QA, the organization can be confident that the end result has met or exceeded their standard of quality.  

Quality Assurance in Software

According to The ISO, in software, quality assurance refers to:

“The function of software quality that assures that the standards, processes, and procedures are appropriate for the project and are correctly implemented.”

Quality Assurance is a Preventative Measure

The purpose of QA is to prevent defects or known bugs from hitting the market. It provides the opportunity to correct these issues before a release or update goes live.

Simply put, quality assurance is a proactive management practice used to ensure that quality standards are met or exceeded. 

QA planning is conducted at the beginning of a project. Typically, the outcomes of QA planning initiatives are quality plans, inspection and test plans, the selection of defect tracking tools, and the training of people in the selected methods and processes.

By conducting QA at the beginning of a project, businesses can mitigate identified risks before they negatively impact the business or disrupt customer experiences. 

Defining Quality Control (QC)

According to ISO 9000:2015: Quality management systems—Fundamentals and vocabulary, quality control is that “part of quality management focused on fulfilling quality requirements.

While QA addresses how a process is performed or how a product is made, quality control addresses more of the inspection of the end product or service. 

In layman’s terms, QC is a reactive method by which quality is gauged and consistently monitored.

Quality Control in Software

According to The ISO, in software, quality control refers to:

“The function of software quality that checks that the project follows its standards, processes, and procedures, and that the project produces the required internal and external (deliverable) products.”

Quality Control is a Detection Mechanism

QC refers to the verification of output conformance to desired quality levels. It’s used to isolate and provide feedback on the causes of quality problems.  

Contrary to quality assurance, quality control includes all activities that serve the purpose of determining the level of quality delivered by the solution, product, or service at hand.

Before a project goes into production, stakeholders should consult with customers to identify customer requirements expected from the product or service. These customer requirements can then serve as a checklist that can be monitored throughout the development lifecycle of the product or service.

QC can then be performed by using processes such as structured walkthroughs, testing, and code inspections to ensure that the product or service offering meets the agreed set of requirements.

Both Quality Assurance and Quality Control Are Components of Quality Management

QA addresses the process of quality, while QC addresses the quality of output, or the end product itself.

Businesses must allocate appropriate resources for the consistent performance of quality assurance and quality control in order be confident that they are offering the best products and services possible, and meeting the expectations of their customers. 

Both of these tactics fall under the larger umbrella of quality management — the process of ensuring that an organization, product, or service remains consistent in their fulfillment of quality standards.

As an organization’s quality management plan evolves over time, the confidence of all stakeholders — including employees and customers — will also grow.

According to ISO, quality management is comprised of seven core principles:

1. Customer Focus

2. Leadership

3. Engagement of People

4. Process Approach

5. Improvement

6. Evidence-Based Decision-Making

7. Relationship Management


Read ISO’s paper on Quality Management Principles for more information on each of these principles.

The Benefits of Using Surveys for Quality Management

Many benefits come with implementing surveys into your organization’s overarching quality management strategy. 

These surveys can be used to inquire about, and identify the customer requirements discussed above in regard to quality control. 

Further, if surveys gauging quality are distributed to customers on a consistent and routine basis, businesses will be able to identify and define trends, and find the root-cause of problems that may lead to decreased quality over time. 



The insights gathered from this data can inform and set the pace of strategic development, as well as help product teams prioritize their efforts. 



If customers see that their feedback is not only being considered, but acted on, the business will see a spike in customer satisfaction and loyalty, which of course, can be measured with the Net Promoter Score (NPS).  

In the long-term, businesses that leverage surveys as part of a greater comprehensive quality management strategy will see a positive impact on their bottom-line. 

These businesses will also end up spending less capital thanks to new efficiencies created by quality management processes. 

What does your organization’s quality management strategy look like? We’d love to hear from you! Drop us a line in the comments below.

The post Quality Assurance vs. Quality Control: How Each Supports Quality Management appeared first on Alchemer.

We’ve talked a lot about the various ways product management professionals are collecting feedback, from the traditional feedback survey to new tactics like Twitter and Slack channels. But truth be told, we know there are tons of ways in which the insights are gathered.

We’d love to learn from you, our beloved readers, on the different ways in which you collect product feedback, and what you do with it all from a product and organizational perspective.

True to our nature, we’ve built this short survey. If you have a few minutes to spare, we’d love to hear from you.  

We will leave the survey open for one week. The data collected will be featured right here in our blog and used to provide other professionals with inspiration to collect feedback in perhaps a totally new way they haven’t yet leveraged.

Feel free to send this post to your colleagues. As we always say, the more the data, the better!

Be on the lookout for the follow-up blog post that will feature the data collected from this short survey.

How Do You Collect Product Feedback? [Survey]

TAKE THE SURVEY

The post How Do You Collect Product Feedback? appeared first on Alchemer.

As well as we know how important and vital collecting product feedback from customers is, it’s nearly as common for product managers to not ask early enough in the process or at all. Product development processes get complex and fast. Skipping parts where it may not seem clear as to why it’s important is often the all too comfortable status quo.

Image excerpted from Uservoice report, “Survey: The Influence of Customer Feedback on the Product Development Process.”

Yet, if the product is to remain competitive and relevant and useful and profitable — customer feedback needs to be seen as the central nervous system of the company’s ecosystem.

Clarity of Purpose, Plan, and Responsibility

How often do we solicit feedback and let it sit collecting dust due to a lack of what next direction? I don’t have a statistic for this, but I can anecdotally say, it’s more than it should be.  And overtime, this lack of clarity can severely impact the bottom-line, hemorrhaging billions of potential profitability.  

“At Asana we wanted to get the best of both worlds: a clear strategy where everyone can connect the dots from their daily work to the company mission, and a collaborative process where the people closest to the work can influence our direction,” says Jackie Bavaro, head of product management at Asana.

Make it well-known throughout the company what the next step always is — maybe the next few steps. Plans may change, especially for those who are making products in the high-tech high-growth startup world, but at the very least the team is in-the-know that there are plans to keep the feedback in motion.

The feedback management process can be thought of as a give and take relationship — it’s only as valuable as you make it and that value only increases if you use the feedback for the product and company’s betterment in a timely manner.

Establishing a Feedback Loop

With a plethora of channels available to send in and share customer feedback, a recent study by Uservoice suggests companies find traditional customer interviews (in-person, over the phone, or a video conference) to be the most valuable albeit one of the most costly means of data collection.

Do be mindful that interviews should not be the only feedback source. As useful as they are, they are extremely time intensive, and typically, garner only a handful of interviews. To tell the full story, product and customer-facing teams should explore other sources such as usability tests, surveys (our favorite!), and establishing a customer advisory program that can be relied on as needed, the Uservoice study found.

Closing the feedback loop is a challenge for most companies and where the process often falls flat.  

“A growing number of companies have developed effective customer feedback programs that head off those challenges right from the start. Instead of building elaborate, centralized customer research mechanisms, these firms first begin their feedback loop at the front line. Employees working there receive evaluations of their performance from the people best able to render an appraisal — the customers they just served. The employees then follow up with willing customers in one-on-one conversations. The objective is to understand in detail what the customers value and what the front line can do to deliver it better. Over time, companies compile the data into a baseline of the customer experience, which they draw upon to make process and policy refinements.”

-Rob Markey, Fred Reichheld, and Andreas Dullweber, “Closing the Customer Feedback Loop”, Harvard Business Review. December 2009.

With nearly eight years after publication, it still holds true: the strongest and airtight feedback loops not only connect customers with front line employees and decision makers, but they keep that customer top-of-mind across the organization to product teams and beyond, which was proven by the comeback of Charles Schwab in 2004 to boost revenue and make billions in net new assets in less than five years time.

Foster Transparency at All Junctures of the Development Process

Let it be known how you are using the feedback and that you’re listening. Make it prevalent on your blog or in a FAQ section of the website showcasing that the feedback submitted is being taken into consideration. Don’t forget express how thankful you are for that feedback, too, a small token of appreciation can go a long way. Otherwise, people will not see the impact of their feedback and the likelihood of collecting future feedback from the same customer is lower.

We’ve seen companies keep these lines of communication open a few different ways:

• Post updates on where the product team is in in the process on the company’s public facing blog or appropriate community pages/forums
• Invite the customers who provided feedback to a shared Slack channel to easily share updates and in near real-time
• Devote time during weekly company meetings to discuss the current state of feedback and product developments influenced by that feedback

To learn more tips like these on how to improve your product feedback process, get a copy of the eBook Build Better Products with Intelligent Product Feedback.

Build Better Products With Intelligent Product Feedback (eBook)

Get Your Copy

The post How To Generate More Organic Product Feedback appeared first on Alchemer.

1. The Top 5 Challenges That Hold Companies Back from Leveraging NPS Data to Develop and Improve Products
2. Using Net Promoter Scores to Boost Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
3. The Higher The NPS, The Larger The Market Share
4. What’s The Secret to NPS Success? Time.

Does your company currently use Net Promoter Scores to gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty? If not, you’re missing out on a simple, easy to obtain metric that provides unprecedented insight into how your brand is performing from a word-of-mouth perspective.

Check out our latest infographic, 2017 NPS Leaders by Industry, for a high level overview of NPS, and to see which companies are leading the pack. The infographic can be found below.

(Click on the image to enlarge)

We’d love to learn more about how our readers are using NPS. Please take a brief moment to fill out the survey below! You can choose to keep your responses anonymous, or if you’d like to be called out by name for your creativity and use of NPS, please complete the contact form.

How are you using NPS?

TAKE THE SURVEY

The post [INFOGRAPHIC] 2017 NPS Leaders by Industry appeared first on Alchemer.

The following post is part of a series that will help inform readers of the power that a company’s Net Promoter Score has on its long-term business goals. The previous posts in the series can be accessed via the following links:

1. The Top 5 Challenges That Hold Companies Back from Leveraging NPS Data to Develop and Improve Products
2. Using Net Promoter Scores to Boost Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
3. The Higher The NPS, The Larger The Market Share

In this series, we’ve addressed the challenges that often inhibit companies from using NPS data to improve their products, how measuring NPS can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, and how companies with higher NPS typically hold larger market share.

Now, let’s take a look at why benchmarking your company’s Net Promoter Score over time provides significant value to your business.

Benchmarking Your NPS Against Competitors

One of the most important things to consider while in the beginning stages of adopting NPS into your business strategy is how your score compares with others in your industry. Doing so will give you some perspective, as particular industries trend very high in terms of average NPS, while others tend to get lower scores regardless of great strides taken by an individual company.

For example, 2017 research by Satmetrix found that the average NPS for Department/Specialty Stores was 60, while the average NPS for Internet Service was only 2. Therefore, if you’re in the retail space, you wouldn’t want to compare your NPS to that of a company in the internet service industry.

Without a definitive benchmark comparison to the competitors in your field, it can be challenging to see where you stand in your market, and what score indicates that significant action is needed.

After all, you don’t want to lose your customers to competitors that have the potential to provide them with better service than you can. Today, the average consumer is drawn to companies that put customer service first – you want to be one of those companies.

Calculating Your Score Over Time

In order to maintain a thorough and holistic understanding of how your company’s customer satisfaction stacks up against competitors’, NPS should be collected and analyzed consistently over time. It’s the only accurate measure of whether a company’s strategic changes are having an effect on customers’ perception of the brand.

To get truly actionable data that defines what the customers take is on the experience that they’ve received, you should be administering an NPS question throughout the year, and as close to the act of purchase as possible.

Companies that only send out NPS surveys once a year, or even once a quarter, risk missing out on opportunities to wow their customers, or to address concerns in a timely manner.

You might want to consider randomly selecting people to receive your company’s NPS survey on a daily basis, and and then tracking that score constantly. This real-time connection to your customers can drive much of your decision making, and will provide evidence that your decisions are founded on data, not impulse.

How to Act on NPS Feedback

In order to be truly successful at boosting customer satisfaction, you’ll need a full system in place to support your NPS survey administration and data collection.

This means that NPS needs to be a constant topic of conversation across the teams that comprise your business – from customer service, to marketing, sales, business operations, and anyone else that might come in contact with customers.

Fluctuations in your scores need to be carefully examined so that you can identify and address their root causes. What are you doing well? What could you improve on?

At many tech companies for example, NPS results can often be traced back to small hiccups in software performance. These results may help the company identify growing segments of their customer base that want to see certain updates or changes to the software. This is on-the-ground feedback that should be treated as incredibly valuable across  your organization, especially the product team.

It’s also critical to keep in mind that monitoring and administering NPS questions is not a “set it and forget it” process. Someone, preferably several to many people, should have their finger on the NPS pulse at all times, and should be prepared to act on both individual responses and emerging trends.

Feedback as a Promise

Customer feedback data definitely shouldn’t go into a giant well that gets closed off and forgotten. By taking the time to complete a satisfaction survey — even if it’s just the one question NPS survey — your customers are placing their trust in you.

These customers have taken the time to provide input on how they interacted with your product or service, and by asking them about it, you are implying that you’re going to do something about their answer.

If you consistently ignore input from your customers, don’t be surprised if they start to abandon you.

The Secret to NPS Success? Time.

Every company, no matter their services or products, relies on a positive reputation to stay afloat and profitable. As such, most businesses looking to gain traction find themselves requesting feedback. They want to know how happy customers are, how much those customers enjoyed their experiences, and, most importantly, how likely these customers are to speak positively to those around them. Not only that, but companies want to know why their customers feel the way they do.

The biggest mistake that businesses can make is to only ask for customer perception once — most often at the point of sale. Instead, to create an accurate picture of customer opinion, smart businesses connect with customers frequently — before, during, and after they have purchased a product or service — depending on the overall objective of capturing the data using NPS.

NPS, like all metrics in business, is what you make of it. If you simply ask questions when the mood strikes, there’s a good chance your data will be insignificant at best, and misleading at worst. If you don’t act on the feedback you’re receiving, then what’s the point of even asking? When you take the time to reach out, build a community, and use customer insight to improve and fine-tune your operations, the effects of NPS can be quite significant.

The key ingredient to success, both in business and in the NPS method, is time. With a regular approach, an effective methodology, and a strong community, your business is poised to receive realistic, relative feedback that is directly actionable. At the end of the day, isn’t that ultimately what we’re all trying to find?

The post What’s The Secret to NPS Success? Time. appeared first on Alchemer.

It might sound like common sense to say that brands should continuously collect feedback on their products and services so that they can optimize their efforts and maximize their profits, all while ensuring and sustaining product-market fit. But it’s far too common that companies push feedback to the backburner upon encountering challenges.

Without a proper feedback strategy in place, or regular analysis of NPS data, it can be difficult to draw insights  and leverage them to drive business decisions. Companies that are missing the mark when it comes to NPS are letting low-hanging opportunities to improve customer relationships, innovate better products, and reduce churn pass them by.

NPS data is gathered by administering a single question to the people that use a business’s product or service: “What is the likelihood that you would recommend [COMPANY OR PRODUCT] to a friend or colleague?” 

“[NPS] helps us determine not only whether students like our customer service and user interface,” says Peter Poer of Magoosh, the online test company for standardized tests like the GRE and the SAT. “But also how well our products prepare students for their exams.”

Let’s take a look at why some companies might be hesitant to allocate resources for collecting product feedback using NPS data:

1) These companies might not realize the true value of collecting and managing product feedback. 

If a business has never had a product feedback management strategy, the decision makers at that business might be naive to the profound benefits of implementing one. They might have doubts that customers will provide powerful insights, or they might not realize that much of the power held by feedback is unlocked by consistently collecting and analyzing feedback data over time.

2) These companies might have no clue where to start when it comes to collecting and taking action on feedback.

Devising and implementing a feedback strategy can be overwhelming, and it can be tough to know where to start. It’s important to remember that a lot of the power of feedback comes from consistently measuring said feedback, so that benchmarks can be identified, and progress can be measured over time. That being said, simply ceasing to procrastinate, and beginning to collect feedback data immediately is a great place to start. Once the company begins to collect responses, they can begin to analyze the feedback and start solving the issues that are bubbling to the top.

3) These companies might think that if sales are up, customers are happy.

Decision makers are often concerned with, and burdened by, the bottom line. At times they can distance themselves from contingent metrics that are just as important, as they focus all of their attention on sales numbers. By collecting feedback from customers, surprises such as high churn rates can be predicted and avoided.

4) These companies might struggle to get real, honest feedback.

Some companies might find that their customers are not properly incentivized to provide useful feedback on products and services. However, small campaigns that offer tangible incentives such as discounted products or services, or even gift cards for participating customers, can prove to be well worth the ROI.

5) These companies are unable to centralize the data.

Some organizations might have issues with organizing feedback data in one centralized location. After all, what’s the point in even collecting feedback if the data received is such a mess that it’s not able to inform business decisions? By implementing a tool that allows a company to not only collect feedback data, but to organize it and uniquely report on it, the entire feedback process is simplified, streamlined, and made more efficient.

Despite these challenges, feedback allows businesses to identify customer satisfaction trends, and arms them with the information they need to establish action items and processes that contribute to easing their customers’ frustrations.

Consistently measuring NPS can work wonders for a brand, as it allows the organization to identify trends, pain points being experienced by customers, and where to focus their energies respectively.

Click here to learn more about NPS, and to get started with NPS collection immediately, be sure to download our ready to use NPS template!

The post The Top 5 Challenges That Hold Companies Back from Leveraging NPS Data to Develop and Improve Products appeared first on Alchemer.

We often see when helping clients manage the data collection process for their products, product retirement or product recycling falls to the wayside — focusing their efforts in product improvement and research or moving onto a new product all together, leaving every element of the previous product behind after it has become irrelevant in the market and/or run its course and become obsolete.  

Yet the goal of this strategy is to compare the full-range of the product by quantifying all adjustments, fixes, tweaks, and the impact it all has on the market. This information should then be used to improve product processes, feature request prioritization, and back-up any product shift with historical market performance data.

Holistic Assessment

It takes meticulous and continuous tracking to get this strategy right. For it to truly work in this product feedback context, the strategy needs plenty of data, dedicated time to analyze the data, and the ability to then take the numbers and apply them to forward-thinking initiatives. There are two objectives with conducting a holistic assessment of the cradle-to-grave strategy:

Objective 1: Establish or attribute any production kinks or experience hiccups with the product at a specific point-in-time so the product team can then address that issue head on and in an efficient timeframe.

Objective 2: Identify the consequences any changes in the product will have on the end-user’s experience or on the market.  

Create Greater Visibility with Cradle-to-Grave

Product managers should always have the greatest visibility possible in the product, the experience it offers, and how it functions in the field. Not only because this allows for the product manager and the product team to always have their finger on the product’s pulse, but they have greater control of the product, according to Accenture.

With this end-to-end approach, product managers can:

• Continually monitor the source and quality of product adjustments
• Control the production schedule and delivery of fixes and/or enhancements
• Improve reverse supply chains

Without a holistic strategy, the company is placed at risk, Accenture says, “Brand damage, sales declines, burdensome regulation, and customer lawsuits can result from poor response to product failures.”

When to Use Cradle-to-Grave

Use this approach when you’re looking to test the impact of any product changes with your audience. This could include checking at the quality of the materials you are using to make the product or even package the product and how you can distribute it. Essentially, as a product manager using the cradle to grave approach, you are responsible for the product’s development, impact, and innovation from its conception to its death — figuratively speaking, of course.

The most important takeaway from using this method is that you just don’t stop trying to improve a product’s functionality or its use in the market after you’ve calculated a great idea or have a working prototype. Follow through with the product from the very early ideation stages to when/if it becomes obsolete. That data becomes invaluable for any product development initiatives moving ahead and creates a benchmark of sorts for you to work off.

The post Supporting a Complete Product Lifecycle: Cradle-to-Grave appeared first on Alchemer.

Co-hosted with Fort Collins, CO-based New Belgium Brewing, we hosted a live webinar on July 11th that highlighted the unique way the award-winning brewery incorporates product feedback into the QA process, to ensure consistency and quality in their delicious craft beer.

Here’s a quick overview of what the conversation included:

• The benefits of actively using product feedback for your business strategy
  Product teams often view customer feedback on a product as a one-and-done event rather than viewing it as a helpful and continuous process, says Notejoy Founder and CEO Sachin Rekhi.
  • Maintain consistent quality experience feedback — continuous being the secret sauce to this. If you are not collecting product feedback continuously, effectiveness of the process decreases.    

• The complete product lifecycle and how to grab insightful feedback throughout
  “We really want that beer that we have brought up through this entire journey to be as consistent as possible — it’s what the consumer expects. When they crack open a Fat Tire they want that Fat Tire to taste the same every single time.”
  • From ideation and user testing to product retirement, the kind of feedback collecting will impact the direction, success, and innovation of the product throughout the lifecycle.

• How sensory science is fueled by product data and what impact this has on the end product  
  “We are using sensory and Alchemer to close the feedback loop on how the product is doing,” said Schultz.
  • Sensory science, a common practice in the craft brewing, cosmetics and automobile industries, is a field of science that evokes responses in a highly controlled manner to ask specific questions. The sensory experts at New Belgium rely on this data collection method to get information about a product by using trained panelists as instruments for QA/QC and product development.
  • The data-driven and statistical form of science allows product managers to get information about purchasers by using consumers to learn buying habits, preferences, and furthers innovative developments.

To learn more from the product feedback management conversation between Alchemer CEO Christian Vanek and Sensory Analyst Ali Schultz, download the recording and the PDF of the presentation.

Collect the Right Feedback to Improve Your Products — and Keep Your Customers Happy

Get The Recording

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