The aim of any Customer Success professional worth their salt is to make and keep their customers happy.
There’s one often overlooked way of doing just that: managing product feedback.
We recently ran a webinar on the topic which you can watch here.
For this article, we wanted to focus on the practical steps you can take to start managing your feedback efficiently and start making your customers happy.
Here are the steps:
Get Everyone on Board
First things first, you need to ensure that everyone is on board with the process you’re about to begin. If they aren’t, then this isn’t going to work.
This might sound scary, but it really shouldn’t be.
You need to arrange a meeting with everyone involved with product feedback.
So, that’s product managers, customer success managers, and stakeholders.
These are the people who need to realize the benefits of managing feedback and who need to be on board.
To get these people on board, explain to them in the meeting that this process is simple to integrate within your organization, and you can get started with it right away.
Then move on to the benefits:
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You’ll receive feedback which will help the product team to develop an improved product.
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Customers will be happier because you’re listening to them and taking what they say on board.
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Your whole organization will grow, with customers sticking around longer, and prospects enthused by a better product.
There are benefits for each of the people sat in on this meeting. Make that clear and there’s no reason for them to say no.
This meeting also gives the chance to dig into what your colleagues need from feedback.
How should feedback be presented to the product team?
What are your biggest pain points around how feedback is currently managed?
What commercial difference would feedback make in terms of revenue and churn?
The answers to these questions will help you figure out the best process going forward, and also enables you to understand what other teams require.
Capture Feedback in One Place
The next step is the most important one as far as product teams are concerned.
We often speak with companies who have their product feedback spread out across different channels. They have emails, Trello boards, tweets, and maybe even snippets of long-forgotten conversations on post-it notes.
The trouble with having feedback all over the place is that it’s, well, all over the place.
There’s no way for you to organize it, no way for you to know who wants what. It’s a mess.
For the product team, it means that they can’t make data-informed decisions about what to build next.
For the success team, it means they have to deal with feedback, when they should really be helping customers use the product.
And for customers, it means nobody is actually listening to them.
This is why you need to capture and store all of your product feedback in one place.
It empowers you to prioritize feature requests, to work out which are “nice-to-haves” and which are “dealbreakers”.
It means you can focus on a specific type of customer, most relevant to your current business goals. If, for example, you wanted to reduce churn from Enterprise customers, you could focus in on what your Enterprise customers are asking for.
So, how exactly do you do it?
The only decision you really have to make here is where you’re going to store the data.
It has to be somewhere convenient to access for all members of your organization. Ideally it should enable customers to self-serve and provide feedback as and when they choose. In a perfect world, it will allow you to manipulate the data so you can prioritize and segment as needed.
Not every channel will cover all of those bases, but simply choosing one is a start.
For smaller organizations and startups, something simple is more than enough. Perhaps a dedicated email address or an online form, such as Google Forms, will do.
As you scale, you’re going to need something a little sturdier. We often recommend Trello or Airtable for those beginning to grow. But do be warned that both of these have their limitations too.
Finally, for those organizations who are scaling rapidly or Enterprise companies who have already scaled and have outgrown the tools above, it’s time to consider splashing the cash on a tool designed exclusively for managing feedback.
That’s where
Establishing a dedicated feedback channel ensures your data is organized and genuinely usable, and that your customers can submit feedback whenever it’s convenient for them.
Keeping an open channel will allow for cross-pollination of ideas, wherein customers can see what everyone has submitted, and give their opinions on other requests.
Communicate with Your Customers
In order to close the feedback loop, you need to communicate back to your customers.
This is the part that a lot of organizations don’t do but it’s really vital if you want to make your customers happy.
Sure, you can receive a load of feedback, and you can act on it and end up with a better product. Great!
But if you don’t communicate back to your customers when they submit a request, then you’re missing out on the opportunity to make them happy.
You’ve probably experienced the frustrations of this first-hand. You use a SaaS product, and you have an idea for a feature. You figure out how to submit your request, write it all up, and send it off. That’s a lot of time and effort you’ve spent to help that company. When they don’t reply, or even acknowledge that you’ve submitted feedback, then you’re going to be angry.
I don’t need to tell you that an angry customer is not something you want.
Yet one simple alteration to your feedback process would not only stop them from getting angry, but would actually make them happier than they were before.
The alteration is simple: You have to talk to them.
Whenever a customer provides feedback, thank them for it, explain a bit about your process, and then keep them in the loop.
If the answer is no, then politely explain why. If the status changes to “planned” or “building” (or anything really) then let them know.
They’ll appreciate that you’ve taken the time to keep them updated, and it will help them understand the reasoning behind your product decisions.
Keeping your customers in the loop doesn’t take as much effort as you think.
Take the time now to craft some responses for each eventuality, and then keep them in a shared document. People can then access that document and copy/paste the response to the customer, tweaking it slightly to suit the situation.
Even better, invest in a plugin like Gorgias which allows you to create whole templates that can then be added into emails by using a keyword shortcode.
Here are some example responses to help get you on your way. Feel free to use these and adapt them to your organization.
High Touch (Submitting the request for the customer):
“Thank you so much for your feedback! I’ve submitted this as a feature request to our product team. They review new requests once per week, and we’ll reach out to you once it’s been reviewed.
If you have more ideas like this one, you can submit them to our team by [clicking the “suggest a feature” button under our help navigation]. Feel free to submit other ideas and requests that you have there - and thank you for helping us build a better product!”
Low Touch (Pointing customers in the right direction):
“Thank you so much for your feedback, we love hearing your ideas and feature requests so much we have a designated place for our product team to collect them.
Just go to [the “request a feature” button under our help navigation to submit your idea], and our product team will review it within the next week. Then we’ll reach out to you once it’s been reviewed!
Feel free to submit other ideas and requests that you have - and thank you for helping us build a better product!”
You should replace the bits in the square brackets with your own feedback channel details.
We have a range of other examples you can use or draw inspiration from here.
Use the Feedback
Of course, collecting all this feedback is worth nothing if you aren’t going to act on it.
During the course of the meeting we mentioned earlier, you need to align everyone around the process.
If you do that, you’ll agree on the following things:
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Where, and how, the product team can access the data they need.
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How often the product team will review new requests.
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How customer facing teams will communicate with customers.
When it comes to using the feedback, you need to know two things.
One: Which requests are the biggest priorities to your customers?
Two: What is important to the different customer groups?
Remember that all customer feedback is NOT equal. Some things will be more important to you now, and other things will be more important in the next quarter.
Your feedback is likely to be a mixture of Enterprise users, free triallers, churned users, and so on and so forth. But you need to drill down into the group that you’re focusing on and look at the feedback from a strategic point of view.
The key thing is that everyone is aligned and working towards the same goal.
Summary
There are four main steps you need to take in order to manage product feedback effectively. Get it right and you’ll make your customers happier, and your organization will grow.
Start by getting everyone on board with the process. Set up a meeting with the product team, success team, stakeholders, and everyone else involved with feedback in some way.
Explain the benefits of managing the feedback and try to nail down the process so everyone is on the same wavelength.
Next, you need to make sure you have one distinct feedback channel that is easily accessed by team members and by your customers.
This allows you to prioritize and manipulate the data so you can make the right product decisions.
Then, you need to make sure you keep your customers in the loop. Thank them for submitting feedback and explain the process to them. Whenever the status of their request changes, let them know and explain why.
This ensures that your customers feel listened to and improves your relationship with them, making them happier in the long run.
Finally, actually use the feedback you receive. Narrow it down to a specific group of customers depending on your current business goals. Then you can see the priorities for that group and look at building those features down the line.
So, that’s just about everything.
If you’re ready to start taking feedback seriously, then you need to take the first step and schedule that meeting.
If you have any further questions or need something explaining in more detail, please do get in touch.
