Whether it’s a constructive comment about an in-the-weeds product feature, or a top-line, overarching refrain echoed by a number of users, customer feedback can be a valuable facilitator of both incremental updates and larger-scale changes to a product or service.
The tools to cull this important currency, like customers surveys, product request forms and more, are ample. But they’re void of utility if the information they gather isn’t properly synthesized and capitalized upon. In the process, the relevant teams working with collected feedback must ensure not to sideline customers’ wants and needs — as Melissa Skrbic-Huss, UI / UX Manager at Procare Solutions noted, “customer feedback isn’t a one-way interaction.”
Parlaying comments, concerns and queries into material change from which customers will benefit can require the joint efforts from a handful of internal teams — with some undertakings more rigorous than others.
“Managing all the forms of communications from clients is admittedly challenging,” Scott Kelly, an account executive at Adswerve, said. “Multiple teams and subject matter experts may need to be engaged to assist with more complex client challenges.”
While these efforts might require deliberate, calculated coordination between multiple stakeholders, staying close to the customer voice can pay dividends in keeping the feedback loop running.
For example, Eli Rothfeld, Denver and San Francisco head of customer care at Wix, said that successfully acting on user feedback led the company to introduce its “advanced optional feature,” called Corvid, a few years ago.
“User feedback plays a huge role at the most strategic levels of decision-making here, and it allows us to deliver better products and services to them,” Rothfeld.
Built In Colorado recently connected with six local organizations to learn how they keep their customer feedback loops moving along successfully to drive value for their end users. An overarching takeaway: It’s all about follow-through.
According to Eli Rothfeld, head of customer care for the website creation tool’s Denver and San Francisco offices, tools like daily feedback reports are valuable to informing strategy. “In aggregate, the feedback is used to prioritize our product and service roadmap and to be sure we’re investing in the most important improvements,” he said.
What are your company’s main methods for collecting customer feedback?
Customer feedback is gathered for two main areas. First, around our products. We document all feature requests and issues that come up in support calls, categorize it, escalate it internally with our product teams and use it to prioritize improvements to our products and services.
Second, we gather feedback around the service we provide within customer care. We support users by providing in-app help articles and answering their questions live via phone, email or chat. In each case, we invite our users to share their experience through a written survey, rating how satisfied they were with the service they received.
Once feedback has been collected, where does it go?
Every customer survey is shared across the company in a daily feedback report, with the ability to read all details on the experience and survey comments. In aggregate, the feedback is used to prioritize our product and service roadmap and to be sure we’re investing in the most important improvements.
At the individual user level, urgent and actionable feedback is assigned immediately to a specialist who contacts the user to learn more about the experience and/or speed the resolution of any open issues. The feedback is shared broadly for people to understand patterns and inform improvements, and also examined case-by-case to determine where direct customer outreach can make a positive difference.
User feedback plays a huge role at the most strategic levels of decision-making here.”
Take us through how customer feedback recently prompted a change in your company’s product or services.
In 2017, as a direct result of user feedback, we released our advanced development platform for web applications, Corvid. At that time, users were asking for more robust tools that are customizable enough to suit all of their design needs. While they loved the simplicity and ease of our editor, some more-professional designers lacked back-end, front-end and database features.
We constantly heard this feedback in customer care and communicated within the company’s leadership and product development teams. As a result, we introduced Corvid, a platform that served as an advanced optional feature that users could seamlessly integrate with Wix products to enhance functionality.
The Denver-based digital marketing agency — which boasts expertise on social media marketing, search and other digital strategies — takes a long-term view toward customer feedback. “We take even the smallest piece of feedback as if it were coming from multiple clients to ensure we’re not just covering our current customer base, but future ones as well,” Client Services Manager Megan Bucur said.
What are your company’s main methods for collecting customer feedback?
We have regularly scheduled calls directly with our customers to ensure they’re getting the necessary customer service and campaign performance, while learning directly from them as well. Additionally, we release customer surveys that are provided directly to our marketing team and relayed down to the appropriate management teams as needed.
Once feedback has been collected, where does it go?
Our local teams will relay feedback they’ve compiled up to their management teams. We review all feedback — internal and through our surveys — with management and decide the necessary course of action to improve or complement existing team members. In most cases, when a change is needed, we add it to our roadmap to roll out any process changes across the entire client services team. We take even the smallest piece of feedback as if it were coming from multiple clients to ensure we're not just covering our current customer base, but future ones as well.
We always want to learn from our existing clients to ensure we provide top-notch customer service and performance.”
Take us through how customer feedback recently prompted a change in your company’s product or services.
We have several clients that depend on us to relay insights and future strategy ideas to board members, company presidents and business owners. We have seen several scenarios where we have implemented these changes immediately within their account, but also utilize the feedback to relay across our client success team for learning and growth opportunities within the teams themselves. We always want to learn from our existing clients to ensure we provide top-notch customer service and performance.
According to Director of Customer Success Alexandrea Welley, a Denver-based team member of the software company — which focuses on automating data integration efforts — it’s a combination of both “data and snippets of anecdotal information” that helps the team turn feedback into action.
What are your company’s main methods for collecting customer feedback?
We collect customer feedback in a number of ways, including customer QBRs, in-app surveys and data collection from within our own tool.
Once feedback has been collected, where does it go?
The path for acting on customer feedback varies greatly depending on the type of feedback. For example, product feedback — whether it be design, feature requests or functionality — goes to our product team and can impact our roadmap tremendously. General customer experience feedback is monitored for trends that we then address on a case-by-case basis. When making decisions based on customer feedback, we use data and snippets of anecdotal information to inform discussion and outcome.
We use data and snippets of anecdotal information to inform discussion and outcome.”
Take us through how customer feedback recently prompted a change in your company’s product or services.
We recently rolled out a change to expand our trial capabilities to allow customers more accessibility to Fivetran firsthand. After rolling this out, we quickly noticed a trend in customer inquiries around the specific announcement, and we were very quickly able to iterate on the in-app messaging. Being able to provide clarity to all customers, based on the proactive feedback of just a few, was a real win.
When gathering and acting off of customer feedback, adopting a “data-driven lens” is key for the Denver-based child care software provider. Why? “We’re able to be more agile and course-correct more quickly,” UI/UX Manager Melissa Skrbic-Huss said.
What are your company’s main methods for collecting customer feedback?
Customer feedback is the cornerstone of our business approach. We collect it at every point of the customer journey to inform our strategy. We use a variety of feedback vehicles, including NPS surveys, product feature request forms, marketing surveys and customer feedback communities, in which we recruit customers to do user interviews or usability tests. It’s important that we always take a “test, learn, iterate” approach to every initiative. By viewing everything we do through a data-driven lens, we’re able to be more agile and course-correct more quickly.
Once feedback has been collected, where does it go?
Customer insights are integral to our discovery process. Each tri-team — product, design and engineering — works together to gather feedback from all of our channels and adds these notes to a digital whiteboard during brainstorming sessions. We also document all feedback on Atlassian Confluence product spaces.
It’s important to note that customer feedback isn’t a one-way interaction. When customers provide feedback, we work to bring them along and offer transparency into the process. For example, if a customer requests a product feature, we can provide status updates to the customer as their feature request moves through development.
When customers provide feedback, we work to bring them along and offer transparency into the process.”
Take us through how customer feedback recently prompted a change in your company’s product or services.
Due to COVID-19, many businesses in the child care community had to close for a period of time. When they reopened, they had to completely reimagine processes and procedures to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the children, staff and community.
One of the riskiest times for COVID-19 spread is during drop-off and pick-up due to increased foot traffic and congested entryway spaces. This led to creating a way for parents to check their children in and out using completely contactless technology. Armed with feedback we received through customer interviews and surveys, our development team dove head-first into the project.
Because we knew how important this would be to support child care centers’ ability to remain open, every team — from IT to product to marketing — worked in parallel to make it happen. Within months, we introduced two contactless methods that centers could implement: QR code and GPS.
With QR codes, parents use their mobile devices to scan QR codes at the center, completing the process with no device-sharing or physical contact. With GPS technology, parents can complete the check-in and check-out process without leaving their vehicles.
At the Denver-based martech organization, which helps organizations leverage the Google Marketing Platform, Account Executive Scott Kelly said that fluid internal dialogue is critical to effectively implementing customer feedback. “When the client has a need that surpasses the immediate team, our account team leverages every internal avenue to ensure the client’s needs are met,” he said.
What are your company’s main methods for collecting customer feedback?
Since we are both a media and analytics company, there are many moving parts, each with multiple forms of client feedback, including customer support ticket feedback, client portal feedback and status client calls.
My team, account management, most often collects customer feedback through standing check-in calls (the team is also looped in on all customer feedback types). Check-in calls provide a deep understanding of the company’s inner workings and what is pivotal to the team’s success. While we oversee many projects, duties and responsibilities, the primary goal is always to ensure that clients feel their needs are acknowledged, understood and handled by their account team.
Once feedback has been collected, where does it go?
When feedback has been collected, our company relies heavily on strong internal communication to pass along anything that gets uncovered. Managing all the forms of communications from clients is admittedly challenging. Multiple teams and subject matter experts may need to be engaged to assist with more complex client challenges. When the client has a need that surpasses the immediate team, our account team leverages every internal avenue to ensure the client’s needs are met.
For example, we have many media, analytics and data science experts. Using our knowledge of the issue and our internal teams’ capabilities, the account team will bring in all of the internal resources needed. We will meet internally first to brainstorm and discuss solutions before meeting with the client to provide a recommendation.
Knowing how to navigate internal teams to best fit your client’s needs can be a path-finding mission. We have created a communication workflow that allows both media, analytics and data professionals to come together and communicate seamlessly with each other.
Multiple teams and subject matter experts may need to be engaged to assist with more complex client challenges.”
Take us through how customer feedback recently prompted a change in your company’s product or services.
On a recent status call, a client provided feedback regarding the utilization of a Google paid media feature. It appeared the automated feature did not perform as the client anticipated. Feature adoption, such as the utilization of automated bid strategies powered by Google machine learning, helps clients with their campaign success and hands-on-keyboard time.
Typically, when a client tests a platform feature that produced less-than-desirable results, the feature is rarely ever tested again. After uncovering this concern on our media-focused status call, we circled back with the analytics team to see, from an analytical perspective, what could be affecting the media performance. In doing so, an issue with the client’s website structure and how their site was passing revenue was identified. We informed the client that this may have been the reason for their dissatisfaction with the automated feature. The feature could then be reevaluated and tested for better leverage in the future.
Customer Success Supervisor Hannah Brotherton said that the Longmont, Colo.-based sticker- and label-printer leverages a “multi-channel approach” in order to stay connected to customers. Additionally, customer reps strive for a “go the extra mile” mentality in their interactions, she said.
What are your company’s main methods for collecting customer feedback?
We use a multi-channel approach to collect and enhance our customer experience. We collect customer feedback formally through our NPS survey and outside reviews, such as Google and social media. Additionally, we informally collect feedback through customers’ direct experience with our customer success team. Proactive integration of customer feedback has allowed us to continuously react and respond to our customer’s experience in real-time, keeping our formal channels of communication high with positive experiences. The processes and products we offer make it so every customer interaction and order is connected to one or many of our employees. The level of human interaction allows us to create and sustain meaningful relationships and open the door to more real-time feedback from customers.
Once feedback has been collected, where does it go?
When a customer offers feedback, we always thank them for the time it takes to do so. It’s important to react to both positive and constructive feedback with the same lens, as both offer us insights into our customers’ experience. We collect and analyze feedback both formally and informally, looking for trends that help us shape and grow our company.
We also spend a lot of time empowering and training our customer success representatives on how to support our customers in real time, always looking for opportunities to go the extra mile in every interaction. We continually focus on understanding what the customer is ultimately looking for and we work with our team to remove obstacles that may be in the way of helping resolve customers’ roadblocks to create positive experiences. Our goal is to increase the agility of our customer success team and the company.
We collect and analyze feedback both formally and informally, looking for trends that help us shape and grow our company.”
Take us through how customer feedback recently prompted a change in your company’s product or services.
One of the ways we’ve increased the safety of our team members during the pandemic is to work from home, meaning our customer success team began to work offsite. This put a lot of pressure on the manufacturing team to distribute our customers’ orders safely and efficiently while maintaining our turnaround times and companies’ COVID-19 protocol. We needed to take into account the feedback from both our internal team members’ and customers’ experiences regarding the process. We know that picking up orders is a huge benefit.
