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Orangescrum as a Customer Feedback Management System

Engaging customers is a matter of pride for all technology providers. Fortunately for Team @Orangescrum, it is more than a delight to have active customer participation and we have a lot to thank our users for it.

Given the fact that there has been a significant rise in Orangescrum users over the last 3 years, we have been receiving feedback left, right and center.

Receiving feedback is one, but ensuring each one of them is well responded to is another. It is not just about sending them a thank you note or an acknowledgment email.

And an absolute mention for our fanatic Customer Success team too. They ONLY want positive responses for our customers. If a customer needs something, they go to greater lengths to make it happen. Of course to the point where the feedback is not conflicting with other users.

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Hence, the development team is constantly challenged for overall product improvements like a better design, easy to follow user experience and heightened use of the Orangescrum platform.

Having said that, we have a very well-defined approach to handling these feedbacks.

Each of these feedbacks are

  • First discussed among the product team (developers, product owner, and customer success teams)
  • The initial response from the discussion is shared with the customer
  • Product team’s recommendation is sent out for Customer Advisory Board review
  • CAB review decision is shared with the customer with probable timelines
  • CAB approved items are assigned due priority & hit the development floor
  • Implemented feedback is released post thorough QA
  • Final notification sent to the customers of successful implementation

This is quite a flow here that needs to be backed up by a robust and transparent system.

The initial few months were ok in terms of managing over emails and chats but we started missing a few of them here and there, some remained unanswered, some were never put forth to the CAB, etc.

Using Orangescrum to manage and track each of these feedbacks we always the plan, but as usual, we waited till there was absolute chaos. Not done L

So how did Orangescrum come to the rescue?

Defining the Right Flow

The first thing we decided was to align the feedback execution with relevant development and release flow.

Our prior experience with request handling had given us a fair view of the logical flow of the issues and requested enhancements.

There were bound to overlap, great ideas, some not very interesting and some not very urgent.

Keeping the various scenarios in mind we set the life-cycle of the task as follows:-

New ->Open -> Deferred -> Duplicate -> In Progress -> Pending Retest -> Reopen -> Resolved ->Production -> Verified -> Closed

The key thing was to set up a single project for all feedback received with a Custom Status Workflow as below from requested to release.

Customer Feedback Workflow

Organizing the Feedback

Once the workflow was setup we started entering all requests, issues, and enhancements into the project by sorting them into the right feature buckets i.e. we created Task Groups for each feature and created the relevant tasks under these task groups.

Task Group Collapse

Feature segregation was important for us.

The primary reason was also to capture which of our features were the most loved and used by our customers.

Because the number of inputs against each of these features will give us a clear indication of user behavior, their processes and how they intend to use the specific functions. E.g. timesheet or Kanban.

Kanban Task Group

The idea was to incorporate the useful changes as fast as possible and give our users the ease of doing their work and fulfilling their objectives seamlessly.

And the added advantage for us was to identify what we missed originally and build our lessons learned list too.

Setting things into Motion

Execution and releasing the requests in a timely manner was our primary concern.

Being an evangelist of collaborative and productive project management platform we wanted to ensure we practiced what we preached and that we eat our own dough!

Once we had our flow defined as explained above we set the right regimen w.r.t execution and turn-around times.

Kanban SaaS

Step1 – All feedback was recorded in Orangescrum by the Customer Success Team with the status “New”.

Step2 – Daily meetings were set up to review the feedbacks received and get approval where applicable to push them for execution by putting them in the “Open” queue.

Step3 – Items in the “Open” state were picked up by the developers and moved to “In Progress”

Step4 – QA would review the in-progress tasks and mark them as “fixed” or “reopen”

Step5 (A) – IF “reopen” then, developers rework and set it up to “Pending Retest” once they were done with their work.

Step5 (B) – IF “fixed” the developers would push them to “Production”

Step6 – QA would then “Verify” the production environment to be doubly sure that everything is working fine just as in our staging environment and mark them as “Verified”.

Step7 – Once verified, the Project Manager would then conduct a final review and mark them as “Closed”

Finally, the Customer Success team notifies the requestor of the successful implementation or resolution of their requests.

Kanban OS SaaS

What really worked?

It is evident that there were multiple teams involved as always in providing our customers with the perfect service.

In our case, it happened to be the Customer Success, Product Manager, PMO, Development Team, CAB and our Quality Assurance teams.

Orangescrum came through for us by ensuring that we had

  • Well defined roles and responsibilities
  • Complete visibility of entry and exit of tasks
  • Transparent allocation of tasks
  • Set the right buckets, priority and task labels
  • Closed-loop execution with dev and QA teams in sync
  • Quick daily check-ins and status review
  • Collaborative brainstorming and issue resolution

Over a very short period, we were amazed as to how simplified and easy it had become for us to support our customers productively. We were able to garner more support and enthusiasm from our users.

The most rewarding part of the entire process was that we were able to collaborate and keep our customers in a very timely manner with the ability to share progress transparently.

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The initial results weren’t very over the top but our satisfaction and happiness ratings were really trending in a couple of months and we continue to keep them that way as of this post.

As we all know, happy customers are hard to come by!

So what’s your story? How happy are your customers?

Leave a note or share valuable inputs for us too.

Categories: Customer Feedback

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