A Closer Look: Clearswift, Reading, England

  PM Network  

Would you travel around the world to meet your leading 200 customers? Clearswift did, and it has helped the web and email security solutions provider in Reading, Berkshire, England stay ahead of the competition.

“Unless you keep track of what your customers want and what your competitors are up to, you can go from number one in your market to number 20 just like that,” says Alyn Hockey, director of product management at Clearswift.

COO Andrew Wyatt regularly visits the company’s top customers to conduct face-to-face interviews about their needs and what Clearswift can do to meet them. His team then reviews the data to find opportunities for new projects.

This relentless information gathering shapes the organization’s process for choosing which projects promise the best bottom-line benefit and opportunities to beat out competitors.

Customer feedback world tour

From September 2010 through June 2011, Mr. Wyatt and Mr. Hockey traveled the globe, sitting down with the company’s top 200 clients.

“The travel can be overwhelming,” Mr. Hockey admits, “but it helps us determine which direction we want to go with our next set of projects.”

After each trip, they compiled their notes into a vast spreadsheet with hundreds of line items defining potential features and product ideas that could be turned into …

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