Geoff NgAt Prophix, a strategic objective is to continuously improve the user experience and ensure what is being developed solves the business problems of our customers today and tomorrow. Listening to customers and partners is part of the Prophix culture and not simply something that lives only in the product planning group. Whether it’s supporting an emerging technology, creating new functionality to solve a specific pain point, or addressing pet peeves in the product known only to frequent users–all feedback is taken seriously.
Before a single line of code is written, the product planning team goes to great lengths to seek clarity and understanding of specific problems that affect our customers with the goal of making things easier to use. We call this ” productization“; a process of listening to customers to discover repetitive error prone tasks, often involving many technical steps (like writing scripts), and eliminating them through effective user centric product design.
Gathering feedback from real world customer use cases is an important process for the product planning team. Several methods are utilized to capture feedback and new ideas:
1. Social feedback forum
Since its introduction two years ago, the Prophix feedback forum has been a huge success, generating over 500 ideas, with active participation by over 400 users. There are direct links to the feedback forum from within Prophix, making it easy for anyone to contribute ideas, comment on existing ones from fellow users, and vote on ideas to help the product planning team prioritize requests. We are proud to ensure that a number of customer driven enhancements make it into Prophix during each release.
2. Customer site visits
Members of the product planning team (myself included) routinely make site visits to customers around the world. These face to face meetings are an opportunity to share specific feedback and observe the usage of Prophix at the customer’s own location. Visits to customers around the world has enabled us to capture unique local requirements to further improve the product for a global audience.
3. Annual Product Survey
The annual product survey is an opportunity to profile how our customers are using Prophix, which parts of the product they like, and which parts can be improved.
4. Annual Prophix User Conferences
The user conference is definitely the highlight of the year for the product planning team. This is the only time where we get hundreds of Prophix users in one venue where we chat with them on a variety of product related topics. I’m humbled by the generosity of our customers who are fiercely passionate about improving Prophix and take the time to share very detailed feedback.
5. Annual Prophix Partner Conferences
The vibrant partner ecosystem comprised of partners around the world is also a valuable source of feedback. For the past ten years, Prophix has held annual partner conferences which has connected partners from around the world. Partners bring a wealth of domain, regional, and industry specific knowledge that is valuable to creating a globally relevant product.
6. Prophix Customer Advisory Board
The Prophix Customer Advisory Board (CAB) serves as an important forum for customers and Prophix leaders to exchange ideas, plans, and share “real world” business experiences using Prophix. The forum includes accomplished members of the business community from around the world. Prophix is passionate about proactively listening to customers, understanding current challenges, and incorporating new ideas to improve the customer experience
Listening to you, understanding your problems, and translating these into products that you like to use, is what makes my job rewarding every day. As Prophix continues to evolve, I look forward to interacting with you at one of our events, or through one of our established feedback channels. We are listening.
Prophix
