Product Voice: How Member Feedback Drives Functionality

At DirectEmployers and Recruit Rooster, we work hard to know how our products are performing for our Members and customers. We want to know where they are being successful, where they are causing frustration, and where they need improvements. Knowing our software is not just there to look pretty, but has real world impact with real dollar consequences for our Members drives us to make what we build easy to use and inherently intuitive

To achieve this, we make use of many different tools. Our Members and customers serve as our primary source of feedback and insight into how our products are performing. Technology gives us insight into where the software is failing to achieve your goals and needs. Talented and dedicated staff strive to make your experience with DirectEmployers and Recruit Rooster excellent by continuously bringing new and improved functionality to our products and services. All three of these areas work in concert to achieve this.

First, on the technology front, we use a wide variety of tools. We monitor our servers for speed and functionality, making sure they are running at peak performance. Slow servers cause frustrations every time. But fast does not automatically yield satisfaction. Are buttons difficult to find? Is the process that we are super proud of in fact proving to be confusing? Are descriptions missing? Whenever the system causes you to throw your hands in the air, odds are you are not alone, and the system will report itself to us as having issues. And if it’s a major issue, it will do so right away. Even in the middle of the night, much to the consternation of whomever is on call.

However technology alone is not going to capture everything. Computers are adept at reporting data; not so much at understanding motivation or preference. They can’t report on the reason behind why you are doing something. Is the OFCCP waiting impatiently for a report? Do you have to enter that PRM record right now and your plane is boarding? Analytics is overwhelming, and you just need to find out where a particular requisition is being seen online? Automated tools just cannot record this information.

This is why we value so highly the direct input of our Members. Whether it is a call with a membership engagement staff member, a sales engineer, or a 1 on 1 session at DEAM, direct feedback from our Members is invaluable. It adds meaning to the data, reduces guess work, and ensures we are tailoring the function of our product to meet our Members’ needs.

Our product development team is made up a of a wide variety of individuals that all share that common goal. They use all the feedback we receive to drive decisions about what we build and how we do so.  Working closely with other departments within the company, they ensure we are providing the best tools we can in response to your feedback. When you talk to your membership representative about an issue you are having, odds are pretty good their next stop is the desk of a developer.

This is why it is so valuable to us to hear from our members when they are frustrated with something (or in love with it). This provides real world examples that let us see beyond the immediate data provided by our monitoring. It exposed to us how workflows and bugs impact your job outside of the product.

At DEAM18, we launched our first DECompress session, where we had dedicated space for our Members and development staff to meet and discuss how you use our software and how we can improve it. It was a beautiful thing for us to have the opportunity to sit one-on-one and get to the bottom of how and why you use our software. It helped us to make better decisions and better software through all of 2018. We expanded and replicated that interaction over the course of the last year; bringing to bear technology, staff and events to expand on it.

At DEAM19, we are looking forward to repeating this great interaction between staff and membership. We will continue with one-on-one sessions, so look for our DEvelopers and Sales Engineers in Naples to schedule a session. In addition, we will be conducting a breakout session where we share some tips, tricks and how to sessions for our products. We are looking forward to seeing you in May!