The Benefits of Client Feedback in Consulting Strategy

Collecting feedback without acting on it is worse than ignoring it altogether—it's a waste of time and a betrayal of trust. To truly benefit from feedback, it must be analyzed and acted upon. This involves identifying common themes, prioritizing areas for improvement, and implementing changes based on the insights gained. 1. Identifying Issues: One of the most valuable aspects of a feedback loop is its ability to uncover problems that might not be immediately visible to leadership. For instance, employees might highlight inefficiencies in a particular process, or customers might point out recurring issues with a product. By regularly reviewing feedback, you can spot patterns that indicate systemic problems, allowing you to address them before they escalate. 2. Saving Time and Money: Addressing issues identified through feedback can lead to significant time and cost savings. For example, if employees report that a certain task takes too long due to outdated software, investing in an upgrade could streamline the process, saving time and reducing frustration. Similarly, customer feedback might reveal that a product feature is unnecessary or confusing, allowing you to simplify the product and reduce production costs. 3. Improving Company Culture: When employees see that their feedback leads to real change, it fosters a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration. They become more invested in the company’s success and are more likely to contribute ideas in the future. This can lead to increased innovation, as employees feel empowered to share their insights and suggestions. 4. Enhancing Customer Satisfaction: Customers appreciate when their feedback is acknowledged and acted upon. When they see that their input has led to improvements, it strengthens their loyalty to your brand. This not only helps retain existing customers but can also attract new ones, as satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your products or services to others. 5. Staying Competitive: In today’s rapidly changing market, staying competitive requires agility and responsiveness. A well-established feedback loop allows you to quickly adapt to new trends, customer needs, and industry developments. By continuously improving based on feedback, your business can remain relevant and ahead of the competition. Does your company have an employee survey and/or feedback loop? How well does it work?

Over the last several weeks, Tipalti has hosted several customer advisory boards across the globe. One in NYC for US clients (by Far our best attended ever!), one EU CAB in Amsterdam, and our first-ever internal CAB with key customer-facing subject matter experts. CABs are an excellent way to engage with and deepen client relationships, but the real objective is to get deeper, more contextualized customer feedback to better inform your product and other business-related decisions. Here are a few insights I have garnered from our recent experiences: 1. The Impact of Listening: The power of Active Listening (aka #reflecting) can never be understated. Hearing first hand feedback from a customer while you look them in the eye, asking questions to clarify understanding, and then expressing that you are genuinely considering that feedback into your decision-making helps to improve your business while making customers more loyal. These conversations also help ensure your team is putting the customer at the center of their decision-making. 2. The Power of Human Connection: There is a distinct difference to capturing feedback in-person vs digital methods of capturing need. Businesses often prefer to use spreadsheets to make decisions and that is very important. But relying too heavily and solely on this, without getting the deeper understanding of Why clients care about certain things and without fully appreciating the Emotion and excitement or frustration levels tied to the feedback can lead you off track. There is an important place for human-to-human interaction in business and those who get that will ultimately run a more successful business imo. 3. The Value of Collaboration: These CABs are, by nature, cross-functional efforts to pull off. Customer marketing may pull the event all together, customer success and account management helps to recruit attendees, product guides much of the content and conversation, and customers may also help to inform the topics and agenda too. At the event, everyone is engaging with one another. After the event, these different groups need to synthesize the input, prioritize it, share the learnings with business leaders, and action the learnings. These are big undertakings but they pull the entire company together to focus on the customer as their north star and that alone is transformative. Thank you to Leslie Barrett, Paola Johnson, Veronica Wynkoop, Irina Musteata, Reut Golan, Gil Vind Picciotto and everyone involved in making these 3 CABs a great success!

I've seen too many enterprise software companies get caught with customers in the 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗽: • Promise too much = lose focus • Listen too little = lose trust I was super lucky to have two incredibly product-minded co-founders in Ted and Joshua. Of the many things I learned from them, one that has really stuck with me is that while customers understand their pain points better than anyone, they're not best positioned to solve that pain - they're too close to it and just don't have as many data points across variants of that pain, resulting in a failure of imagination as to the optimal solution. Customer feedback is absolute gold, but that doesn't mean every nugget should get directly translated into the product roadmap. The topic came up during the AMA after our Logicbroker All Hands last week - here's what I shared with my team:  1. 𝗟𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘆 - Make sure the customer is heard and build a 3D model of their pain in your head by probing into the granular details of what they're dealing with 2. 𝗦𝗲𝘁 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 - Thank them for the feedback and communicate how this will inform related product research as we work towards an optimal solution 3. 𝗘𝘅𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗲𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 - Have we already solved this pain point, but in a counterintuitive way? Educate the customer on how other clients are successfully handling this today. Encourage them to try it out and share back additional feedback to round out our understanding 4. 𝗗𝗼𝗰𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 - Advocate for clients by employing methodologies like RICE (Reach x Impact x Confidence / Effort) to map feedback to prospective projects in a structured way that will automatically reprioritize initiatives as incremental data points are collected over time  5. 𝗙𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝘂𝗽 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆 - In subsequent client QBRs, share new learnings around initiatives their feedback has matured. Be transparent about where they fall in the company's priorities and update on new related releases that may partially address their original pain point  Valuing customer feedback and protecting the product roadmap are not mutually exclusive. These two goals are inherently intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Building every client request will degrade the product, but ignoring client feedback will also degrade the product - it's a fine balance. Customers don't need a 'yes' - they need to be able to trust that you're listening and leading with purpose.