One of the main purpose of customer success in a SaaS enterprise is to be the eyes and ears for product managers. Effective bug reporting consists of accurately assessing severity, clear documentation of the issue, and notifying the right people with the appropriate level of urgency. For feature requests, it's having an inquisitive and opinionated team who understands the product direction and strategy.
Tips:
- Get feedback from your product manager. Feature requests are ultimately for your product managers, so it's important to understand your audience. As a customer success leader, it's important to meet with product organization to learn what type of feedback they need and how they want them presented and what level of detail. Design a process around this need.
- Challenge reps to be opinionated. Customer success can help filter customer ideas that don't align with the product direction. They can also champion ideas they feel are a impactful. Keep everyone in sync on the product strategy and encourage the team to think like an entrepreneur.
- Understand what a feature is designed to solve and what it isn't. Then ask how the customer is using the feature. This will help determine the level of urgency and resources to be allocated to the change. A feature needs to solve what it's meant to solve. But if the customer is using it for a unique workflow, we'd de-prioritize the request.
- When determining the severity of a bug, consider the business impact of the functionality and how many customers are affected.
Bug and Feature Request Template:
- Briefly summarize the request. Ideally this should be no more than a few words. This summary will probably become a mental shorthand that identifies a unit of work for somebody, so best to keep it simple,
- Describe the current situation. Something to compare the proposed change with the current behaviour. If it’s a bug, provide the steps to reproduce the bug. If you can’t reliably reproduce it, describe (in as much detail as you can) the conditions under which the bug appeared. If it’s a feature, just briefly describe how things work right now.
- Describe the desired outcome. If you’re requesting a bug fix, describe what you expected to happen. If you’re asking for a new feature, describe how a working implementation would behave. It’s easier to understand a proposal when there’s a contrast between the way things are and the way things you want them to be.
- Describe the benefits of the change. Justify your request. Describe how it will help your users, customers, or team.
