How to Track Customer Feedback: Designing a Killer System That Works
By: Kareem Mayan
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Startup, Customer Engagement, Product Management, Design

Part III: How to use your customer feedback

Now you’re cooking with gas: you’ve built a sustainable feedback process that collects the right data from the right teams. It puts the data in one place. It’s dead-easy for your internal teams to use. And you’ve automated as much of it as possible.

Your focus now should be on using that data to make solid product decisions. You want to operationalize it.

This is how.

Use the insights from your customer feedback data to prioritize features, write specifications, bring your team together, and build relationships with your clients. Photo by UX Indonesia from Unsplash.

1. Determine a triage process to clean the data and get useful insights

The first step is to triage the data. This is where you’ll categorize the feedback and figure out what is telling you.

That means answering the following questions:

Do we understand the root problem? If no, get clarification.

Can we imagine acting on this someday? If yes, assign it to a feature request.

This process should provide you with a set of the features requested by your customers as well as the number of customers that have requested each feature.

Goal: to ensure that feedback is consistently categorized so that you can create a robust database.

2. Schedule internal stakeholder meetings to review trends

You’ll probably want to schedule a regular meeting to review recent trends in the categorized feedback with the relevant teams. This is where you’ll prioritize.

Another meeting?

Yes. I know that lots of meetings aren’t actually useful, but there are two good reasons to go through your feedback in a meeting.

Your teammates might have additional insights. The primary reason is that your customer-facing teams may have useful insights that help contextualize the data you’ve collected or clarify trends.

For example, after looking at your data, you might decide that building some new feature is a priority. But your customer support team might help you understand that what people really need is to fix a bug.

A regular meeting with your front-line teams can help you more deeply understand your feedback data and sharpen insights.

It’s a way to demonstrate value to your teams. You are asking your other teams (support, sales, etc) to do a bunch of work to collect this data for you. They’re only going to put in that effort if they can see the data is being used.

Feedback meetings demonstrate to everyone that you’re actually using the data to develop a better product. This is positive reinforcement, and it helps your team feel motivated to continue to participate — even if it’s more work for them.

Goal: to contextualize your data, get the right insights about what your customers want, and clarify their priorities.

Determine your feature request priorities in a meeting with your internal stakeholders. Use your customer feedback data to guide you. Screenshot by author from Savio.

3. Use the feedback to determine what you are going to build

Determining your building priorities is a mix of art and science. It’s a complicated process. Your customer feedback should be a factor in that decision, although it shouldn’t be the only factor.

At its core, deciding between Feature A vs. Feature B, means picking some principles to guide how you’ll invest your developer budget.

One way is to divide your development time into feature “buckets”. One way to structure your build decisions is to commit to spending some percentage of your development effort days on each of:

strategic features,

customer requests, and

tech debt.

For example, you might choose to prioritize them all equally, assigning 33% of your development to each “bucket”. Or, like Superhuman, you may choose to invest 50% of your dev time on strategic requests, 50% on customer requests, and 0% on tech debt.

Another way is to pick a business goal and to build features that support it. Your company might decide that this quarter you’re going to focus on reducing churn. The product team could then prioritize feature requests obtained from churned customer feedback.

Or, maybe you’re trying to increase upgrades to the “Enterprise” product plan. The product team may choose to develop some feature that makes that product more appealing to the customers on your lower subscription levels.

Whatever your process you use, ensure that you’re allowing your build decisions to be informed — at least in part — by customer feedback so that you end up with a product your customers actually want.

Goal: to use your insights to guide business and product decisions.

4. Use the feedback to determine feature requirements

But don’t stop there.

You’re going to need to write a set of requirements for the features you build. Your feedback can help you here as well. Make sure you read what your customers want carefully. Use their feedback as the backbone of the feature specs.

What if you feel like you don’t have enough information?

Then get more. Use this as an opportunity to reach out to the customers or prospects that have provided feedback for more information about what they need. You might even ask them to walk through your mockups or to beta test features.

Goal: to use the feedback and the people that provided it as a resource for building a better product.

5. Use the feedback to be the best-informed person in the room about your customer needs

Your customer feedback data can also be used as a political tool.

If you’re a product manager, you’ll probably be used to receiving requests from various stakeholders — sometimes even the C-suite — for features that you know won’t provide much value. You might also be familiar with pushback from the development team about whether a feature they’re building will actually be useful.

Increasingly, we’re also seeing these requests coming from customer success teams. There is increasingly a shift in customer success teams owning more of the product roadmap — and this will likely continue.

In all your interactions with your internal stakeholders, feedback data is your friend:

Use it not just to find out what your customers want, but also to advocate for those features over the pet projects of others.

Use it to let your success team know that you’re building a product that will increase retention.

Use it to let support know that you’re tackling the biggest customer issues first.

Use it to let your sales reps know that you’re building a product that will help them drive conversions.

Use it to assure your development team that people really do want the features they’re building.

If you arm yourself with facts about what customers want, you not only put yourself in a position where you can make a better product, but you’ll also look competent to your peers, and even help unite them on a common vision.

Goal: to advocate for, justify, and rally people behind a singular product vision that your customers actually want.

Use your customer feedback to justify decisions about what features you’re going to build — and which you’re not. Screenshot by the author from Savio.

6. Close the loop with customers to build relationships and improve sales.

This is the last, and perhaps most underrated, use of your customer feedback data: as a sales tool.

Closing the loop means following up with your customers when you build a feature they asked for. Ideally, this is a personal, 1-on-1 type of communication that emphasizes you’re listening to them. It’s a powerful way to show that you care: you’ve listened to what they need, you prioritized their needs, you changed your product, and you even remember that it was something they asked for.

It also shows respect. If they went to the effort of providing you with feedback, you can go to the effort of following up with them.

Closing the loop with your customers is a powerful way to build relationships. Here’s how you can do it:

If people asked for something, tell them when you built it. You’ll strengthen your relationship with your customer and build commitment to your product.

If a prospect mentioned they were looking for a particular feature, follow-up and show them that you built it. It may help you close the deal.

If a current account is at risk, show them that you’ve taken their needs seriously. You may encourage them to stick with you.

Closing the loop is a relatively simple way to deepen relationships with your customers, increase retention, and even recover lost customers.

Goal: to strengthen your relationship with your customers by closing the loop.