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What you need to know about customer complaints and product reviews across a product lifecycle. Customer complaints can be a critical indicator of the fit of your product for customer needs/purpose. When a product launch goes well, they enable a company to increase market share, achieve revenue growth and diversify its product offerings. 

When things go wrong, there are several reasons why you might be getting customer complaints. The onus is on the product lifecycle manager to get on top of this in their annual product reviews and lifecycle governance. The secondary benefit of investing time doing these product reviews is increasing your focus on the customer, outcomes and product value.

Today's blog post explores the top features and examples to improve your product lifecycle monitoring and oversight of customer complaints.

A product governance framework offers a consistent workflow to monitor your product and assess customer value. But it can be daunting to get started and know what to look for. As you launch your product and sell it in different distribution channels, you will need to conduct product reviews at the very least annually. In these reviews, you must monitor how you are tracking your customer value and complaints metrics and trends over time, at the company level and individual product status.

How can product execs review the product and get to the bottom of the customer complaints?

Product managers need to effectively communicate a product's competitive advantage, vision, growth prospects and fit with the target customer. You need to analyse any performance gaps and get everyone on the same page about customer complaints. Yet, it is hard to pin down the details you need with so much to be done. 

Customer complaints happen all the time with new product launches, which is sometimes beyond a product manager's control. However, taking the lead as a product manager to complete a strategic review of customer complaints helps identify problematic products or issues like sales documentation and inadequate product training. An example of this is using Root Cause Analysis RCA. Root Cause Analysis of your customer complaints is a fundamental part of product management.  

Unfortunately, road mapping tools and project management tools alone don't help. Sure, they are helpful when releasing new product features - but beyond that, you are on your own for product governance. 

Having a digital product lifecycle and governance platform with templates and dashboards, you can know when to address the underlying reason behind a customer's complaint. This makes it easier to inform critical people and move through improving your in-life products and services.

An end-to-end product lifecycle governance solution, Skyjed includes several features to improve how you monitor and communicate customer complaints.  Here are a few examples of how Skyjed, an end-to-end product lifecycle and governance platform, can help you monitor customer complaints, get ready for annual product reviews, and move faster.

Example 1: Create a complaints summary using templates you can tailor

In the crucial product monitoring phase, you pin down the details of how your product is performing. You need to talk to frontline service management teams, customer success and sales to get a single source of truth for your product. This involves a fair bit of collaboration and time management.

When doing this in Skyjed, you can use purpose-built templates for monitoring complaints. - you can use these templates for common workflows to save time and stay consistent. Compiling a complaints summary doesn't have to take weeks. Time is the enemy of customer complaints. As customer complaints 'become aged', customer satisfaction and trust can easily be lost. 

Product level dashboards for monitoring allow you to quickly see the status of your customer complaints and who needs to be notified when you hit a trigger threshold.  

It is in your interest to develop a standard template to capture and make decisions about customer complaints.

Here is an example:

1. complaint received, 

2. the type of complaint, 

3. average time to resolve, 

4. resolved and unresolved complaints, 

5. and total complaints and movement prior year. 

Example 2: Product triggers make things a lot easier

Product triggers with automated workflow are handy here, too - with notifications. Rather than having these on emails or in excel spreadsheets, the triggers are centralised in Skyjed's workflow tools to keep you on top of product risks.

Product triggers and Skyjed's workflow builder are the best-voted features to reduce unnecessary administration and reporting. This saves you time and helps you spot issues early.

Example 3: Keep things strategic with a Problem statement

When you receive customer complaints and create a summary, it's not the end of the story; it's the beginning of a product managers task - with the strategic piece to come: the process of conducting an RCA.

Start with a problem statement.

Ask why?

Because?

Why?

Root-cause

A well-analysed performance or opportunity gap in customer complaints needs a clear statement specifying the difference between actual performance and expectations.  Product managers need to understand how large is the gap and the timeframe to resolve it.  Use Skyjed's actions and comments and track actions to meet a deadline.

Example 4: Set an action to keep things moving 

Also, assign a business owner to conduct a root cause analysis. Doing this can speed up addressing customer complaints and spot issues across your lifecycle before they blow up into critical complaints. Based on your performance gap - for example, you may have set a product trigger on customer complaints - with a threshold of 100 product-related complaints.

Ask why we have this gap - using one customer as an example case study.

Ask what is causing it and keep mapping out why. This is handy to help you get to an actionable cause.

Example 5: A digital and automated annual product review with reports nailed

With the help of a monitoring workspace, like Skyjed, you can then prioritise a list of areas that are maybe causing friction or be a breakpoint in your customer experience or product value proposition.

Use dashboards and driver libraries to create a table of the primary root cause areas. For each root cause, list out actions that can improve the gap, assign an owner, rate the impact and set a risk mitigation action and due date by taking away the tedious administration; it's possible to complete a strategic review of your customer complaints save time.

Skyjed allows you to bring all your monitoring activity and reporting into one place through a product lifecycle. Product insight dashboards and strategic reports in Skyjed enable you to quickly generate reports and check the status of your product and make reporting easy - you can quickly export the reports and send them across the organisation. 

So if you want to finalise your product governance framework and consider a tool to automate the essential annual product reviews, get in touch, request a demo and proposal request an instant  proposal here.

About Skyjed

Skyjed is a product lifecycle and governance platform for growth and compliance. Skyjed's Ai-powered end-to-end product platform brings together every data point across the entire product portfolio into a single source of product truth. Skyjed was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia and London, United Kingdom. For more information, visit Skyjed

Get in touch if you would like to find out more.