Sharing and Actioning Customer Feedback in Product Teams

Communication is critical – we’ve all heard that before. In feedback-driven development, this means communicating with your customers as well as communicating with your product teams.

If you’re the one to bring customer feedback to your product teams, you’ll have an understanding of how you want to present this information. Gathering feedback and data is one part, making sure the right team gets the most relevant feedback is another, and so on. We talked to 6 PM and CX leaders about how they approach this process in their B2B SaaS businesses.

Note: Savio helps B2B SaaS Customer Success, Product, and Sales teams organize and prioritize product feedback and feature requests. Learn more about Savio here.

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Dimitris Tsapis, Head of Customer Experience @ PlanM8

We believe that customer feedback is really important, so we host regular feedback sessions. Getting feedback is important for improving the product, its performance, and also grows the community. Having these sessions with our existing users helps us to gain a fuller understanding of the audience and their struggles.

After the session, we analyze the gathered information. Moving forward we do three team sessions:

• The full Product team meeting - where we discuss all of the analyzed info. The meeting is held with people from the team segments. Doing this gives everybody a chance to give their take on different feedback topics even if they don't work with the specific segment. This way we get an inside “outsider” view that can be very insightful. In the end, we divide the tasks between the product team segments to research and work on them.
• The individual team segment meetings - In these, we discuss, test, and work out different solutions that have been inspired by the feedback session data. This is a bit more segmented type of work that focuses on different areas such as: Further developing the product via UX & UI.; improving the buying process; finding a better product-market fit; developing new marketing strategies; just to name a few.
• The full Product team review meeting - during this meeting each of the team segments presents their findings and results. Then we do some brainstorming and discuss how we are going to proceed in the future.

After this, we prepare for another customer feedback session if one hasn't already happened in between the team sessions.

Doing this process helps us get a better understanding of our audience and what challenges they face, which in turn helps to further adjust our processes. This approach also is helping us to delegate the team's focus to the most important process segments and to double down on the best performing marketing channels.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Nina Tsarykovich, Head of Customer Success @ UXPressia

The key point is the transparency of users' feedback and the possibility for all team members to access it at any time.

We have a shared Airtable base of Insights where we add every single piece of feedback obtained through different channels, e.g. live chat, email, surveys, public testimonials on software review platforms, and personal communication.

Not only it gives us the possibility to prioritize requests on a quantitative basis, it also helps to understand the qualitative aspect based on what our clients say about their needs.

Obviously, it’s important to understand the real need behind the clients’ request so we share the particular use case along with the request where possible to shed some light on the client's motivation, goals, and challenges.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Sonika Mehta, Co-Founder & Product Director @ Zonka Feedback

Keeping the product teams in loop of customer communication, customer issues and customer feedback not only gives the team a sense of ownership of the product but also helps bring in amazing ideas on the table. Not making customer feedback available to your team reduces impact of the feedback and creates a barrier. On the other hand, with making feedback available to the team, it becomes a driving force for growing teams.

At Zonka Feedback, we have created three important Slack Channels #customerissues, #customerfeedback, and #productdiscussions. Before the Customer Issues become tasks in Jira, they’re immediately shared by the Customer Support Team on our Customer Issues channel and taken up by the concerned team. Similarly, all feedback is shared on the Customer Feedback channel. When Customers request changes, throw in ideas for improvement, or suggest a feature, it is discussed in our Product Discussions Channel with all key stakeholders and then put in our roadmap. All types of customer communication is directly shared with the team. This keeps them involved as well as responsible for all product features.

Follow Sonika Mehta: @sonix15
Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Brenna Schaaf, Director, Product Marketing & Commercialization @ Power Kiosk

Our approach to being obsessively customer centric with our Roadmap is to cast a wide net internally across all customer facing teams and drill down. Our most fruitful insights are born out of our Customer Support and Operations Teams' desks. We have a weekly meeting where these two teams each bring 3-5 learnings, insights, or situations they’d like to discuss with Product and Marketing. The most impactful insights that inform our Roadmap are often those pulled from support tickets or emails. We time and time again see ideas initiated from customer support land us in a strategic space. That then later inspires tactical solutions to implement. By having all a mix of department heads in the same conversation we’re able to more easily identify recurring themes and gain the ability to stitch together a more cohesive story about our customers’ needs and their sentiment towards their experience with our products.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Eropa Stein, Founder @ Hyre

I’ve always told my team that “The customer is always right!” and that “There’s no pleasing everyone”. So, prior to reaching out to the product team and causing a disruptive change to the roadmap, you should always analyze the data. Using customer analytics tools can be powerful and, when data is analyzed correctly, can help with many aspects of your business. These tools can decrease the churn rate and highlight feedback that could have a huge impact on customer engagement. This can provide you with the evidence needed in order to take the action required to minimize the risk of customer dissatisfaction.

These tools also help with communicating development needs with the product team in an objective manner. It is easy to understand what customers want and what features they are looking for in your product. Providing the metrics necessary to roll-out features that truly match what a majority of customers want, rather than a useless add-on, is priceless.

Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Annabel Maw, Director of Communications @ JotForm

At JotForm, we have a support forum where our customers leave product feedback and suggestions. Our product team pulls information from there and takes note of what customers are saying. Then they add it to a queue and work to make product updates as soon as they can. It's a simple and streamlined flow.

Follow Annabel Maw: @AnnabelLMaw
Connect on LinkedIn: LinkedIn

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Here are three key takeaways from the above:

1. Use what the customers have told you. The customer is one of the best sources of information you have at your disposal. Back up your decisions with what the customers actually want.

2. Make sure everyone feels as though they are heard. Everyone should be contributing to these discussions to allow for more informed product decisions.

3. Keep everyone updated. Update your roadmap, keep your teams informed of any changes. And, of course, close the loop.

Read next: How to Use Customer Feedback to Get Product Buy-in and Manage Stakeholders

Last Updated: 2023-03-08

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