The digital transformation has pushed companies to review their relationships with their end users, whether they are customers or employees (internal applications). Thus, giving users a role has become a major element. Agile is widely spread, making IT teams more efficient and strongly reducing the number of project failures. The means to involve users, especially when they are far from the product teams, have not changed for decades and were not designed for agile: excel files, qualification meetings with a few users, involvement of key users only, emails etc. These methods all have one major flaw: it is almost impossible to identify if the business feedback is relevant and objective.

And this has a direct impact on application adoption. For CRM for example, 83% of managers indicated that their main difficulty is the adoption of their application by end-users.

“69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were better recognized.”

How to give a role to users in the company through feedback?

Too often users are dropped into a new tool without having been sufficiently involved in the design, despite the efforts of the product teams during the design / acceptance phases. This is due to the methods indicated in the paragraph above. Thus, projects can be perceived as being imposed on users, even though you have put your heart into them.

Are there some easy-to-implement elements to overcome this problem?

1. Transparency from A to Z on the reasons for your project

Transparency is too often lacking in companies. If your project has been developed on a purely ROI-oriented logic, don’t hesitate to say so. If it is a version upgrade but it will require internal configuration and a period of appropriation, tell them in advance.

2. Use your company’s internal communication to gather feedback

The more ambitious the project, the more the marketing and internal communication teams must be involved. This can be done by animating communication via weekly or bi-weekly newsletters, or via the company’s intranet. Regular communication with users ensures that you are in control of what is happening, the progress and that you communicate on successes and difficulties.

So that this is no longer a secret for you, I recommend this excellent article by Jamespot on internal communication via the intranet.

3. Create a community and use collective intelligence for your project

The power of the community is no longer in question. Studies show that collective intelligence multiplies by 5 the quality of feedback in companies.

Many tools allow you to simply create communities to allow you to engage your users more and more with you. You like your Whatsapp group with your friends? Create a similar experience with your colleagues, explain the purpose of this community, and don’t hesitate to solicit them.

4. Considering all the feedbacks is possible thanks to the data

Processing and researching user feedback in a company can become a particularly time-consuming workload, considering that it is already an important part of the project manager’s life.

And now, how do we ensure that this feedback gathering process is relevant?

We have highlighted, above, the importance of the user in the improvement of applications. But their importance is duplicated during the writing of user stories but also during the qualification and prioritization of feedback, from various sources, in your product backlog. However, this step can be long and tedious: you have to sort out the different mails, organize meetings, distinguish between bug reports and improvement requests. That’s why we recommend this article, which will give you precise answers on this subject