Monte Carlo Innovation, Technology & Agility

How does your product team gather customer feedback? 

At Monte Carlo, our product team primarily gathers customer feedback through direct conversations with customers. We regularly engage in calls with them, seeking insights into their experiences with our product — both positive and negative. This real-time feedback loop allows us to understand what’s working well and identify areas where customers are encountering friction. We also proactively follow up with customers to delve deeper into specific feedback points raised in previous interactions.

Additionally, we involve customers in our feature-development process by directly reaching out to them for input on new features or improvements. Once a feature is nearing completion, we often release it under a “beta” label to a select group of customers. This beta testing phase provides valuable feedback that helps us refine the feature before a full launch.

How does customer feedback guide the product design? 

Customer feedback directly influences and benefits our product development process in several ways. 

It helps us prioritize features. Feedback helps us understand which features are most important to our customers, allowing us to allocate our resources effectively and focus on high-impact improvements. 

Customer feedback helps us identify pain points. Through customer conversations, we can pinpoint specific areas where users are struggling, enabling us to address these issues and enhance the user experience.

Customer feedback also validates new concepts. By seeking feedback on new feature ideas, we can gauge customer interest and gather insights before investing significant development effort.

It helps us improve existing features. Feedback often reveals how we can refine existing features to better meet customer needs and expectations. An example is when we got feedback from several of our customers that our experience around incidents in Monte Carlo was difficult to understand and navigate. This is a core experience to our product and we needed it to be much smoother. We undertook a large redesign of the experience, going all the way back to the basic building blocks. We worked with several of our customers to workshop some different basic concepts around their jobs to be done and got to the foundations. From there we built the feature back up, testing and getting feedback with a wide variety of customers along the way before releasing it in beta to our champions, tweaking it some more, then rolling it out to our full customer base. The end result was a much simpler experience that was very well received by all users.

There are often learning curves with customer feedback. What were some of the key lessons your team learned? 

We’ve learned several key lessons regarding prioritizing customer feedback. Not all feedback is created equal. Some feedback is more valuable than others. It’s essential to consider factors like the customer’s experience level, the frequency of the feedback, and its alignment with our product vision.

We learned to look for patterns. Individual feedback points may not always be actionable. However, when we identify recurring themes or patterns across multiple customers, we know it’s something worth addressing.

We learned to balance customer needs with business goals. While customer feedback is crucial, it’s equally important to ensure that our decisions align with our overall business objectives and strategic vision.

We also learned to maintain open communication. We strive to be transparent with customers about how their feedback is being considered and acted upon. This helps build trust and fosters a collaborative relationship.