Nov 10, 2025

Building Nets To Catch Customer Viewpoints To truly understand the voice of the customer, you need to go beyond listening; you need to build processes and infrastructure that initiate and maintain the conversation. Embedding day-to-day users into the product-development cycle takes long-term effort and commitment, but it delivers outsized returns. Here are a few practices and programs to consider: • Customer Advisory Panels: Invite a panel of clients from different industries, organization sizes and job roles to quarterly sessions where they interact with product teams to brainstorm pain points and design solutions. • Embedded Voice-Of-The-Customer Tools: Consider building unobtrusive micro-surveys and feedback widgets into product interfaces to get contextual input on solution features and capabilities at the point of use. • Collaborative Innovation Workshops. Host design scrums where product teams and select customers simulate production workflows to shine light on bottlenecks, logjams and opportunities. • Beta Programs: Build loyalty and capture insights by releasing new features and product versions to a limited group for feedback and iteration before the full rollout. • Executive Roundtables. Bring C-suite leaders together annually for facilitated discussions to discover how your solutions fit into their strategic requirements, where the gaps are and how to be a force in their future. Executing Client Insights With the mechanisms in place to gather high-quality market intelligence from your customers, you can start translating that feedback into solution capabilities. The process of validating, prioritizing and executing those ideas begins with gathering them in one place. AI tools may be helpful at de-duplicating, scrubbing and combining entries to make a coherent knowledge base. Tagging ideas by factors like urgency, complexity and strategic alignment helps reveal their interrelationships and how to draw value from them. There are always more good ideas than resources to execute them, so smart prioritization needs to guide thumbs-up/thumbs-down decisions about feature development. Bring together stakeholders from across the company—sales, engineering, product teams, customer success and more—to rate potential development ideas. The wealth of perspectives helps balance factors like business value, technical feasibility and customer impact. Maintain customer trust throughout with open dialogue about what's in the development pipeline, what's out and why. As you develop new solution functionality, it's wise to do regular customer demos to make sure new features are on track to meet user requirements. Before general release, define targets for success metrics like adoption rate, user satisfaction and customer efficiency, then track them rigorously. This is a great place to use dashboards that let executives monitor the product's pulse in the world. Pass those outcomes back into your customer outreach and feedback loop to strengthen the full lifecycle. Realizing And Refining The Benefits Embedding customers in the product lifecycle helps make sure that solution designs mirror the way users really work. It also focuses development effort where it will deliver the most customer value, accelerating adoption and reducing churn by fostering client champions who are personally invested in the product. Features born from genuine customer collaboration to solve real pain points create selling propositions that can't be matched by siloed competitors. At SmartRecruiters, our product team engages regularly with users through our Design Partner program and Design Lab. This helps our team understand user needs and ensures that feedback informs the development process. Recruiters often spend significant time on repetitive tasks such as screening resumes and scheduling interviews. By deeply understanding these challenges, we can identify opportunities to streamline workflows and make tools more supportive. Our AI agent, Winston, has been designed to assist with these tasks, and early user feedback suggests it helps reduce administrative burden. Ongoing development continues to focus on refining these capabilities and improving overall workflow efficiency. Formalizing strategies that prioritize listening can be transformative for any organization. By going beyond surface feedback and understanding the broader context, including team workflows, regulatory pressures and customer expectations, you gain a clearer view of the forces shaping daily operations. Leaders who make listening a structured part of decision-making are better positioned to build solutions that truly meet real-world needs. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?