Buyer Suggestions Repository: Definition, Varieties, Instruments, and The best way to Set One Up | by Kareem Mayan | Apr, 2023

A suggestions repository is a central location the place product groups can acquire and arrange buyer suggestions. It might probably maintain suggestions from varied sources equivalent to buyer help tickets, characteristic requests, surveys, opinions, and social media. By aggregating all of this suggestions in a single place, product groups can achieve a holistic view of buyer wants and ache factors.

Product managers normally select a device or piece of software program to behave as a repository, however actually a repository is anyplace you retain suggestions — even when it’s on paper in a drawer.

Why go to the difficulty of establishing a suggestions repository? The identical cause you’d pan rivers in a Yukon stream: to generate gold. Accumulating suggestions gives a ton of advantages:

1. Higher decision-making

A centralized location for suggestions offers your product groups the ability to make knowledgeable choices about which options or enhancements to prioritize. They will establish developments and patterns in buyer suggestions, serving to to information product improvement choices.

Certain, they may do that with out a repository, trying individually on the suggestions they obtain from Slack, Typeform, Assist Scout, Gong, Twitter, and all the opposite apps the place suggestions sits. But when the suggestions is siloed, it’s more durable to attract correct and actionable insights to tell their product technique.

It’s a lot better to place all of your person suggestions in a single place and take a look at it collectively.

2. Elevated collaboration

A suggestions repository can encourage cross-functional collaboration throughout your organization. Right here’s who will be concerned:

• Product groups normally arrange the suggestions administration system and use the ensuing suggestions information to prioritize options, write characteristic specs, create wireframes, and prototyping.
• Buyer help and success groups normally acquire suggestions from prospects and shut the suggestions loop when new options are constructed.
• Gross sales groups normally acquire suggestions from prospects and would possibly shut the loop with prospects and generally even misplaced offers.
• Advertising and marketing groups generally acquire suggestions from social media, and may use suggestions to sharpen their Gross sales copy.
• Software program improvement groups is likely to be inquisitive about seeing buyer suggestions to grasp why they’re constructing one characteristic and never one other.

With all suggestions in a single place, product managers, builders, buyer success managers, salespeople, and designers can work collectively to handle buyer wants and ache factors.

3. Improved buyer satisfaction

Clients prefer it when their suggestions is heard and acted upon. By gathering and addressing buyer suggestions, product groups can create merchandise that higher meet buyer wants and finally result in elevated buyer satisfaction.

That reduces threat. By addressing person expertise suggestions, product groups can decrease unfavorable opinions, churn, and finally a failed product launch. Addressing buyer wants and ache factors can create a extra constructive buyer expertise and scale back the chance of consumers switching to rivals.

In different phrases, making use of insights from person suggestions repositories higher retention, and that means increased internet income. Plus, if you construct a greater product, it’s simpler to promote (which signifies that you additionally get higher gross sales).

4. Higher analytics capabilities

Whenever you centralize your suggestions in a repository, you’re capable of deliver collectively several types of information. For instance, you’re capable of enrich the suggestions you get from Slack with buyer plan or income information out of your CRM or buyer help device.

Suggestions that’s structured with buyer information offers you extra highly effective methods to investigate it. You would possibly slice and cube your suggestions by buyer income to seek out the characteristic requests that might have the very best affect on income.

![Screenshot of Savio with feature requests ordered by revenue so you can easily see which features have the highest impact]( class=”caption”>Right here, characteristic requests are sorted by MRR so you possibly can rapidly see which options have the largest affect.

Or, you would possibly look to see what options your prospects on the Enterprise plan need most and prioritize these.

Nonetheless you wish to slice it, suggestions repositories allow you to phase your suggestions so you possibly can construct evidence-based roadmaps and techniques.

The repository can take totally different varieties relying on the wants of the staff. It may be a easy spreadsheet or a extra subtle product administration software program device designed particularly for managing buyer suggestions.

Some well-liked suggestions repository instruments embody spreadsheets, product improvement instruments, challenge administration instruments, and purpose-built suggestions repository instruments.

Be aware: Savio helps B2B SaaS Buyer Success, Product, and Gross sales groups arrange and prioritize product suggestions and have requests. Study extra about Savio right here.

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheet software program could be a easy and cost-effective possibility for smaller product groups. Google Sheets, Excel, and Airtable are all generally used to carry buyer suggestions.

Professionals: Spreadsheets are helpful as a result of they’re cost-effective and will be simply shared between totally different staff members. They’re additionally fairly versatile — ​​they are often custom-made to swimsuit a staff’s particular wants and will be simply up to date and modified as these wants change.

Cons: Alternatively, spreadsheets usually lack a few of the superior performance of devoted suggestions repository instruments, equivalent to simply pulling collectively suggestions and buyer information, or connecting to product roadmapping instruments.

In addition they are tremendous handbook — it’s tough to automate your suggestions course of utilizing spreadsheets. And as you scale, the handbook nature of spreadsheets turns into an more and more massive barrier. In our expertise and based on the product groups we’ve talked to, they steadily change into leaky.

Product improvement and subject monitoring instruments

Devoted product improvement instruments like Jira and Shortcut will be highly effective choices for managing suggestions repositories for SaaS corporations.

Professionals: Product improvement instruments are constructed to be collaboration instruments: A number of staff members can collaborate on a single challenge. That makes it straightforward to share suggestions and analyze it collectively. It’s additionally a scalable answer — Jira, Shortcut, and different instruments can deal with giant quantities of suggestions and will be scaled up as a staff grows and receives extra suggestions.

Cons: These instruments have steep studying curves. These instruments are additionally sometimes unable to combine with and centralize suggestions out of your suggestions channels like e mail, a characteristic voting board, or your help device. In addition they aren’t in a position to hook up with your buyer information or assist you shut the suggestions loop if you construct a characteristic your prospects ask for.

Learn extra: Ought to You Observe Function Requests in Jira (or Any Different Challenge Tracker)?

Challenge administration instruments

Challenge administration instruments, like Asana, ClickUp, or Trello, can be utilized as suggestions repositories by creating a selected board or challenge to gather and arrange buyer suggestions.

Professionals: A few of the benefits of those instruments embody that they’re collaborative and that they match into your present workflows. They might supply quite a lot of kinds for maintaining suggestions information, equivalent to in a listing or Kanban board. They usually’re additionally sometimes straightforward to be taught because you’ll normally select a device you’re already utilizing.

Cons: Alternatively, challenge and job administration instruments are normally severely restricted for gathering suggestions. They don’t allow you to simply pipe suggestions out of your channels into them, or do superior evaluation on the ensuing suggestions information. In addition they normally don’t allow you to construct visible product roadmaps to share with stakeholders or shut the loop with prospects.

Objective-built suggestions administration instruments

Lastly, some instruments — together with Savio — are constructed particularly as a repository for suggestions. They’ve options that allow you to acquire suggestions from anyplace, slice and cube your suggestions information, prioritize options utilizing information, construct and share product roadmaps, and shut the suggestions loop.

Professionals: You possibly can automate suggestions assortment out of your customer-facing groups with integrations to the apps they use. You are able to do highly effective analytics and perceive the voice of your prospects. You possibly can rapidly discover the highest-impact options and prioritize them. And a few instruments allow you to even ship customized close-the-loop messages so you will get credit score if you take heed to your prospects.

Cons: Alternatively, suggestions instruments normally include an extra price (there are some free ones, however they’ve restricted options). It’s yet one more device your groups need to be taught. They usually can require vital coaching since lots of your frontline workers would possibly use them to gather suggestions.

Here’s a step-by-step information for establishing a suggestions repository:

1. Decide the scope: Outline the scope of your suggestions repository, together with what varieties of suggestions you’ll acquire and the way you’ll acquire it. This might embody characteristic requests, buyer help tickets, surveys, person testing, or opinions.
2. Select a device: Select a device to handle your suggestions repository. As famous above, there are a number of choices for instruments. Savio is a robust possibility, however listed below are a bunch extra different suggestions administration instruments if you wish to try some options.
3. Decide information fields: Decide what information fields you’ll need to gather, such because the date the suggestions was acquired, the client’s title or username, and any related product particulars equivalent to the brand new product characteristic being mentioned. We additionally advocate gathering buyer verbatims.
4. Enrich suggestions with buyer information: Add buyer attributes, like MRR, plan, sort of buyer, and extra, to your suggestions. That is elective — however strongly beneficial — in an effort to phase your information and distill highly effective insights.
5. Arrange classes or tags: Create classes or tags to assist categorize suggestions, making it simpler to go looking and analyze. For instance, you would use tags like “bug,” “characteristic request,” or “usability subject.”
6. Combine with different instruments: Combine your suggestions repository with the instruments your frontline groups use, equivalent to buyer help software program or survey platforms, to streamline the suggestions assortment course of.
7. Share the repository: Share the repository along with your product managers and different related groups, equivalent to buyer success, help, or advertising, in order that they’ll entry the suggestions and contribute to the evaluation.
8. Evaluate and replace: Recurrently evaluation and replace your suggestions repository to make sure that it stays helpful and related to your product staff.