How GoalGorilla Automated their Feedback Process with Receptive

Open Social by GoalGorilla is a SaaS product that enables organizations to create and maintain online communities, currently powering over 1000 of these communities around the world.

For this case study, I spoke with Evelien Schut, a Customer Success manager, about the impact that Receptive has had on their feedback process.

Before Receptive

When GoalGorilla launched Open Social, their first SaaS product, they didn’t have any sort of feedback process in place.

While they were fully aware of the benefits of listening to customer feedback, they had no way of properly organizing the data they were collecting.

We didn’t really have a process, but we did notice that this was interesting information, and we should list it somewhere.

In fact, any interesting feedback they received from their customers was simply put into a Slack channel for people to look at.

This led to several problems…

Firstly, they had no real way of organizing their feedback. They simply had a long list of ideas in Slack with no way of knowing how many people wanted that idea, and no way of sorting through them. This rendered their feedback useless.

As a result of the unorganized feedback, there was a massive disconnect between what their customers were asking for, and what their Product team was planning to build. Evelien, and the rest of the Success team, didn’t have the data to back up their ideas of what customers wanted.

Our roadmap was based simply on what we thought needed to be built for our product. It was good that we knew what the product should look like, but we needed to make sure our customers agreed.

Finally, it was taking up far too much time. Customers would submit a lot of requests and would then keep asking about the status of that request. It took a lot of manual work to keep them updated.

They needed a way of automating their process, and organizing their feedback…

Implementing Receptive

Before they dove in and started using Receptive, they realized that having a process in place and ensuring everyone was on board with it was essential.

Using the guidelines that we have in our help docs and on our blog, they mapped out their feedback process, assigned roles, and made sure everyone understood the benefits of using Receptive.

Receptive has several articles about setting up your process and getting everyone on board, and this made me realize that we have to get everyone on board otherwise nobody will use the tool. It gave me lots of ideas.

The Product Owner and the rest of the Product team immediately got on board, and shortly after they launched Receptive.

They decided to hold monthly roadmap meetings with virtually every team, from Support to Marketing, invited. They then take a look at the top ten requests from each SmartList, and discuss which ones they want to start building.

This helps everyone in the organization to understand the product decisions that are being made.

After Receptive

One of the biggest benefits that GoalGorilla have seen since using Receptive to manage their feedback is the amount of time they’ve saved.

Receptive has automated a lot of the process. Their customers, for example, no longer need to message about the status of their feedback. They can simply log in to Receptive and see for themselves.

They also use Receptive’s roadmapping functionality, and share their roadmap publicly, so that customers, team members, and prospects can all see what is being planned for the future.

What’s important for us is that our customers are really liking the tool. They think it’s very professional how we handle feedback and actually pay attention to it.

Perhaps more importantly, customers feel like they’re genuinely being listened to.

Their Sales team even shows Receptive to leads to show how much they’re willing to take their feedback on board.

Evelien’s favorite aspect of Receptive is far and away the automated update emails that keep customers aware of what is being planned, built, or released. This saves her and the rest of her team a great deal of time.

In One Sentence?

Receptive is a very insightful, easy-to-use way of incorporating the voice of the customer into the product building process.