This post is part of the B2B Retention Handbook series. To explore more challenges and solutions, check out the series here.
Having a process for customer feedback and communicating product updates are essential no matter the number of different customers you are serving. Not only could a process help prioritize the roadmap for your product, but it could offer your revenue team an opportunity to stay strategic as bugs or issues come up (and they ultimately will).
Explore some ideas for how to deal with product concerns as a united team by keeping the customer informed.
Outline
Reasons
- If your Customer Success and Support teams aren’t working closely with your Product team to monitor and address product bugs, customers may get frustrated and churn.
- If you don’t respond quickly and effectively to bugs reported in support tickets, that may also damage your customer relationships and threaten both churn and account growth.
- If you stack all bug fixes in “the next release”, customers may temporarily abandon using your product until the next release, which can slow progress towards reaching goals and reduce customer satisfaction.
Solutions
- Align your account teams (see Your team doesn't know your customers' unique product histories) with Product Support and DevOps teams to coordinate response and give customers reliable estimates on when bugs will be fixed. - The Essential Guide to Product-Driven Customer Success | Gainsight
- Provide feedback mechanisms, like a product support ticket system and a process to automatically update customers when bugs have been fixed. - Best Help Desk Software | G2
- Notify Sales and Marketing to be aware of bugs and accounts reporting them in order to avoid sending conflicting information or invitations to renew or upgrade while bugs are still active. - The Art of The Customer Follow-up and Delightful Customer Service | Intercom
- If there are serious bugs that will take a long time to correct or that may require a new process to avoid, make sure that customers are notified and be prepared to offer additional account support to mitigate any loss of performance or downtime. - Communicating With Customers During a System Outage | Help Scout
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