Kyle Reid
Photo courtesy of Kyle Reid

Despite all the secret growth hacks and data-driven product strategies, most SaaS companies hardly ever tap into their most valuable resource: their customers. You can invest all the time you want into building a digital product, but your product could already be obsolete if the customer's voice isn't in your design.

Kyle Reid is the Senior Vice President of Design and Technology for StoryBrand, Coach Builder, and Business Made Simple. His work is successful because it puts users at the heart of product decision-making, which leads to a successful launch and long-term sustainable growth.

The Blind Spot

When building digital products, data-driven decision-making is vitally important but not the whole picture. While data is great at showing a clear, unbiased picture of user engagement and retention, it falls dramatically short when telling the entire story.

Reid shared with us what made the groundbreaking marketing and messaging AI tool 'StoryBrand.ai' successful. He says they let their customers guide the work. He invited customer feedback groups to participate in the product evolution in a few key stages.

Pre-Launch

'You often don't have access to extensive, helpful customer data before a product is live. You do your best to research but end up designing based on your gut,' Reid says. 'Don't leave the success of your launch up to a guessing game—bring customer feedback in as early as possible. It doesn't have to be a perfect group of users. Just start asking everyone what they think. Fully qualified or not, their feedback is valuable. You'll be surprised at how the most important features to you and your team could be the least important to customers. It could save you valuable time and money by avoiding focusing on the wrong deliverables.'

Launch

Once you go live, the real work begins. Not only should you pay close attention to new customer signups, but your inbox is vitally important to the longevity of your product. Being ready to respond rapidly to customer feedback on launch may win you brand evangelists and prevent retention from fizzling out.

For example, after launching StoryBrand.ai, Reid reports that customers asked for an easier way to generate new assets in the application using the same information about their business. Initially, the team designed the tool to allow for complete customisation when generating new assets each time. While it was flexible, it wasn't exactly repeatable. Based on that feedback, Reid and his team designed a new way to generate assets: a user can create one from scratch or load a saved profile of their business' products and services.

The new feature was live within a few days, and customers wrote in with rave reviews. Quality-of-life updates like this led to higher conversion rates from free trials to paid users. 'There's no better trust builder than surprising and delighting your customers with an update they asked for days or sometimes even hours before,' says Reid.

Post-Launch

Once your product is live, it's tempting to sit back and coast on the success of a grand launch. Reid suggests proceeding with caution and not getting too comfortable. The majority of your customers will rarely come to you with feedback, and waiting for them to do so puts you on your back foot. He suggests building a post-launch customer feedback loop before you go live.

'You may feel like it's time for a vacation after all this hard work,' Kyle says, 'and that will come soon enough, but this is when you need to lean in. Watch your numbers, analytics, and inbox, but most importantly, get on the phone with your customers. Segment your user base into early adopters, power users and cancellations. Obsess over making their feedback actionable, then get to work!'

Feedback Is a Goldmine

We asked Kyle Reid what the single most important thing to remember when it comes to customer feedback impacting designing and building software. He says, 'Go get the bad news as early as possible. This means you become solely biased towards building the best product for your customers. Let go of what you may think is best, and start listening!'

There's no question, if you take Kyle's advice and introduce the customer voice into all phases of building a digital product, customer acquisition and retention will grow significantly.