People talk about customer feedback more than ever before today. Proof point: there are thousands of feedback tabs on web sites these days, generating many millions of ideas and suggestions for businesses large and small. But how valuable is this feedback? Do customers really know more than the product developers who live and breathe their subjects? When are these voices signal and when are they just noise?

Of course the lie of user feedback is that customers are better product designers than the professionals. Most readers will have heard the old Henry Ford line “if I’d asked customers what they wanted they would’ve said a faster horse.” This is old news. Move on.

In my experience as a product developer, and in my observations of thousands of customer communities, there are a few general categories you can slot customer feedback and its value. Having a few simple buckets to sort input into can save a business countless hours of busywork and time-to-market. But there’s one massive, transformative appeal that connects it all–the real reason feedback tabs have become ubiquitous. So here’s how I think about the value of feedback.

Actionable suggestions

A vanishingly small portion of the time (far less than 1% in my experience), customers will offer ideas that are novel and useful. The popular mythology around the value of user feedback is concentrated in this category. The appeal of innovation-on-the-cheap is too appealing to resist, apparently. There are some systems that have optimized for crowd-sourced innovation, but in fact this benefit is rare for most businesses.

There are a few reasons for this. First, internal product teams are idea generation machines themselves. In the case of Get Satisfaction, we joke that 95% of all fundamental ideas we’ve seen in four years made it onto our white board in the first three months of the company’s life. we’ve still only built out a fraction of them.

Secondly, many novel customer ideas are just not useful because they are too narrowly focused or they aren’t compatible with the business strategy. These are interesting for a different reason, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Stating the obvious

“You should internationalize your interface,” is an idea we’ve had posted dozens of times in our community. Now, I don’t mind the nudge–I would never want my Francophile friends to think i don’t love hearing from them, or any other brand of linguaphile. But from the standpoint of the idea itself, it falls squarely into the “no duh” category.

So while ideas like this may not be actionable unto themselves (they’re likely to be in the roadmap already), it can still be valuable to have the pitter patter of anxious customers creating background pressure on your planning process. It can also be a good opportunity to harness that energy to better understand the deeper needs of these customers. What languages are most important to translate into? Is language a user-preference or is it defined by each community? Are people willing to help translate?

The tendency in a busy product team is to dismiss or ignore an obvious suggestion, often because they’re self-conscious they haven’t gotten around to it yet (“it’s been on the roadmap for a year–how embarrassing”). Instead, look at idea discussions as a way to collect user requirements for the feature or product you already know you want to build, even if you don’t get around to the actual building for a year.

Let a thousand ad hoc focus groups bloom in your community.

Clues

A huge portion of user feedback isn’t either of the above. At first glance it may look like noise–offbeat suggestions, or ideas that don’t quite make sense to you or your business. “Add spellcheck to posting topics” and “Allow anonymous posting” are examples in our community. The ideas have merit, of course, but we are unlikely to support them anytime soon. This is where having questions and problems side-by-side with ideas can be helpful. Collectively, a wide range of customer input becomes the basis for pattern matching underlying problems and needs.

Take the suggestion for anonymous posting. This is something we’ve actually tried in the past. It was a giant invitation to spammers, and perhaps surprisingly, the quantity of usable input did not improve noticeably. It also spawned challenges to our core product objective of creating stronger relationships between companies and their customers.

But we very much relate to the desire of organizations that want to remove all barriers for their customers to provide feedback. To some of these young companies it seems obvious that removing the requirement to create an account in order to post will make a big difference. But is anonymous posting the answer?

This tension between strongly worded user suggestions and our internal goals and experience is an amazing opportunity to stop and understand the underlying issue more clearly. In this case, our job was to identify the deeper issue: we need to do more to remove barriers to posting. Posting should be as simple as sending an email. After much consideration, we decided we can do this through one-click authentication through Facebook Connect (or LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, etc). This approach gives us the benefits of authentication while eliminating any account creation process. (sidenote: you’ll see major improvements to our implementation of this in upcoming months)

Building an “empathic organization”

In many ways, it’s the voices that come out of left field that are the most valuable of all. Because if there’s one fundamental reason we should be opening ourselves up to external feedback, it’s to step out of our comfort zones and walk in our customers’ shoes. The oddballs challenge us to do this, since we can’t just flatten their input into another stat in a feature spreadsheet.

In a word: it’s about empathy. Immersion in our customers’ lives allows us to experience what they do, outside of the tyranny of our hard-nosed strategies and backwards looking data. We learn that our words don’t make sense to people outside our bubble. That there are new, unexpected problems that we could solve through small changes to our interface. That we’re asking the wrong questions.

Empathy itself doesn’t always translate into changes to our roadmap, or the addition of new features. Often the greatest successes are when we redesign existing features to be better tuned to real customer use. In a larger sense, with each step we take towards fully integrating our customers’ lives into our experience, we’re building “empathic organizations” with fates deeply intertwined with the people we serve. This in turn can’t help but create more moral, more meaningful businesses.

That’s a giant step for mankind.