Feedback led digital transformation - The next big wave in enterprise SaaS adoption

We’ve all been there. You hire the best UX engineers your money can buy, the ones having portfolios that make you go, “Wow”. You throw every piece of design science, heatmapping, and A/B testing at your product. You build something that, on paper, is perfect. It’s slick, it’s intuitive, and it solves a real problem. But then, you launch it to the real world, the world of busy offices in Mumbai, scaling startups in Bengaluru, and traditional businesses in Indore… and something breaks!

Not the code. The experience.

The hard truth we often ignore in the SaaS world is that no two customers are the same. We love to group them into ‘Personas’, but at the end of the day, those are just boxes. Real people don't live in boxes, but they live in variables.

The User A vs. User B problem

Think about a simple task, like placing a bulk order on a B2B procurement platform.

• User B flies through the process because they’ve used similar tools before, they have a high- speed fiber connection, and got a dual monitor setup. To them, your UX is 10/10.
• User A, however, is getting stuck. Maybe they are trying to do this on a slightly older device while simultaneously being on a phone call. Maybe the terminology you used, which seemed logical to your designers, but doesn't translate to their local workflow.

The use case is identical. The goal is the same. But User A’s friction is a silent killer for your SaaS adoption. Traditionally, we’d wait for a support ticket or, worse, wait for them to churn. We might get a 3-star rating months later with no context. But a star rating is just a post-mortem. It tells you the patient is unhappy, but it doesn't tell you where it hurts them.

UX science is great, but it isn't enough

You can follow every best practice in the book, but those are based on averages. Digital transformation isn't about being good enough for the average, but it’s about being usable for the individual. If User A is getting stuck where User B isn't, the only way to transform your application into something truly indispensable is to understand the ‘why’ behind that specific friction.

How many stars in that rating?

For years, the industry has relied on star ratings. Let’s be honest, these have become mere vanity metrics because it’s not serious and personal anymore. Funny to the extent that in some offline cases (like a car service), service support coaxes you to give 9 or 10/10, because anything below that is bad by their books. When a user is frustrated, the last thing they want to do is click a tiny star or gauge on a scale of 1-10, and then type a paragraph in a box. It feels like homework!

The next wave of Enterprise SaaS isn't just about better features; it's about contextual, multi-modal feedback. Imagine if, at the moment of friction, User A could simply tap a button and say, "Hey, I'm trying to add the GST details here but the dropdown keeps disappearing when I scroll." Using the power of Audio, Video, and AI, instead of a static text box, we’d be moving toward a world where feedback is

1. Audio First, where letting the user speak their frustration, and subsequently, the voice captures the tone, urgency, and specific context that text simply can’t.

2. Video Captured, with a quick screen snippet or a video note, the developer doesn't have to guess the bug. They see the struggle in real time.

3. Lastly AI Analysed, AI analysed that it can take these hundreds of hours of audio and video feedback and process them into actionable themes. It can tell you, "15% of users in Tier-2 cities are struggling with the document upload sequence because of high latency."

Of course, this isn't about "spying." This is a collaborative, consent-led process. When a user knows their specific struggle is being seen and heard to make their life easier, the relationship shifts from Vendor-Client to being a Partner.

Transformation from being a tool to a partner

Digital transformation has often been viewed as a one-way street where the company builds the tech, and the employees are expected to transform themselves to fit it. This is why so many expensive enterprise rollouts fail. People revert to their old spreadsheets because the new tool feels like a stranger.

Feedback-led transformation flips the script because when you use real-time, rich-media feedback, the application begins to evolve around the user. It then becomes a living organism, doesn’t it? If the data shows a specific sequence of steps is causing a "User A" situation repeatedly, the AI can flag this for a Just-in-Time UI adjustment, or it may be a contextual walkthrough.

The Indian Edge, High Context, High Empathy

In India, our business culture is inherently high context. We prefer a quick phone call over an email and a face-to-face chat over a formal report. Why shouldn't our software reflect that? By integrating audio and video feedback into the SaaS experience, we are essentially bringing a human touch to the enterprise level. We’d be literally moving from searching for the user manual to a culture of ‘Talking to the Tool’.

Conclusion

When we start valuing the feedback of the person getting stuck just as much as the one who finds it easy, we move toward true adoption. The next big wave won't be a new AI-powered dashboard, but it will be the infrastructure that allows a user to say, "This is hard," and a system that actually listens, understands, and changes. That is where the transformation actually happens, in the small, frustrated clicks of a user who just wants to get their job done.

Written By - Deepankar Das, Co-Founder & CEO, ButtonShift 

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