But how do you get there? How do you move past being “another SaaS tool” and become a tool people rave about?

We’ve found that the best way is to ask our users. It sounds simple, and it is when you have the proper setup.

After you ask, make sure to listen to the response. It’s easy to skip this step!

Let’s dive into the customer feedback strategy to help you maximize this valuable resource.

What is customer feedback?

People love submitting reviews. You probably love doing it too, especially when something goes wrong. There’s something cathartic about putting your thoughts and opinions out there.

What can you do about customers’ online reviews? And especially negative feedback? Well, you can start by controlling the narrative.

Reviews are just one form of feedback, but they illustrate the point well.

Customer feedback is any commentary your users share about your product and their customer experience. Feedback can come from:

• Reviews
• Feature requests
• Bug reports
• Social posts
• Chatbot inquiries
• Sales calls
• Emails
• Customer survey responses
• And more

To make sense of all the feedback, product managers create a strategy and utilize customer feedback programs.

Customer feedback strategy

Here’s what we recommend to make sure your customer feedback strategy is sound and beneficial.

Set clear goals

Ask yourself:

• Why do you want to collect and manage feedback?
• Do you have clear intentions to act on it?
• Is everyone in your team aligned?

Collect feedback, but do it for the right reasons. That’ll set you up for success.

Choose the right channels

How do you know which feedback channel to focus on?

Think about where you currently communicate with your customers. And, more importantly, where do you tend to get the most engagement? This can vary from customer to customer. 

If your users never check their emails but are very active in a chatbot, send an invitation to leave feedback there.

If some users love talking about your tool on Twitter, join those conversations and ask for feedback there (you can make the conversation private).

Think about not just your current users, but also potential customers. And try to be where they are. It’s the best way to really connect with them and discover their needs.

For example, potential customers (or leads) can mention something during sales calls. So take note of those ideas.

You also won’t know until you try. So test out several channels to determine what’s right for your audience.

Get all data in one place

Whatever you choose, keep all the data in one place. You can start with a spreadsheet, an idea board, or a feedback board like Canny. But avoid having all feedback in different places. It’ll get too complex very quickly. Plus, you won’t be able to quantify how many people request similar features.

With a system like Canny, you can invite your users to submit ideas and add votes to existing ones. You can also vote on behalf of your users and prospects.

Pick a feedback management system

Collecting, organizing, and making sense of feedback is easy when you have a proper setup. You won’t need to scramble to get feedback into one place or struggle to understand and derive any valuable insight from it. Canny helps you do all that.

Listen, respond, and engage

One of the things people hate the most is being ignored. An unhappy customer is often the one who doesn’t receive enough attention. That’s where lots of customer churn happens!

So, when you collect feedback, don’t ghost your users. Really listen to their opinions, ask for clarification where needed, engage in a conversation, and show that you care. In other words, close that customer feedback loop.

Analyze

Take time to make sense of all the data. Here’s what you can do:

• Look for patterns and common themes
• Use qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques to gain meaningful insights
• Perform feedback analysis
• Check which ideas are the most popular
• Segment your users to understand what your priority groups want
• Develop a prioritization formula to score ideas objectively
• Determine which products will delight your customers and prospects the most

Here’s an example of how segmentation works in Canny. When you segment your users, you’ll quickly see how you can best serve your most valuable customers.

Take action

Involve other team members. Share your findings, decide what to implement, and keep everyone in the loop. Once you start building something, let the world know! Add it to a public roadmap your customers can see.

You’ll motivate your users to continue leaving feedback. They’ll see that it matters and makes a difference.

Iterate and improve

Always assess what’s working and what’s not. Don’t be afraid to rethink your strategy. That’s what this guide is for! Go back to the drawing board, try different approaches and techniques, and see what happens. You won’t know until you try.

Now that we’ve covered feedback strategy, let’s dig a little deeper and discuss customer feedback programs and systems.

Customer feedback programs

A customer feedback program comes from your overall strategy (check the previous section) for obtaining and using customer feedback. It’s sometimes called the voice of the customer (VoC) program.

Your program should include clear intentions and goals for managing user feedback. That includes how you’ll collect, organize, prioritize, and act on that feedback. You must also define where, when, and how to gather feedback.

Once you’re ready to outline precisely how to collect that feedback, you can move on to building your customer feedback systems.

Customer feedback systems

Remember how we mentioned that you need the right setup? This is what we mean.

Customer feedback will only work in your favor if you know how to manage, analyze, and make decisions based on it. Just reviewing it won’t really move the needle. And that’s why you need customer feedback systems.

These systems help you collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback and opinions.

But what are some of those systems?

Start by collecting feedback. You can do that through:

1. Customer feedback survey – asking your users for their opinions directly

• NPS (net promoter score), CES (customer effort score), CSAT (customer satisfaction score), etc. – popular ways to measure customer satisfaction

2. Feedback form – requesting feedback after a specific action or conversation
3. Social media monitoring – watching what people say about you on social media
4. Online review platform – monitoring sites like G2 and Capterra
5. Customer support and customer success interactions – answering questions and asking users to rate the conversation
6. Idea board/feedback management portal – a tool like Canny is great for that

As you can see, there are lots of sources of feedback. To analyze it all better, it’s best to bring it all in one place first. And that’s what Canny allows you to do!

Once you’ve set up a way to receive feedback, you can start digging into your users’ real feelings toward your product.

Customer insights will help you figure out what features to build next and how to increase loyalty. That’s why feedback analysis is so important.

In short, you need to look for patterns, determine your main goal with feedback, and show your customers that you care.

Why does it all matter?

Now all this may seem like a lot of work. Not just collecting, but also processing and making sense of all that feedback? That’s a handful.

The truth is, you’ll end up with more work on your hands if you don’t have a customer feedback program. That’s because people will speak up no matter what. So you, as a product manager, have to manage that feedback anyway.

And if you don’t, you mind end up building features no one cares about. 

When you set up a system to collect all that feedback in one place, managing it will become easier. You can even automate certain aspects of it!

While working with that feedback, you’ll uncover valuable insights and customer sentiment. You’ll know what to work on next, relate to your customers on a deeper level, and build a better product as a result!

Now that we’ve covered the importance of customer feedback programs, let’s explore them a little more.

How to ask for feedback

After you’ve decided to build a customer feedback management program, it’s time to collect that feedback. Rather than trying to catch all the ideas that fly at you from every direction, you can set up a system to help you manage it all.

We mentioned a few ways to collect feedback in the systems section. Our favorite, of course, is using a feedback management tool (like Canny!). It shouldn’t be the only way you gather feedback, but we recommend making it central to your system.

Your feedback management system should house all your feedback. Having all feedback in a central spot makes managing and analyzing it a snap. 

Here’s how to invite users to submit feedback in your idea portal.

Where to ask for feedback

We’re big proponents of having a feedback button prominently displayed at all times. This will minimize frustration, give users an outlet, and position you as transparent and open.

Other ways of collecting feedback include:

• Survey: NPS, CES, and CSAT are the most popular ones
• Email: distribute a survey, link to your feedback board, and more
• Social media: ask for ideas, redirect to your feedback portal
• Customer support: use chatbots or reach out to customers directly
• Customer review sites: let your customers know they can leave feedback there
• Sales calls: note any feedback or ideas that prospects bring up during sales calls

Let’s illustrate with some examples.

How tech companies collect and action user feedback

Here’s how Missive integrates Canny within their tool. Users can check out their roadmap and submit feedback without leaving Missive. It’s a very seamless experience for their users.

Similarly, Taskade embeds Canny into their site.

ClickUp has a button within their tool that redirects users to their Canny board.

Giving your users an easy way to give feedback will make them much more likely to share their opinions.

Here’s an example of a survey invite from LinkedIn. It quickly explains why this survey is important, how long it’ll take, and where the feedback data will be used.

Now let’s discuss the best time to ask for feedback.

When to ask for feedback

The most common advice is – ask a happy customer for feedback.

However, we believe you can learn even more from unsatisfied customers. Sure, public reviews are better when coming from happy clients. But, if you’re interested in improving, ask someone who’s not 100% satisfied.

You can set up triggers that automatically ask for their feedback after they perform a certain action. For example, they’ve just interacted with your customer support agent. Now you can ask them to review the conversation.

Another idea: ask for feedback on an anniversary of using your product. You can also make it a big deal and congratulate your users! Make them feel special, and then ask for something.

If you’ve just introduced a new feature, you can collect feedback after someone uses it. It’ll help you determine whether it’s a successful feature or not. It can also guide you towards improving it.

Now let’s discuss what you can ask to get the most useful type of feedback.

What to ask

Here are some common questions for you to consider. We use many of these during case studies, check-up calls, renewal calls, and so on.

Whenever and wherever you ask for feedback, think of your primary goal, and try to phrase your request very clearly.

Don’t use all of these questions at once though! Pick the ones that matter the most to you right now.

“When planning your customer feedback interviews, be sure to document internal assumptions and biases, as these can often turn into leading questions. When you write down assumptions, you’re reminded to validate them, not reinforce them by influencing customers to answer in a specific way.”

Eileen Licitra, Product Marketing Strategist at Insight Out Marketing

Open-ended questions:

• What are you trying to achieve by using our product?
• What challenges led you to try our product?
• How did you find our registration process?
  • Is there anything you would change?
• Is there anything that prevents you from using our product? 
• What aspects of our product do you like? 
• What aspects of our product would you change? 
• What improvements would you suggest?
• How is your overall experience with our company?
• Is there anything else you would like to share?

“Pick one option” questions:

• How satisfied are you with our product? (CSAT survey question)
  • Very satisfied
  • Satisfied
  • Neutral
  • Dissatisfied
  • Very dissatisfied
• How easy or difficult is it for you to solve your issue with the help of our product? (CES survey question)
  • Very easy
  • Easy
  • Neutral
  • Difficult
  • Very difficult
• How likely are you to recommend our product to others? (NPS survey question)

• How responsive are our customer service representatives?
  • Very responsive
  • Responsive
  • Neutral
  • Unresponsive
  • Very unresponsive

Remember only to pick the questions that help you achieve your immediate goals.

With Canny, you can create an open invitation for feedback. You won’t need to send out separate surveys and think about what to ask. Your users will submit their opinion when they have something to share. That feedback can come from your chatbot, your sales rep, your support conversations, and more.

Tips for managing and organizing feedback

Collecting feedback is a lot of work. But the real work begins when you start processing it.

Once you receive feedback, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Especially if you’ve implemented a few of the systems we mentioned above.

Suddenly, you might feel like there’s too much feedback, and it’s coming at you from all directions.

It’s true – managing feedback can be a challenge. But it doesn’t have to be.

You need to set up a feedback management system. Ideally, all feedback is in one place, and you can quickly identify patterns. A good system will help you manage duplicate feedback and track how many customers voted for it. 

With Canny, you can do exactly that.

Canny connects to many different tools and helps you with gathering customer feedback.

You can also invite your users to submit feedback directly in Canny, upvote existing ideas, comment, and discuss with each other.

Then, you can see which feedback’s getting traction and focus on that.

To make it even better, you can prioritize your feedback based on custom criteria and select the winning ideas.

Things to avoid

Making false promises

Sometimes, customers get their hopes up. If you’ve done a good job, they know you listen to their feedback and genuinely care. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll build every feature they request.

Make that clear from the get-go. Explain that you prioritize the most essential features for your business at this time. Ensure them that their opinion matters and that you’ll consider their ideas later. But don’t make promises you can’t keep.

Asking too often

Yes, there’s such a thing as “overcommunicating.” Customers get tired of emails and feedback requests. So, instead of burdening them with those, make your feedback board available to them at all times.

Be strategic with your communications and walk them through how easy it is to leave feedback. This way, they’ll want to do it without reminders.

Close the feedback loop

Remember: managing user feedback is an ongoing process. It’s never set and done. Your product, users, and the environment around you constantly change. So you need to evolve too.

By listening to user feedback and implementing customer feedback programs, you can drastically improve your customer experience.

A happy customer also often makes a loyal customer.

So use the power of customer feedback! And start building better products today. Canny can help you get there. Check out what it can do for you, and book a free demo here.

Maria Vasserman

Maria loves all things creative – writing, photography, movies and beyond When she's not creating content to tell the world about Canny, she's either photographing a wedding, jumping at a rock concert, camping, travelling, snowboarding, or walking her dog

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The post Why customer feedback is essential: the ultimate guide to effective feedback programs appeared first on Canny Blog.

But let’s back up a bit. Why do you need to seek customer feedback in the first place? It’s an excellent way to show customers you care. Plus, you can use feedback to improve your service and product offerings.

In this article, we’ll share four tips for writing engaging customer feedback emails. You’ll also see some customer feedback email examples you can use for inspiration. 

Let’s get started!

1. Keep it short and simple

You need to keep your email short, sweet, and to the point. Ideally, your email should be less than 200 words. You want the reader to absorb the information as quickly as possible (more on that later). 

As a rule of thumb, include the following components in the email body and no more:

• A greeting
• Your reason for writing to the recipient (i.e., to collect feedback)
• How long it will take the recipient to complete the survey
• A visible call-to-action button they can click to start the process

Here’s one of GetResponse’s customer feedback emails:

After the headline, the email goes straight to the point by explaining its purpose. Also, it informs the recipient how long the survey will take to complete. It conveys all this information in only a few lines. Then there’s the hard-to-miss call-to action button. It stands out against the white background.

But why should you keep your email short? It keeps your email’s recipient focused.

Your email has one goal: to collect the customer’s feedback. Therefore, it’s a good idea to narrow down the reader’s focus. Your goal is to get them to take your desired action immediately.

Including unnecessary information in your email could distract the user. People might not even read that information. The average time people spend reading brand emails has declined over the years. It’s gone from a high of 13.4 seconds in 2018 down to 10 seconds in 2021. 

In other words, you have a small window to grab your reader’s attention. It’s best to use it wisely.

2. Personalize your email

Marketers who use personalized emails report 25% higher unique click rates. This brings us to our second tip for writing engaging customer feedback emails. Personalize your emails.

Email personalization entails tailoring your email to customers. You can do this by leveraging the customer data gathered by your email marketing service.

Include your recipients’ names in your email subject lines. You can also include the sender’s name in the email, like the example below: 

Including the sender’s name in the “from” address humanizes your brand. Your customer will feel like an actual person is talking to them. That will make them feel like the company made the email specifically for them. 

Personalize your emails by making them timely as well. When you send a feedback email, let it coincide with the stage your customer is in on their customer journey. 

The customer journey are the stages customers go through when interacting with you. Here’s a rundown of the stages:

1. Awareness: the stage where a customer becomes aware they have a problem. So,  they search for a solution
2. Consideration: the customer discovers marketing content related to a possible solution 
3. Purchase: the stage where they purchase the solution (or try it for free)
4. Adoption: the stage where the solution becomes an indispensable part of their life
5. Advocacy: the stage where they spread the word about the solution

Let’s assume a customer unsubscribes from your SaaS business. Your feedback email should aim to discover their reasons for unsubscribing. Don’t send them an email that seeks feedback on how they found out about your brand, for example. 

3. Offer an incentive

When requesting feedback from customers, wisdom dictates you don’t show up empty-handed. Time is money. Your email recipients will think they’ll lose out if they respond.

So, make responding to email surveys worth their while. Give them an incentive. The incentive can be as simple as saving the recipient time. You can highlight this benefit in the email subject line. 

However, if you want an incentive that really packs a punch, offer your customers a discount. Here’s one of the best feedback email examples for this:

Source

The fashion brand Kate Spade offers a 25% discount in exchange for customers’ feedback. The brand also generates FOMO (fear of missing out). It does this by telling the readers to hurry up before the deal ends in a few days.

Offering an incentive is one of the oldest engagement tricks in the book. It’s a popular strategy employed to boost engagement. 

4. Make it easy to provide feedback

Even if your email recipients are willing to provide detailed feedback, they won’t if you make it hard for them to leave it. That’s why you should make it as easy as possible for a customer to share their valuable insight with you.

There’s no shortage of options for collecting meaningful feedback. With these strategies, you can give your customers a positive experience too.

For example, you can make your survey take the form of multiple-choice answers. Check out one of our feedback email examples below. This type of feedback form doesn’t require much thought from your customer. You’re already giving them possible answers after all.

Use NPS surveys

You can also use Net Promoter Score surveys to generate customer feedback. Like multiple-choice questions, these surveys are easy to answer. You just ask this single question: “How likely are you to recommend [brand name] to a friend or a colleague?” 

Respondents give an answer from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). See an example of an NPS survey below:

Source

Your customer can also answer each question with just a mouse click. Based on their single answer, you can already determine customer loyalty:

• Those who answer 9 or 10 are your loyal customers.
• Those who answer 7 or 8 like your service. However, they’re not happy enough to be promoters.
• Those who answer 0 to 6 are unhappy customers. They’re unlikely to buy from you again.

This customer feedback survey email, however, has limitations. It’s always possible not one of your answer options say what your customers really want to say. To avoid this, give your customers the option to share any additional thoughts they may have. You can, for example, include a blank line in these types of emails. This is where they can just write down any additional comments.

Examples of engaging customer feedback emails

Now that we know the theory, here are some examples of engaging customer feedback email examples:

1. Thumbtack

This customer feedback email is an excellent example of personalization. The sender uses the recipient’s first name. Thumbtack also sends the email right after the recipient used its services.

Source

It’s also an excellent example of brevity. Notice that in less than 200 words, the Thumbtack Team managed to convey the purpose of the email.

2. Moosejaw

Moosejaw offers recipients $10 for free if they answer their survey. That’s a great way to encourage recipients to take action.

Source

The brand ensures the copy announcing the incentive stands out in the email example as well. The copy is in huge letters. It’s right in the middle of the email. With this strategy, recipients won’t even think of ignoring the email. Who doesn’t want free $10 after all?

3. Acme

In this email example, Acme uses an NPS survey to determine customer loyalty. The survey is easy to answer. All the recipient has to do is click on a number:

Source

Acme also includes a text box in the email survey so recipients can elaborate on their answers if they want to. 

Bonus: follow up with customers

Your job doesn’t end after you write your customer feedback email and hit send. 

Follow up with customers who did not respond after the initial email. Research shows your average response rate goes up to 13% if you send one follow up email. 

Send that follow up email three days after the initial feedback email. If you follow up earlier, your customers might think you’re pushy and intrusive. 

But don’t just follow up on your feedback request with customers who didn’t respond. Do this with respondents who submitted their valuable feedback, too.

Following up with a satisfied customer that gives positive feedback can help you build brand loyalty.

Following up with a dissatisfied one can lead to valuable insights. As I mentioned earlier, this constructive feedback can help in product development or future rebranding efforts.

Source 

The email example above shows you how to follow up when a current customer gives negative feedback. The customer service team asks how the company can help the customer. This can ensure your good reputation as a brand. It shows the email recipient the company strives for a good customer experience.

As a final tip, always thank your customer for giving you feedback, whether positive or negative.

Secret to writing engaging customer feedback emails revealed

Writing engaging customer feedback emails doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, when you use the four strategies revealed in this article, it can make the process easy. 

Personalized and short emails will do the trick. Offer an incentive. Also, make it easy for your customers to provide feedback. 

As a bonus tip, don’t forget to follow up after writing and sending your customer feedback email.

Implement the tips above. Also, get inspiration from the feedback email examples in this article. You’ll enhance your reputation with customers too.

Michal Leszczyński

Michal is immersed in developing, implementing, and coordinating all manner of content marketing projects as the Head Of Content Marketing & Partnerships at GetResponse. He has 10-plus years of expertise in online marketing with a Master of Science Degree in Strategic Marketing and Consulting from the University of Birmingham (UK). Michal is the author of more than 100 articles, ebooks, and courses for both GetResponse and renowned websites like Crazy Egg and Social Media Today.

All Posts - Website

The post How to write engaging customer feedback emails (+ examples for inspiration) first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post How to write engaging customer feedback emails (+ examples for inspiration) appeared first on Canny Blog.

This article will give you an in-depth look at how to report your customer experience ROI. It will provide you with the best practices for measuring this important metric.

Why is customer experience ROI hard to prove

Customer experience management and measuring CX ROI are difficult. This is because it involves intangible elements like customer satisfaction, loyalty, and trust. On top of that, improving your CX can call for a significant investment of your time and money.

These investments can take time to show results, so it can be difficult to measure your ROI in the short term.

This is because it’s not always easy to link customer experiences to business outcomes. For example, increased revenue, reduced costs, or improved customer satisfaction are good indicators. Yet, it’s hard to link them to a single CX program.

How to report your customer experience ROI 

How exactly do you start measuring ROI on CX investment?

Here are the steps you can take to learn how your CX investments are helping your business.

Gather operational and experience data 

Before you can measure customer experience ROI, you need to start gathering data. You’ll need operational data (like financial data). One place you can go for this data is your accounting software. You can access the necessary data through advanced reporting features.

You’ll also need customer experience data (such as customer feedback surveys). To access this customer data speak to your marketing and sales teams. Also, refer to your CMS system to gain insights into the customer experience you provide. You can then analyze the data to determine the impact of CX initiatives on your business.

Understand the formula for CX ROI

The formula for CX ROI is pretty straightforward.

You can classify many different things as the benefits of your CX initiative. For example:

• How improved customer satisfaction has affected your revenue growth
• Cross-sell and upsell rates
• Customer retention
• Cost-to-serve rate.

Your investments will include:

• Operating costs
• Employee training
• Cost of any new tools or technology

Calculate the benefits and value of your program

To measure the benefits of your CX program, you’ll need to consider its short and long-term impacts.

Short-term benefits could be direct revenue or improved CSAT scores. Long-term benefits mean factors like increased customer loyalty, reduced customer churn, etc.

You’ll then need a way to link these factors to your CX initiatives. The most common option is to track metrics like CSAT, CLV, etc., over a set period. Some projects will take longer than others to show results, so you’ll have to use your best judgment.

Calculate the operating costs of your program

Think about all the direct and indirect costs associated with the initiative. Direct costs could be employee salaries, software or technology costs, or training expenses. Indirect costs are things like rent, cost of utilities, or general office expenses.

Include future predictions and trends in your report

When reporting customer experience ROI, you should also consider future predictions and trends. This will give you better insight into the long-term impact of your CX initiatives. This is where tools like ecommerce accounting software can come in useful. It offers features such as inventory management and real-time views of your cash flow. These help with forecasting and understanding the future implications of your CX program.

Customer experience ROI metrics

These are the most popular metrics for measuring customer experience ROI:

Customer lifetime value

CLV is a measure of the total value a customer will bring to your business over their customer journey. To work out CLV, use this formula:

You can extract the data you need to calculate CLV by using your retail accounting software. You can gain an overview of all customer transactions. You can also calculate the average purchase value and the number of purchases per year. This makes it a lot easier to identify your CLV.

CLV gives you a better understanding of the value a customer brings to your business. This works well with your customer acquisition cost. They will give you a clear picture of your available investment margin for CX programs.

Cost per conversion

Cost per conversion measures the cost of acquiring a new customer. Conversion means a customer taking a specific action. And you can define conversion however you’d like in your organization. Just make sure that everyone’s aligned with your definition of a conversion.

This can be anything from buying something to filling out a contact form.

Use this formula to work it out:

Cost per conversion is a popular metric. It helps you track your outgoings and begin to understand how much you spend to get new customers.

This information can help you make informed decisions about your pricing.

Cost per interaction

This measures the cost of each customer interaction, from a phone call, to an email, to a chat session. Here’s the cost per interaction formula:

It’s an important metric to consider when evaluating your ROI. That’s because it gives you a clear picture of the cost of each interaction. This helps you decide how much you want to spend on customer support and experience.

First contact resolution

FCR measures the percentage of customer issues you solve the first time they contact you. It’s a useful metric because it gives you an idea of how well your customer service process works.

A high FCR rate tells you that customers are getting the support they need straight away. A low FCR rate tells you that customers are having to reach out many times to get their issues resolved. You can work it out with this formula:

Improving your FCR rate reduces the cost of customer support. It also improves customer experience.

Churn rate

Churn rate is the percentage of your customers who leave or stop using your product. A high churn rate can have a significant impact on your revenue growth. It means you are losing customers and potential revenue. 

The formula to calculate churn rate is:

Measure your churn rate when evaluating the ROI of your customer experience program. It will give you insight into your customer satisfaction and how it trends over time. 

Getting started with CX reporting

Measuring your customer experience ROI isn’t easy. Yet, with the right analytics, you can get a good idea of the return on your CX investments. Use the data and customer experience metrics we talked about above to get off to the right start. You can perfect your customer experience strategy and gain more satisfied customers.

Maria Vasserman

Maria loves all things creative – writing, photography, movies and beyond When she's not creating content to tell the world about Canny, she's either photographing a wedding, jumping at a rock concert, camping, travelling, snowboarding, or walking her dog

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The post How to report your customer experience ROI first appeared on Canny Blog.

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Churn is the number of customers that leave a company. Sometimes it’s expressed as a percentage of the total number of customers. It’s an inevitable part of doing business. So what can we do if we can’t avoid it?

That’s right – learn from it and move on. In this article, we’ll explain what exactly you can learn from these experiences and how you can use it to your advantage.

Step 1: identify the churn

Before we dive in, let’s first define the different types of churn.

1. Churn rate is the raw percentage of lost customers over a specific time period
2. Negative churn is where you want to be, of course. It happens when revenue from expansion overshadows the lost revenue from customer churn. Upsells, add-ons and upgrades help to achieve that.
3. Positive churn is common in certain industries that operate under the outcome model. Recruitment, dating, weight loss and health services are some examples. A customer achieves the desired outcome and leaves. The goal is still achieved, so this churn is viewed as positive. 
4. Voluntary churn (aka active churn) happens when an existing customer decides to and then leaves.
5. Involuntary churn (aka (delinquent churn) occurs when there’s a payment failure or some other issue that prevents a customer from continuing to use the product.

It’s important to understand what types of churn you’re facing. That lets you understand and respond appropriately. 

Step 2: break it down

Understanding why customers leave is the key to providing a better experience and avoiding customer churn in the future. 

To start, you can look at your data on churn rates, current customers, and their usage of your product or service. Calculate the churn rate (we’re explaining how to do that in step 4) and explore how they’re using the product. This will help you understand when and why customers choose to leave. As with any set of data, try to identify patterns. When only one customer leaves, it’s unfortunate, but likely not a dealbreaker. But, when five or more customers leave for exact same reason, you need to investigate.

To learn from churning customers, you need to offer them a way to give you feedback. Typically, exit surveys are used here.

Step 3: check yourself

Maybe you lost quite a few customers in the past quarter. You’re probably feeling a bit down. But have you compared your customer churn rate to the industry average? Maybe there’s something going on in the world (ahem, recession, ahem) that’s affecting everyone around you and not just you.

It’s hard to tell what the average churn rate is. But here are some guidelines. In SaaS, the churn rate you want to strive for is 2%-8% of MRR. Of course, this varies by the age and of the company, the number of customers, and the amount (and quality) of competition.

General rule: the lower the churn rate, the better. But don’t focus as much on the number itself. Rather, notice the trends. If your churn rate is decreasing over time, do more of what you’re doing! If not, think of other customer retention strategies.

Here are some of the common reasons why customers churn:

1. No longer need your product
2. Dissatisfied by the product
   • – Lack of certain features/integrations
3. Unhappy with the customer service
4. Reduced budget
5. Not using the product enough
6. Found a better/cheaper solution
7. Their payment method expired and needs to be updated (involuntary churn)
8. The billing contact left the company and needs to be updated (involuntary churn)

Some of these you can combat before it becomes a problem. Others just can’t be helped. So focus on those that you can fix! Here are a few ideas.

No longer need your product → product improvements

When you know that a customer is unhappy with your product, it’s a golden opportunity. Chances are, if they’ve shared their dissatisfaction with you, they’ve been struggling for a while. So, first and foremost, make communication that easy and seamless for them. Give them a platform to easily share feedback and hear back from you.

After you’ve identified the gaps in your offering (could be a missing feature, a lacking integration or anything else that’s vital for this client), assess whether or not you can build it. Prioritization comes in handy here. Identify how much time and effort this would take. Determine how useful this will be in the long run (is it just 1 customer who’s requesting it? Are they a vary valuable and revenue-driving customer?). Then, if you can, build what your customer is asking for. 

And, make sure to let them know once it’s live! There’s a good chance if you let a churned customer know that you’ve solved their pain point that they’ll give you a second chance.

Unhappy with the customer service → customer support and customer success

This goes without saying – customer support and success are the keys to customer satisfaction.

68% of customers leave a company because of poor customer service. That’s a lot of money left on the table!

You also can’t get a better churn prediction indicator than those conversations that happen with the support reps. Every touch point during customer onboarding and throughout their entire customer journey directly affects the churn risk. 

The trick is to pay attention to red flags, monitor customer behavior and product usage, gather customer insight in time, and try predicting churn before it occurs.

Your support and success teams should be set up to help you predict churn and prevent it. Let them leave notes and tags in your success and CRM software highlighting risks. Encourage them to leave feedback (or vote on existing feedback) on behalf of customers in your feedback management system. Get them to update customers as the company addresses their pain points.

These teams are your frontline when it comes to preventing churn. Rely on them and trust them.

Not using the product enough → product use

Customers not using your product is the first red flag. To prevent customer churn, first find a way to identify inactivity and low engagement. 

Then, take action. 

Try to reengage your users by offering support, different use cases for your product, helpful resources and so on. Remind them why they signed up in the first place and show how much they could be doing with the help of your product. FOMO might work here  

Customer success management plays a huge role here, so don’t overlook this. Direct outreach (even if it’s automated) from success can really help encourage usage. A quick call or demo might be all your customer needs to get going.

Step 4: calculate the churn rate

There are a few calculations you can perform as a way of churn analysis:

1. Customer churn rate % (during X period) = (# customers lost during X period / # customers at the start of X period) x 100

2. Revenue churn rate % = ((revenue at the start of X period – revenue at the end of X period) / revenue at the start of X period) x 100

These should help you get a clear idea of your churn rate.

Many tools will help you monitor and track churn over time. Ideally, you want churn to be automatically calculated and easy to access so you can work on improving it. 

Step 5: minimize instead of eliminating

The truth is, customers will come and go. That’s just the way it is. You can’t tie your users to you no matter how amazing your product is. 

You can try your absolute best to gather their feedback, respond to their comments, build the features they’re requesting, update them on the progress, but eventually they may still leave. 

You can’t eliminate churn completely. So focus on reducing churn instead. ven a 1% decrease in your churn rate can make a huge difference to your bottom line. According to research by Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%.

Before that happens, interview your current customers. Try to get a deeper understanding of their experiences and pass that on to the product team. You can gather invaluable insights by just asking your users about their experience.

Of course, asking each and every client individually is time-consuming. And then what do you even do with all those responses? How do you process the results, identify patterns and make sense of it all?

A centralized feedback system is the best solution. 

Canny is a feedback management tool that helps you collect feedback from your users and have it all in one place. Instead of chasing it around Slack, email, Zendesk and Salesforce, you can have it all in one location. 

You can even invite your users to engage – leave comments, upvote other requests, or have a conversation. Then you can prioritize those requests, add them to the roadmap and then announce your updates through your changelog. 

When your customers see that you’re actually listening and building what they’re craving, they are that much less likely to churn.

 Learn from every experience

You can’t avoid churn completely. So try to focus on what you can learn from each churning customer. Break it down for yourself and your teams, control what you can and don’t stress over the things that you can’t influence. And remember – feedback management is still at the center of it all.

Maria Vasserman

Maria loves all things creative – writing, photography, movies and beyond When she's not creating content to tell the world about Canny, she's either photographing a wedding, jumping at a rock concert, camping, travelling, snowboarding, or walking her dog

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Posts

Gathering feedback is one thing. What really counts though is acting on it. That means using the feedback to actually make changes. That’s usually a multi-step process:

• Collecting feedback
• Communicating with users, clarifying and getting more information
• Prioritizing feature requests
• Adding winning ideas to the roadmap
• Developing those features
• Introducing them via the changelog

We’ll go over each step later in the article, but here’s the main thing: you need to close that feedback loop. Why? Because otherwise customers won’t bother to leave feedback for you anymore.

In contrast, when you have a tool that helps you connect all the dots and keep your customers up to date, closing that feedback loop is that much easier.

That’s exactly what our clients did this year. We saw a total of 49,041 completed posts this year! Now that’s a lot of feedback!

Now let’s examine each step a little closer.

Votes

You may get lots of great ideas. But what’s the best way to prioritize them?

Long gone are the days of confusing spreadsheets. Forget scrolling through endless Slack messages and emails. Use a centralized tool and save so much time and unnecessary effort. You can also easily quantify those feature requests with a tool like Canny.

That’s what companies like ahrefs, ClickUp and others did in 2022. And, across them all, we saw 2,907,459 votes!

Giving this power back to the people is highly beneficial You can see what people really want and need. Maybe they haven’t thought of an idea themselves, but they liked someone else’s. If they can upvote it, it’ll be super clear that you should pay attention to it.

Comments

Sometimes it’s best to clarify something before building a feature. What if you misunderstood and built the wrong thing? Whoops.

When you have a direct line of communication with your users, you can always reach out and get more information. Keeping all context in one single thread, under the original post makes, it really easy for the product team. This way, you’ll minimize errors and make the process that much smoother.

The numbers speak for themselves. In 2022 there were 700,381 comments.

Changelog

Once you’ve got feedback and prioritized it (thanks to votes, comments and your own unique prioritization criteria), it’s time to get to work. You can use a roadmap to manage your workload and keep your customers up to date on the progress.

Once you’re ready to ship, don’t forget to celebrate all your hard work! Also, make sure you let your customers know about your updates. If they recommended an idea, they’re likely investment and want to see it through. After all, users love products that are always updated, refreshed and improved. So use a changelog to announce those new features and keep those users engaged!

Bench, CircleCI and others published 12,720 changelog entries in Canny this year!

Integrations

Canny integrates with lots of tools to help you do more in less time. In particular, our Zendesk and Intercom integrations have helped many teams save time this year. Support can quickly send those feature requests to Canny and the product team can immediately take over. It’s really seamless!

That’s what 113,818 posts in Canny were all about this year!

Various teams

Product teams love Canny. But they’re not the only ones! Some other teams that’ve used and enjoyed Canny this year include sales, marketing, support, customer success and more.

We get it: you might be unsure whether or not Canny will suit your team’s unique needs. That’s exactly why we have our Free Plan – for you to test it out!

A year of Canny

We’re excited to close off another calendar year and jump into 2023. Our goal is to always lift more businesses with the help of customer feedback. So here’s to even more productivity and happy customers in 2023! 

Maria Vasserman

Maria loves all things creative – writing, photography, movies and beyond When she's not creating content to tell the world about Canny, she's either photographing a wedding, jumping at a rock concert, camping, travelling, snowboarding, or walking her dog

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Increasing your customer retention rate by only 5% may lead to a 25-95% profit increase. Seems like a big deal!

This article explains how and why feedback management improves customer satisfaction and retention.

It builds brand loyalty

Satisfied and loyal customers rarely complain. And very happy customers become your brand evangelists. They tweet about you without you even asking. They tell their friends and bring business your way. Sounds awesome, right? But how do you get there?

Paying attention to their feedback is a great way. Here’s a scenario to illustrate:

1. Customer submits feedback (“please fix this bug”)
2. Other users vote on it (“yes, I’m having the same issue”)
3. You comment to get more details
4. You prioritize this issue based on votes, effort, urgency, etc.
5. You actually fix it
6. You tell your customers about it (and the ones who brought it up find out first)

What do you think is going to happen if you follow through on their feedback? They’ll be ecstatic! Actions speak louder than words. So acting on customer feedback will make your customers feel heard and valued. Here’s an example of how we got a request to build a ClickUp integration.

Chris Wainwright, Director of Marketing at Humi, says: 

“Feedback from our current customers lets us know what they like about our HR software. And, what needs improvement. We use that information to make improvements. That leads to a better user experience for all users of our product. This helps us keep our existing customers and win new customers. Because, they know that we’re listening to their feedback. And, making changes based on what they tell us!

The more feedback we get from customers, the better we can tailor our products to their needs.”

You can take customer relationships one step further and build a loyalty program. Encouraging feedback can be a great component of any loyalty program. Many programs actively reward users contributing feedback.. 

It’s surprising how many companies fail to collect customer feedback. Even fewer involve customers in their product management. 

Make sure you’re not one of those companies 

It prevents complaints

Why wait until someone is really upset? 

The last thing you want is to receive complaints from public review sites (like G2 or Capterra). Or, negative posts on social media.

Be proactive instead. Manage customer expectations. Give your users a direct channel of communication. Invite them to share their opinion, have a conversation, and take part in the process. Better yet, set up a public roadmap to show them that you’re working on their issue.

The roadmap assures users that you’re continuously improving. And, that you’re not another “zombie project”. It also promotes customer engagement.

If an upset customer is chatting to support, asking for feedback is a great way to diffuse the situation. Encourage your teams to always ask for feedback when interacting with customers. It goes a long way.

Plus, the CS team can also keep those users up to date on the progress of their requests. All this can go a long way! 

“The two most frequent customer service annoyances are:

1. Waiting for sales or support help 
2. Being placed on hold for an extended period of time 

Response speed is a crucial factor in enhancing customer satisfaction.”

Jamie Irwin, James & James Fulfillment

Things like AI-enabled chatbots and other automation can help here. But feedback management really lies at the core of reducing that churn rate.

David Bitton of DoorLoop describes it like this:

“Feedback management systems let you identify when customer satisfaction begins to decline. This way, you can make changes before the situation worsens.” 

In contrast, if users believe that they can’t change anything, they won’t bother saying anything at all. They’ll simply move on. So try to prevent that from happening. And start early on – before they get upset and start looking elsewhere.

It invites users “behind the scenes”

When your customer base feels like they can join you “backstage”, they get that much more invested. They’re almost collaborating with you to build the best product for their needs. So really, they’re doing it for themselves. You’re just providing a vehicle.

Users also feel like they have a direct line of communication with you. They’re heard by the decision-makers in the company they chose. 

Be active about making, replying to, and managing comments. It really helps customers feel seen and heard.

It helps you stay ahead of the curve

When you work in isolation, without user feedback, you’re simply guessing. 

There’s a lot you can do to figure out what your users want:

• examining trends
• researching and benchmarking against competitors
• checking past performance
• calculating customer lifetime value
• mapping your customer journey
• brainstorming customer retention strategies
• planning customer loyalty programs 
• and more…

What’s easier? 

Asking them.

When you collect customer feedback and data, you start seeing patterns. When a certain number of customers mention or ask for the same thing, you’ve got to start paying attention. You can use feedback management software to do so quickly and efficiently.

User feedback can help you uncover new ideas that don’t already exist in the market.

Your users want to give you feedback and ideas. You just need to ask them. Doing so lets you proactively build your product and innovate. And that’s the best way to become and remain competitive!

Otherwise, you end up playing catch-up.

It builds a community

People love connecting over a specific topic. When a product is exceptional, users create communities around it. Think of all the Lego fans out there for example! It wasn’t Lego marketers who created those communities – the fans created them.

It might seem less likely in the B2B tech space, but it certainly exists. Tech fans love getting involved, so give them a way to do so!

Users can then collaborate, vote on various ideas, discuss and get very involved. In a way, you’re crowd-sourcing ideation for your product. All thanks to user feedback!

It helps you build exactly what your users want

And isn’t that the ultimate goal? Give your customers exactly what they want by asking them.

Joe Kevens from PartnerStack says: 

“Feedback helps us understand what our users want from our product. We get customer feedback directly from customers to our Customer Success Managers. Through onboarding and NPS surveys, and even through reviews. For example, when we get a new review on G2, we send the review details to our Slack channel. That lets our product team members see what the user highlights.” 

He also adds that: 

“In SaaS, some of your partners use a product in instances across a range of use cases and maturity levels. They also use your competitors’ products. So, your partners arguably can provide better feedback than your customers. Though, it should go without saying that customer feedback is still very important.”

When you have those open conversations, you can uncover very specific pain points. From there, your product team will be able to figure out solutions. As a result, your customers will enjoy a better user experience. In fact, you can even customize that customer experience.

And that, in turn, will keep them around. This brings us back to our very first point – customer loyalty. See how we closed the feedback loop here? 

Knowing what your users want most is also critical to prioritizing feature development. Prioritization doesn’t depend only on customer feedback. But, it’s a critical consideration.  

With limited engineering resources, it’s critical you prioritize the most important features. 

Please and keep your customers through feedback management

It’s hard to improve if you don’t know where to start. So let your customers tell you. When you open up the gates for their feedback, it will be much easier to understand what really matters to them. And, when you show how much you care, they’ll want to stay with you forever.

Jacques Reulet

Jacques has championed customers at both Coinbase and Shopventory before joining Canny to head up Customer Success. He's also like, really tall.

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The following three customer satisfaction metrics can help you gauge just that: 

• NPS (net promoter score), 

• CES (customer effort score), 

• and CSAT (customer satisfaction score) 

In this guide, we’ll look at each and see how product managers can leverage them to create a better CX.

What is customer satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction refers to how happy a customer is with your business. There are many factors that can influence customer satisfaction including:

• the quality of the product or service, 

• the ease of use, 

• the price, 

• the level of customer service, etc.

Meet your customer’s needs and they’ll be more likely to come back and make repeat purchases. They’re also more inclined to recommend your company to friends and family. 

The real magic happens when you exceed customers’ expectations. That’s when they’re not only returning for more but also telling everyone they know about you. When you do a very good job, these customers act like your brand evangelists and stay loyal for years to come.

When customers are unhappy with their experience, they may take their business elsewhere. In fact, according to Helpscout, only 1 in 26 customers tell a business if they were unhappy. The rest just leave.

Thus, it is important for companies to focus on measuring customer satisfaction. Paying attention to negative feedback can help identify areas of improvement. And thanking customers for their positive feedback makes them feel seen and heard.

Why use customer satisfaction metrics?

Customer satisfaction metrics are ways to track how your business meets customer needs. Improving them can help reduce your customer churn rate and improve customer loyalty. Both of which affect the bottom line.

Businesses can track a variety of metrics depending on how broad or granular they want their data to be. In general, customer satisfaction metrics fall into two main categories:

• Overall customer satisfaction. Metrics that provide a general overview of customer satisfaction levels.

• Detailed customer satisfaction. Metrics that provide specific data to help identify areas of CX that need to be improved.

Collecting and storing customer feedback with the right software is critical for businesses. But it’s not enough to only have the data. Businesses need to be able to analyze and act upon their data to make informed decisions.

That said, as a product manager, which metrics should you focus on collecting data for? Below, we’ll outline and explain three.

3 important customer satisfaction metrics for product managers

1. NPS

What Is NPS?

NPS, (Net Promoter Score) is a measure of how likely your customers are to recommend your business.

The score is based on a simple question: 

“How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” 

It’s a great indicator for measuring whether you have happy customers or unhappy ones.

Here is an example of Canny’s:

Customers usually respond on a scale from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). Promoters are customers who choose with a score of 9 or 10. Passive customers are those who respond with a score of 7 or 8. Detractors are those who respond with a score of 0 to 6.

NPS example

To calculate your NPS, subtract the detractors from the promoters. Let’s say that a company collected an NPS survey from 100 customers and found the following: 

• 40% were promoters, 

• 30% were passive customers, 

• and 30% were detractors. 

The company’s NPS would be 10%, calculated as follows: 

40% (promoters) – 30% (detractors) = 10%.

How product managers can leverage NPS

So what does NPS have to do with product management? As a product manager, one of your key objectives is to grow revenue. Whether it be through customer acquisition or retention. 

NPS is a great leading indicator of both of those things. If you have a high NPS score, you’re acquiring happy customers. Your promoters are likely to stick around and refer you to others. These can be great customers to reach out to and ask for a written review or video testimonial.

Alternatively, if you have a low NPS score, that’s a sign you need to collect more data. You can do this by reaching out to the detractors and figuring out why they rated you low. Once you collect more data you’ll begin noticing patterns of concerns to address.

One thing to keep in mind for product managers is to segment their detractors. Focus on customers who use your product or service more or have a higher LTV. Focusing on issues related to low-frequency users may lead to inefficient resource allocation. This is not to say that you should ignore them. All feedback is valuable! But prioritize the feedback that will greater affect your business.

2. CES

What is CES?

Customer satisfaction is important for any business. Yet, it can be hard to gauge exactly how seamless your customer’s experience is. That’s where the CES (Customer Effort Score) metric comes in. 

CES is a customer satisfaction KPI that measures how difficult it was to solve a customer’s issue.

If a customer has to go through many hoops with customer service, it’s likely won’t result in a high CES score. Things like: 

• Being transferred to various departments

• Receiving a slow response time

• Being forced to re-explain an issue many times

To calculate a company’s CES, ask customers how difficult it was to solve their issue. A CES survey is usually measured using a Likert scale (a scale from 1 to -7). You can then use the results to identify areas of improvement for customer service.

But, CES doesn’t give a holistic view of customer service satisfaction. Thus, use it in conjunction with other metrics, such as NPS.

CES example

To calculate CES, you’ll need to survey your customers and ask them to rate their experience on a scale from 1 to -7. You can use other scales like emoticon ratings, but the Likert scale is most common.

Then, you’ll take the total number of responses that answered 5, 6, or 7 divided by the total number of responses. Lastly, multiply that number by 100. 

For example, let’s say you surveyed 100 customers and 70 of them answered either 5, 6, or 7. Then your CES score would be as follows:

70/100 x 100 = 70%

A high score means that your customers are satisfied with what they’ve received from you. If you have a low CES score, it means you need to make some improvements to your customer service.

Note: you don’t have to multiply the answer by 100. Depending on how you’re going to use the results, you may leave it as a decimal number too.

How product managers can leverage CES

Product managers aren’t usually directly involved with the customer service department. Yet, they can help identify opportunities to reduce post-purchase friction.

For example, let’s say your CES survey score is trending down. You also start noticing a pattern in customer feedback. Then maybe it’s time to assess whether you can improve your product or service. Perhaps an update can minimize the need for help?

Moreover, implementing tools like an AI chatbot can be an efficient way to help customers. Companies can build a chatbot in very little time to take away some of the load from the customer support team.

Whether your CES is trending up or down, it’s important for product managers to remain aware. They can determine whether to tweak the product or provide more information upfront.

3. CSAT

What is CSAT?

A business’s customer satisfaction (CSAT) score gauges overall customer sentiment and satisfaction levels. This number tells you how pleased your customers are with your product or service.

A high CSAT means your customers are more likely to come back in the future. A low score could mean that your business needs to make some improvements.

CSAT example

A common way to calculate CSAT is to ask customers to rate their level of satisfaction on a scale from 1 to 5. Then, take the number of the respondents that answered 4 or 5 and divide it by the total number of respondents. Finally, multiply that number by 100.

For example, let’s say you received responses from 100 customers. If 66 of those customers answered with either a 4 or 5, then your CSAT score would be:

66/100×100 = 66%.

The higher this number, the better.

How product managers can leverage CSAT

CSAT can give you insights into how your product or service is performing.

Tracking your CSAT can be helpful in identifying trends over time. Additionally, you can compare it to industry benchmarks. A good CSAT score will usually fall in the range of 75% – 85%.

Product managers can send a CSAT survey throughout parts of the customer lifecycle (for example, after new customer onboarding).

This provides clarity into whether you should tweak a stage in the customer journey.

CSAT’s downfall is that it is quite broad. It doesn’t provide much insight into which aspects of your business people are unhappy with. So, using it in conjunction with another customer satisfaction metric is ideal. Especially if you’re looking for a more granular understanding of customer sentiment.

Three key metrics

As a product manager, you’re constantly juggling different priorities. Balancing between meeting (and exceeding) customer needs and developing new features is tough. It’s impossible to get everything perfect. But these three key metrics should keep you on the right path.

Track these metrics to gather an accurate picture of how your business is performing. Finally, remember that you shouldn’t use these metrics as a gospel. Rather, use them as one tool among many when making business decisions.

Cody Arsenault

Cody is the founder of CodyArsenault.com – a blog that focuses on providing the tools and techniques to help others make money online. He also heads the SEO efforts at Parakeeto – a company dedicated to helping agencies improve their profitability.

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Sprint planning.

Strategy sessions.

Whatever your team calls them, planning meetings are a fact of life for any functional company. 

A productive planning meeting requires 3 key components:

1. Representatives for those who will be affected by the meeting’s outcomes
2. A clear decision that needs to be made
3. Actionable steps going forward

But, even though these components make for a productive meeting, there’s still something missing. 

Everyone has a voice at meetings—except your users

Often, a planning meeting will include at least one representative from each of your company’s relevant teams—the product team, marketing, support, design, etc. 

This makes zero sense. Presumably, you’re building a product for your customers. 

Now, it’s obvious that you can’t invite your entire user base to chime in every time you need to assign projects. Even if you could, many of them are going to say the same things. 

Plus, you’d have to keep track of who’s making which requests—is the request coming from freemium users, or people on a trial who just showed up? Or the long-term enterprise clients who genuinely matter to the company balance sheet?

But, the customer’s voice needs to have representation. 

In most companies, this looks like a beleaguered support team armed with loosely connected tickets and conversations. 

When you hear phrases like, “we’ve been hearing a lot of…” or “I recently talked to one user who…” you know you’re not dealing with hard data. 

These support anecdotes may be right, but unless they dig up their ticket history and slap the takeaways on a spreadsheet, they’re not especially helpful.

Bring real user feedback into the room

You can’t make informed decisions based on disjointed anecdotal data. That results in wasted engineering resources that may or may not be relevant to most of your users. 

But you also can’t just ignore your customers. This can result in creating a product or feature that you love, but that is lousy for your user base.

Your customers need a proxy to be in the room on their behalf, accurately conveying their sentiments. 

This is where Canny comes in. 

You can see what requests are the most popular, read user comments, identify which users are requesting what, check how long a submission has been on the board. The data is there. It’s immediate. No need to “circle back.”

When a request is submitted, you can ask users to clarify. Just add a comment and every voter will be notified that an admin has asked a question. In other words, you can start a one-to-many conversation with customers without needing to sort through a slew of emails, or send out a tedious survey.

Decisions without guesswork

So what are the results of inviting Canny into your team meetings? Well, with the user’s voice in the room, you can be confident that all stakeholders have had their say. 

You can filter the feedback to see who’s asking, what they’re paying, how long they’ve been around, and other key variables. 

There’s a balance between building the product you want to develop and the product your users are asking for. You’ll have to use your development resources strategically, and you won’t build what your customers are asking for every time. You still get to decide what you build, but now you have actual data on what your customers want to help inform your decisions.

When you use Canny, you know which requests will make the most significant impact on the bottom line. You can quickly tag and identify low-hanging fruit. You can also decide that a request just isn’t in the cards. Just close it and explain your reasons. This way, current and future users can see that explanation.

Making your meetings better by incorporating user feedback

Having all this data at your fingertips also frees up other resources: 

• Support teams don’t have to compile educated guesswork. They can simply focus on supporting your users. They also don’t have to field every feature request as a support ticket, since users now have a clear place to leave that feedback. Support may not even need to show up to the next planning meeting!
• Product teams don’t have to guess which requests will have the most impact. They have a clearly-defined place to go to see what users are asking for, and they know which users to reach out to when clarification is needed. They can even use Canny’s product roadmapping software to add feature requests to your roadmap. 
• Marketing knows which features to trumpet once completed. 
• Sales can circle back with a prospect once their dealbreakers are addressed. 
• Founders, the executive team, and other key stakeholders can easily keep tabs on the speed of development.

Finally, Canny lets you hold people accountable. With just two clicks, you can assign ownership of a task to a team member immediately. That way, everyone walks out with their action plans clearly defined. 

Integrating user feedback into your planning meetings makes them more productive and useful. You can feel confident that you’re prioritizing and building your roadmap with your users in mind. 

Having a feedback tool like Canny will give them a voice in your meetings—and it’s as easy as pulling up a shared screen.

Jacques Reulet

Jacques has championed customers at both Coinbase and Shopventory before joining Canny to head up Customer Success. He's also like, really tall.

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The post Using Canny to integrate user feedback into your roadmapping and planning meetings first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Using Canny to integrate user feedback into your roadmapping and planning meetings appeared first on Canny Blog.

However, each team leverages customer feedback differently: 

• Product teams are interested in customer feedback about specific parts of the product.
• Marketing teams want to understand the top product benefits and value propositions.
• Customer support teams seek feedback on how satisfied customers are with their interactions.

In the past ten years, growth teams have emerged between product and marketing. Growth teams are comprised of marketers, product managers, designers, engineers, and data scientists. Their goal is to improve the customer experience in ways that also drive tremendous business growth.

Growth teams have unique ways of incorporating customer feedback into their work. The details below are based upon my experience running growth teams at large consumer internet businesses.

The difference between growth teams and product teams

Before getting into how growth teams use customer feedback, it’s helpful to understand the difference between growth and product teams. The skillsets found on both teams are similar, but goals and processes are very different.

Product teams are responsible for building new products. Examples include new checkout flows, rating systems, and search functionality.

In contrast, growth teams are responsible for improvements to the existing product. Examples include removing form fields, adding guest checkout, and optimizing search algorithms.

The processes used by traditional product teams and growth teams differ substantially. As a result, growth teams leverage customer feedback differently than typical product teams.

How growth teams work

The typical growth team process can be divided into four steps. 

These steps are optimized to maximize focus and learning—two keys of growth team success:

1. Prior to each quarter, there is a broad brainstorm to identify potential focus areas or themes for the upcoming quarter
2. The team completes an analysis to select the most promising focus area for the quarter
3. An initial set of experiments is documented and prioritized
4. The rest of the quarter, the team runs experiments, measures results, learns, and prioritizes new experiments

What types of customer feedback do growth teams use during this process?

Growth teams succeed by finding product improvements that positively impact the customer experience. In most cases, the best way to understand how to improve the customer experience is by listening to customer feedback.

Growth teams use several sources of customer feedback throughout the process outlined above. However, different types of customer feedback are utilized in each step.

Customer feedback used while selecting the focus area each quarter

A few weeks before the quarter starts, growth teams aggregate customer feedback and other data from various sources. 

At this stage, it’s wise to gather information from as many sources as possible:

• NPS surveys
• Customer support tickets 
• Live chat logs
• Marketing channels
• Feature request boards
• Google Analytics
• Business intelligence tools

NPS surveys are a good starting point. They capture the most common sources of customer dissatisfaction, and quantify severity. Customer support tickets and live chat logs are also good sources of feedback.

Feature requests are another valuable feedback source. Grouping feature requests into categories is one way to identify promising product areas. The most requested features are worth consideration. If customers request a feature that already exists, that’s a good signal that the growth team should focus on those features.

Google Analytics can be used to identify major gaps in the product experience. 

Questions to investigate using Google Analytics include: 

• Do certain steps of the funnel that account for the majority of customer drop off? 
• Does the product perform worse on certain devices or for certain customer segments?
• Are there certain user flows or pages that perform better or worse than others?

The goal of this analysis is to identify the largest product gaps and business opportunities. Interviewing customers is a productive way to validate the final list of potential focus areas before making a selection.

Customer feedback used while brainstorming initial experiments

Once the growth team has selected its focus area for the quarter, the next step is to brainstorm an initial list of experiments. The top experiments from this list will kick off the quarter’s growth efforts.

To brainstorm the list, growth teams do a deep dive to gather all customer feedback and data specific to the focus area. 

For example, if the focus area is the company’s mobile web experience, the team should:

• Pull all NPS responses that mention the mobile experience
• Collect all customer support tickets and chat logs related to mobile
• Look at Google Analytics data for the mobile experience
• Do user interviews about mobile

The goal of this exercise is to identify potential reasons why the product underperforms in the chosen area. Perhaps mobile conversion rate is low because it’s difficult to navigate the checkout page. Or, mobile might underperform because the majority of visitors come from social media channels and land on dead-end blog pages.

Experiments are generally prioritized based on expected impact. Experiments that have high potential impact, are easy to implement, and are very likely to work should be at the top of the list.

Customer feedback while iterating on experiments

After launching the first experiments, the team enters into an iterative experimentation process. 

The process steps are: 

1. Measure experiment results
2. Identify learnings
3. Re-prioritize new experiments
4. Launch new experiments

This part of the process is all about speed and learning. Unlike traditional product teams, growth teams have to move quickly in between experiments. As a result, they tend to rely on experiment results and a handful of customer interviews to select their next experiments.

This need for rapid iteration also places a premium on organization. Growth teams that build streamlined processes maximize the number of experiments they can launch in a given quarter. Software tools can also add considerable value. Canny is an example of a system that organizes data. This enables the team to spend more time building, launching and learning from experiments.

For growth teams, customer feedback is invaluable

Customer feedback is extremely important for growth teams. In the long-run, working to satisfy your customers and grow your business go hand in hand. 

The amount of feedback that is available today is a double-edged sword. But, having organized processes in place (and using a tool to help you manage feedback) can make the process easier, and help growth teams succeed. 

Bruce Hogan

Bruce Hogan is a software and internet expert based in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of SoftwarePundit, a technology research firm that provides advice, information, and tools to help SMBs thrive.

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The post How growth teams use customer feedback first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post How growth teams use customer feedback appeared first on Canny Blog.