The Importance of Customer Feedback

Steve MacLaughlin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:05:00 GMT

At Blackbaud, our product teams focus on two important things: Improvement and Innovation. Improve the features and functionality already available to customers and innovate to bring brand new capabilities to our solutions.

I want to focus on how we improve our solutions and the important role that customer feedback plays. Blackbaud gets feedback from a variety of sources including our Customer Advisory Board, support calls, discussion boards, consulting teams, client meetings, and other internal and external suggestion sources.

As you might imagine, there can be a lot of different ideas and suggestions that come in over time. Blackbaud works with a very diverse set of nonprofits from areas such as healthcare, higher education, family and human services, arts and cultural, independent schools, animal welfare, environmental, and international, just to name a few. That means we get a lot more insight into needs and trends than other vendors in the market.

The key to making the most of customer feedback is looking for patterns and common challenges. You might look through several suggestions and notice a lot of feedback about communication preferences. If you looked at them one-by-one, then it might just look like some isolated situations. But once you pull them together you discover a pattern around the need to manage both online and offline communication preferences. Developing functionality that can use Solicit Codes from The Raiser's Edge not only helps provide a solution, but the native integration is already in place to make it work at no additional cost.

Connecting the dots between suggestions and other forms of feedback really helps drive more meaningful improvements. This also means that you can help provide solutions to both existing and new customers that are valuable. That's a win-win scenario.

As a kid, I learned that you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Listening to customers and understanding their needs is critical to building a successful business and solution. We continue to find better ways for customers to provide feedback and being responsive is one of the reasons why clients view us as more of a partner instead of just another vendor.

In a future blog post I'll take a look at how we work with customers to bring new and innovative solutions to the market.

Connections : Agile

The Importance of Customer Feedback