One advantage of living at an apartment complex that uses Livly is the ability to use the tech company’s community feed software, which encourages residents and staff to communicate in an open forum in real time.
But recently, Livly learned of a problem with this feed.
Some property managers had felt burdened by approving every feed post and wanted more control over what could be posted to the feed in general. So Livly created a solution.
“We rolled out an automatic moderation capability for our community feed,” Rachel Blake, a data analyst at Livly, said. “It automatically flags potentially problematic posts, while not requiring every message to await approval. Residents can still engage with one another in real time, while property managers maintain the control they desire.”
This solution would not have been possible if not for Livly’s client feedback loop. It’s a key component of any business to learn customer concerns and needs, and how companies go about attaining this insight differs across the board.
For example, Palette, a tech company that provides companies with automation-based accounts payable and purchase-to-pay tools, recently rolled out a voice of the customer project where team members reached out to various clients across the country to better understand their needs.
We spoke with these two Chicago tech companies to learn how they navigate the client feedback loop.
Livly is a real estate software company in Chicago. It offers apartment technology that property managers use to simplify tasks and elevate resident experiences, and relies on their clients for feedback on how to improve its software.
What are your company's main methods for collecting customer feedback?
At Livly, we collect customer feedback through channels including regular customer check-in calls and emails, periodic customer surveys and ongoing user research. Our goal in talking with customers is to better understand how we can make Livly work for them.
Our goal in talking with customers is to better understand how we can make Livly work for them.”
Describe how your company typically acts on customer feedback.
Livly employs a multistep process to understand customer feedback. The team begins by aggregating all product and services feedback. Next, we determine which department should address the feedback, and then that team resolves whether the feedback fits with the strategic direction of Livly's business. Finally, feedback gets prioritized alongside other updates the team is working on.
Take us through how customer feedback recently prompted a change in your company's product or services.
We recently rolled out an automatic moderation capability for our community feed. The community feed encourages apartment residents and staff to communicate in an open forum, sending news in real time, managing events and providing an engaging peer-to-peer commerce channel.
Through regular touch points with customers, the Livly customer success team received feedback that property managers wanted more control over what could be posted to the community feed. The customer success team communicated this feedback to our product and engineering teams, which were able to build new functionality into the feed. Previous user research found building staff did not want the burden of approving every feed post. The final solution automatically flags potentially problematic posts, while not requiring every message to await approval. Residents can still engage with one another in real time, while property managers maintain the control they desire.
Palette is a software tech company in Chicago that provides companies with automation-based accounts payable and purchase-to-pay tools. It relies on client interviews and surveys to capture the voice of the customer.
What are your company's main methods for collecting customer feedback?
We do surveys, and of course, our salespeople are always in touch with customers about support and upgrades. For example, if our clients are doing more business and their license requirements have increased, we’ll collect feedback on that interaction. The same goes for if they are looking to add extra modules to their solution or if they are reaching out with technical issues. We are also using voice of the customer methodology to further explore new features and solution sets. This process uncovers needs that may go unacknowledged due to assumptions made by both product development teams and the customers themselves.
Customer feedback goes into our process for building out the roadmap for our solution.”
Describe how your company typically acts on customer feedback.
Customer feedback goes into our process for building out the roadmap for our solution, both now and into the future.
Take us through how customer feedback recently prompted a change in your company's product or services.
Our voice of the customer project has really helped with this. Members from various teams, from marketing to development to product, took part in interviewing current clients in North America and Europe. Various team members dissected the transcripts from the interviews and separated that feedback into hundreds of specified needs. Work like this will drive a new solution set that we’d like to include in future versions of the software.
