What if you could know exactly what your customers think and need? That’s what the voice of the customer (VoC) methodology helps you do.

VoC is about collecting and understanding what customers say about your product. It means listening to their feedback and using it to improve.

“Understanding the voice of the customer directly influences how well we can meet and exceed our customer expectations.”

Julia Valade, customer success manager at Canny

When you truly listen to your customers, you can create products they love. VoC helps you build better products and make informed decisions.

“It’s shocking how many product managers don’t talk to their customers. That should be your first conversation.”

Mike Marriage, head of product at Bloomerang

Talking to your customers helps you understand their needs and solve their problems. This makes them happier and more loyal.

So, nothing really new here, right? You’ve know how important feedback management is. So, we’ve decided to explore this framework from a mindset perspective.

What if you didn’t just use the voice of the customer methodology? What if you became the voice of the customer?

The mindset of being the voice of the customer

Imagine if every product decision you made came from your customers’ thoughts. You’d only build products that people love.

Until someone invents a mind-reading tool, we need a workaround. Many experts suggest using the voice of the customer framework to shape your mindset.

“It is very critical that you look at every feature and problem you’re trying to solve from the customer’s perspective. Ultimately, you are the voice of the customer in the organization.”

Mike Marriage, head of product at Bloomerang

Start with active listening. 

“It’s important to actively listen and truly understand the deeper reasons behind their comments. This means not just hearing their words, but considering the context and what they’re trying to tell us.”

Julia Valade, customer success manager at Canny

This means not just hearing the words but grasping the underlying concerns.

Next, practice empathy. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes to better understand their needs and pain points. User feedback is instrumental here.

“By analyzing user feedback, we identified that students felt overwhelmed integrating new information with their existing knowledge. This led us to develop specific features like mind mapping and spaced repetition systems (SRS). This resulted in a 30% increase in user engagement and customer retention within three months.”

Dominic Zijlstra, founder of Traverse

Dominic’s story perfectly illustrates how listening to customers improves products. Being the voice of the customer means:

• Providing space for feedback, comments, suggestions, and ideas
• Having a dialogue with your users (through interviews and discussions)
• Collecting and organizing them all
• Prioritizing the most impactful ideas
• Continuously updating the users on the progress
• Actually building features they care about
• Telling them about it (closing the feedback loop)
• Doing all this continuously

This is where a tool like Canny comes in handy. It can help you do all that, automate parts of this process, and help you become a real feedback champion.

“I try to imagine a meeting. How can the client have a seat at that table? At the end of the day, they’re the primary stakeholder in product decisions. Canny gives the users a seat at that table alongside product, sales, support, marketing, etc. If I see a clear value-add to the product for just one user, I’ll put it on the Canny feedback board so other users can weigh in. From there, it’s up to the product team what they prioritize, of course, but my job is to ensure that the user’s voice is at least heard. And Canny does that.

Jacques Reulet, customer support at Canny

Advocating means pushing for changes that benefit your customers, even if it takes work.

“Give customers easy and clear ways to submit their feedback. Share user feedback with your product teams regularly and advocate for their needs. Clearly explain the value customers get from your products and any gaps or challenges they might be experiencing.”

Julia Valade, customer success manager at Canny

Lastly, commit to continuous learning. Regularly check in with your customers – set up ongoing feedback loops. Constant feedback helps you stay aligned with what your customers want.

How can you do that without overwhelming your customers, though? Getting a check-in email every week will likely end up in the trash very quickly. That’s why many product managers choose a tool like Canny.

“Canny has provided an interactive space where the users feel like they have a voice and are being listened to. It creates that long term relationship and loyalty we’re striving for.”

Chelsea Darby, customer success lead at Aryeo

Adopt this mindset, and you won’t just use the VoC methodology. You’ll become the voice of the customer – a real champion of feedback and an advocate for your customers.

Let’s break down this methodology further.

Voice of the customer program objectives

You need clear objectives to get the best results from the Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. Typically, there are three main goals with this program: 

• Improve your product and features
• Enhance customer service
• Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty

Improve your product and features

Improving your product can mean lots of different things. You might think you’re improving, but you might end up building a feature no one uses.

That’s why it’s imperative to collect and prioritize user feedback. Focusing on the most impactful suggestions can lead to meaningful changes.

“We rely on app ratings, feedback from our regular users, and issues we receive via email or support tickets. Then, we share and discuss these requests with our development and support teams. Based on this input, we prioritize bug fixes, feature requests, and other similar improvements.” 

Stefan Chekanov, co-founder and CEO of Brosix 

Enhance customer service

When you follow through on customer feedback, this happens naturally. Your users will feel heard and valued. 

“I hold regular check-ins and review sessions with customers to discuss their experiences and gather direct feedback. I then share customer insights with our product and engineering team to inform adjustments or new features. I also use feedback to refine customer calls and processes.” 

Julia Valade, customer success manager at Canny

This may all sound great, but how can you know you’re improving customer service? Once again, ask your customers. Chances are, they want to tell you how you’re doing. For example, you can add a quick customer survey at the end of every live chat.

Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty

When customers see that their feedback leads to real changes, they feel valued and heard. This builds long-term relationships.

“When we listen to what [our users] want, we can make changes that meet their specific needs. This makes them feel valued and keeps them coming back.”

Derek Pankaew, founder of Listening.com

By staying in tune with your customers’ needs, you create a loyal customer base that trusts your brand.

When you consistently gather and act on user feedback, you’ll achieve all three objectives simultaneously. Let’s discuss how you can measure the impact of your actions now.

Common VoC metrics

You need to track key metrics to see how well your Voice of the Customer (VoC) program works. These metrics show customer happiness and loyalty.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This metric shows customer loyalty. You ask customers, “How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend?” on a scale of 0 to 10. Then, you group customers into the following buckets:

• Promoters: 9-10 
• Passives: 7-8
• Detractors: 0-6 are detractors.

Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to get your NPS. A higher NPS means more loyal customers.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

This metric measures how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction. After a customer interaction, like a support call, ask customers to rate their experience on a scale from 1 to 5. A higher customer satisfaction score means happy and loyal customers. CSAT helps you understand customer feelings about specific parts of your service.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES measures how easy it is for customers to achieve their goals with your product. You ask customers if they agree with the statement:

Lower effort scores mean a smoother customer experience. CES helps you find and fix points of friction in the customer journey.

Track these metrics to see where you can improve your product and services.

Now that we are absolutely certain that we need to gather feedback, let’s discuss the “how.”

How to gather customer feedback

To better understand your customers, you need to gather their feedback in different ways. Using only one method might leave you blindsided.

Different customers prefer to give you feedback in different ways. Let’s go back to empathy for a second – put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Maybe you always fill out that post-call survey. Or perhaps you delete it right away. What would make you leave feedback?

The key is this: give your users options.

“To incorporate VoC into day-to-day operations, I recommend setting up multiple feedback channels such as surveys, email feedback, and forums. Analyze the data to identify recurring themes and actionable insights.”

Dominic Zijlstra, founder of Traverse

Here are a few feedback channels you can try.

Feedback portal

Use a dedicated feedback portal like Canny. This lets customers to submit their ideas, comments, and suggestions. They can also upvote existing ideas and follow your product development journey.

Then, you get to the bottom of each feature request, can have a dialogue with your users, and keep them engaged.

Customer interviews

Talk directly to your customers to get deep insights.

“We reach out, we interview, find out what [our users] are doing, what they are up to, what they are hearing, and what trends are.” These chats can reveal valuable details.”

Amanda Laferriere of C2FO

Focus groups

Bring together a small group of customers to discuss your product. This can help you understand their thoughts and feelings in a more dynamic setting.

Customer support chats

Use interactions with support teams to get real-time feedback. These chats help identify common issues and areas for improvement.

Bonus: you can extract feedback from those chats automatically. A tool like Canny Autopilot can find feedback, extract it, add it to your Canny board, and then even deduplicate it.

Online reviews

Read reviews on platforms like the App Store or Google Play. Reviews give you a sense of how customers see your product and highlight both positives and areas that need work.

“For me, the “voice of the customer” is all about understanding what your users really think. For us, it’s like diving into app user reviews and finding out what our users love (or don’t love). These reviews give us a peek into their experiences, helping us see things from their perspective.”

Derek Pankaew, founder of Listening.com

Coming soon: Canny Autopilot will soon be able to extract feedback from online reviews, too. Stay tuned!

Surveys

Send out customer surveys to collect structured feedback. You can ask specific questions to gather customer data on satisfaction and preferences.

Surveys can appear in-app after a user takes a specific action. You can also add them at the end of your customer support chat.

Social media

Monitor social media channels to see what customers are saying about your product. This is a great way to gather unsolicited feedback and engage with users.

On social, users aren’t always expecting to hear back. If you engage, you might pleasantly surprise them and stand out.

Website behavior

Analyze how customers navigate your website to understand their journey and find any friction points. This customer behavior can guide user experience improvements.

For example, your customers might be using a feature in a way you didn’t intend. This may lead to confusion and frustration. If you can detect it, you can then reach out, provide helpful tutorials, and improve your tool.

Sales, support, and success calls

Feedback from these calls can reveal valuable insights about customer needs and challenges. Gather and analyze this feedback to improve your service.

Bonus: once again, Canny Autopilot can automatically find feedback in these channels. You won’t need to spend time adding that feedback to your portal anymore. Now, all feedback will automatically appear in one central place. Plus, it’ll be deduplicated and ready to use!

Emails

Encourage customers to share their thoughts and suggestions via email. This can provide detailed insights. Whenever you can, add a line about feedback to your emails. Your users will feel like you’re open to their suggestions.

Analyzing and prioritizing feedback

It’s one thing to gather your customers’ feedback. It’s another thing to analyze it and really understand it. Analyzing your feedback lets you get to the root of your customers’ challenges. 

How to analyze qualitative and quantitative feedback

Start by categorizing feedback into qualitative and quantitative types. Qualitative feedback includes comments and suggestions that provide detailed insights into customer experiences. Quantitative feedback includes metrics and ratings that you can measure and track.

For qualitative feedback, look for common themes and patterns. This helps you understand the underlying issues and customer needs. Tools like text analysis software can help identify recurring words and phrases.

You can analyze quantitative feedback through statistical methods. Look at average ratings, NPS scores, and other metrics to identify trends. This data can show you how widespread certain issues are and how your customers feel overall.

Prioritize feedback based on impact and feasibility

Not all feedback is equally important. To prioritize, consider both the impact and feasibility of each suggestion.

When you really understand your customers’ needs, you can make the case to prioritize their feature requests. Make sure your prioritization formula factors in the impact feedback has on key customers.

High-impact changes will make a big difference to many users. Feasible changes are improvements you can make with the resources you have.

Create a matrix to map out feedback based on these two criteria. Focus on changes that are both high-impact and feasible. These are the ones that will provide the most value with the least effort.

Using a tool like Canny can streamline this process. Canny helps you collect, organize, and prioritize feedback in one place. It also makes it easy to track progress and keep users informed about the status of their suggestions.

“If it weren’t for Canny, we’d have to hire a product manager way sooner. The whole team and I save so much time by cataloging and triaging feedback so easily. I never want to go back to pre-Canny days.”

Evan Kirkham, co-founder of Outlier

Integrating VoC into product development

We’re doing all this to improve our products. That’s the real goal here. So use all the feedback you get to inform your product decisions.

Here’s how you can integrate customer feedback into your product roadmap.

Make it a habit to include customer insights in your product planning meetings. Remember – you are the voice of the customer!

Your team can’t address every piece of feedback at once. Use a system to prioritize changes based on impact and feasibility. Tackle high-impact, easy-to-implement changes first – the low-hanging fruit. You can‌ make significant improvements without overloading your team.

“VoC gives us real insights that help us create an even better customer experience. Without a nuanced understanding of our users, we’d be shooting in the dark, developing features without any real direction.”

Stefan Chekanov, co-founder and CEO of Brosix

Always close the loop with your customers. Let them know how their feedback has influenced your product decisions. This builds trust and encourages more feedback in the future.

“Lastly, close the feedback loop. Always let customers know how you used their feedback. This strengthens their trust, promotes engagement, and improves your relationship.”

Julia Valade, customer success manager at Canny

Use tools like Canny to document feedback and track progress. This helps keep everyone on the same page and ensures no customer insight gets lost.

Don’t just use VoC; be VoC

Many articles talk about using the voice of the customer framework. We encourage you to become the voice of the customer.

This means making every product decision with your customers’ needs in mind. By truly listening and acting on feedback, you create products that your users love.

Canny can help make this process easier. It organizes feedback, helps you prioritize changes, and keeps customers in the loop. You can save time and make sure every piece of feedback counts.

You no longer have to dream about reading your customers’ minds. You can find out exactly what they’re thinking and tailor-make your product just for them.

Try Canny today to streamline your VoC efforts and become a true advocate for your 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 use the voice of the customer methodology to build products customers love first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post How to use the voice of the customer methodology to build products customers love appeared first on Canny Blog.

Without their feedback, you make decisions based on guesswork.

Feedback comes from many channels – surveys, customer conversations, social media, reviews, and emails. This can be overwhelming and it’s easy to miss important insights.

Organizing this feedback can be tricky. That’s what we’ll talk about in this article – how to organize customer feedback. Effective customer feedback management starts with organized feedback.

Methods of collecting feedback

Collecting customer feedback is the first step to understanding your users. It’s important to gather feedback from different sources to get a complete picture. Here are some key methods.

Surveys

Surveys are a great way to collect detailed feedback. They let you ask specific questions and get useful answers. You can use online tools like Google Forms, Typeform, or SurveyMonkey to create and share surveys. Distribute them through email, your website, or on social media.

Social media

Social media platforms are full of customer feedback. People often share their thoughts and experiences on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Watching these channels helps you gather real-time feedback. Social listening tools like Hootsuite and SproutSocial can help you track and analyze this feedback.

Customer reviews

Reviews on websites like Capterra, G2, and Google provide valuable insights. Encourage your customers to leave reviews and make it easy for them. Don’t forget to respond to reviews – it shows that you value their opinions and want to improve.

Feedback forms and portals

Direct feedback forms on your website or app are another effective method. You can create a custom feedback form and strategically place it across your website and in-app. For example, it can appear after a user takes a certain action in your app.

Canny lets you create a feedback form and link it to an organized feedback portal. Form submissions appear in one central place – your feedback portal.

You can also direct customers directly to your feedback portal. They can easily leave feedback and see what your other customers are asking for.

These forms can collect specific feedback about user experiences or general suggestions. Make your feedback forms easy to find and fill out.

Customer communications

Your customers won’t always leave you feedback where you want them to. You might have a dedicated feedback form. You can send out a survey, but your users will leave feedback where it’s convenient for them. For example, they might share something during a call with your customer success rep. Or they might message your support chat and mention they’re missing a certain feature. You can direct them to your feedback board at that moment, but there are no guarantees they’ll follow through.

Collecting feedback from those conversations is critical, though. Make sure your team understands how important this is and captures that feedback in a way you can access it.

The key to organizing: combining feedback sources

You get feedback from lots of different sources already. Maybe you’re already tracking some of this feedback. The goal is to get a full view of customer opinions. Each source offers unique insights.

First, make sure you’re checking all these sources. Then, find a place to store and consolidate all your feedback. This is how you’ll get a complete understanding of your customers’ needs and preferences. 

Once you have a combined, deduplicated list of all your feedback, you’ll have something to work with. 

Only then can you make informed product decisions based on feedback.

Product managers use a variety of tools for this:

• Spreadsheets/Google Sheets/Air Table
• Boards like Trello
• Project management tools like Asana, Monday, ClickUp

These tools are a great start, but they’re not dedicated to feedback. As a result, you might run into issues down the line. For example, you’ll likely run into duplicate feedback. Manually combining it is time-consuming.

We recommend a dedicated feedback portal.

Featured tool: Canny

Canny can be your dedicated feedback portal. Instead of copy-pasting feedback from various sources, you’ll have all of it neatly organized in one place. Canny integrates with most feedback sources, so you can easily capture it.

You can also:

• Invite users to submit feedback, feature requests, ideas, and bug reports
• Add feedback on users’ behalf
• Let users upvote existing ideas
• Upvote ideas on their behalf
• Invite users to comment on existing posts and have conversations
• And more

Canny Autopilot is the newest AI addition to Canny. It automatically extracts feedback from communication channels like Intercom, Zendesk, HelpScout, Gong, and more. Then, Autopilot:

• Centralizes and automates feedback management: collect and manage feedback from multiple sources in one platform.
• Deduplicates feedback: don’t waste time removing and merging duplicates manually.

You can prioritize your ideas and quickly find the most impactful projects.

Deduplicating & merging feedback

When you have lots of feedback, you’ll eventually run into duplicated requests. Set aside some time to comb through everything and find those duplicates. Your feedback portal will get much cleaner when those duplicates are merged together. 

Finding and combining them manually takes a lot of time and effort. It can easily take all day. That’s why Canny Autopilot has a built-in deduplication feature. It can suggest what to merge or merge duplicates automatically.

Canny Autopilot suggesting to create new posts or merge duplicated posts

If two posts are almost identical, you can add someone’s upvote to an existing post. That way, your board will be even more clean and organized.

It’s easy to get lost in a sea of ideas. Deduplication helps you see the most important feature requests.

Categorizing feedback

It’s time to make all that feedback actionable. And that’s when we get to categorization. This helps you see patterns, prioritize issues, and effectively address customer needs. Here are some methods to categorize feedback.

Thematic organization

Start by grouping feedback based on common themes. These might include product quality, bugs, customer service, user experience, or feature requests. For example:

• Product quality: comments about the durability, functionality, and reliability of your product. This can include bugs and feature requests.
• Customer service: feedback about the support and assistance customers received (including customer support, success, and sales).
• Customer experience: insights into how easy or difficult it is to use your product.

Take it further with Canny – create a separate feedback board for each theme.

Tagging and labeling

Another effective method is to tag and label feedback. You can mark each piece of feedback with specific tags to make it easier to sort and analyze. Try the following tags:

• Sentiment-based tags: positive or negative
• Suggestions for improvement: ideas from customers on how to enhance your product or service.
• Key performance indicators: retention, upsells, or NPS.
• Sprints: Q1 sprint, bug bash, up next.
• Urgency: urgent, high priority, or customer promise.
• Effort: low, medium, or high.
• Platform: desktop, mobile, etc.

Use tags to categorize, quickly filter, and prioritize your feedback.

We add a tag to each post in Canny and set up automation to speed this up. For example, we can ask Canny to tag each post containing the keywords “billing” and “account” as “Billing.”

Then, we can easily filter our boards by certain tags to only see certain posts. We can quickly find what we need. Our roadmap has a separate column for tags, so we always know what we’re looking at.

Segmenting

Segmenting your users helps you see what different customers are requesting. For example, you can create the following segments:

• Free users
• Paying accounts
• Churned users
• B2B clients
• People who signed up in the last 6 months
• Individuals based on their role

Not all clients are created equal. Sometimes there’s a specific user group you want to focus on.

Let’s say your number one concern is churn. You can focus on the feedback churned or churning customers shared. Then, you can fix those issues and try to win them back.

Segmentation helps you see who sends what kind of feedback. This visibility makes product decisions easier. You’ll instantly know what the most important groups of customers care about the most.

Analyzing feedback

The next step is to analyze your feedback. You want to understand the underlying trends and sentiments. Here are some methods you can try.

Quantitative data analysis

Quantitative data analysis involves looking at measurable data. Here are key aspects to focus on:

• Frequency of mentions: track how often certain topics or issues are mentioned. This helps identify the most common concerns or praises among your users. In Canny, you can quantify this with the number of votes each post gets.
• Revenue: tie feedback to MRR or ARR. This will show you what ideas are associated with the most revenue.

Qualitative insights

Qualitative analysis focuses on the content of the feedback. This involves interpreting the meaning behind users’ comments. Key methods include:

• Sentiment analysis: determine whether feedback is positive, negative, or neutral. This helps you gauge the overall mood of your customers.
• Feedback themes and patterns: look for recurring themes or patterns in the feedback. This can reveal common issues or areas where users see the most value.
• Contextual details: consider the context in which feedback is given, such as customer personas and scenarios. This helps you understand the specific needs and experiences of different user groups. Consider asking customers for additional context if their feedback is vague. 

Automating feedback analysis with Canny

Canny can simplify the process of analyzing feedback. Here’s how:

• Automated tagging and categorization. Canny can automatically tag and categorize feedback based on themes like product quality, customer service, and user experience. This saves time and ensures consistency.
• Customer segmentation. Segment feedback based on different customer groups. This will help you better understand the needs and experiences of various user personas. For example, you’ll quickly see what the highest-paying customers are requesting. This will help you make ROI-based product decisions.
• Vote tracking. Quickly see which features are in high demand. You can merge duplicated requests by having one original post and adding votes to it. Then, you’ll get a real sense of how popular each request is.
• Comment Summaries. Sometimes you’ll have a long thread of comments under a post. Now you can get an instant summary of the key points in one click.  

Prioritizing feedback

Even with your feedback organized by tag, segment, and theme, it can still be challenging to know what to do with all the feedback. Which piece of feedback is the most important?

Prioritizing helps you pay attention to the most important issues first. Here’s how to prioritize feedback effectively.

Impact and urgency

Consider both the impact and urgency of the issues. Evaluate how significant the feedback is and how quickly it needs to be addressed. Here are some key factors to consider:

• Impact on user experience. Prioritize feedback that significantly affects the user experience. For example, if a bug prevents users from accessing a key feature, it needs immediate attention.
• Business impact. Assess how ‌feedback impacts your business goals. Feedback that can lead to increased revenue, customer retention, or market competitiveness should be a top priority.
• Cost. Consider the cost of acting on each piece of feedback – money, time, and other resources. 
• Frequency of feedback. Issues that multiple users mention frequently indicate a widespread problem.
• Urgency. How critical is each piece of feedback? Will customers churn if you don’t fix this soon?

There are lots of prioritization frameworks and models that can help assess all of these factors. For example, you can try the Impact-Effort matrix. It encourages you to think about how easy or difficult it’ll be to build each feature. 

Check out more prioritization frameworks here.

Before you jump into fixing mode, try to identify the root cause of each issue.

Root cause analysis

Root cause analysis is a method to identify the underlying causes of an issue. By understanding the root cause, you can implement more effective and lasting solutions. Here’s how to perform root cause analysis.

1. Identify the problem. Clearly define the problem based on the feedback you received.
2. Gather data. Collect all relevant data related to the problem. This includes feedback details, user reports, and any related metrics.
3. Analyze the data. Look for patterns and commonalities in the data to identify potential root causes.
4. Identify root causes. Use techniques like the “5 Whys” (asking “why” repeatedly until the root cause is found) to drill down to the underlying issue.
5. Implement solutions. Develop and implement solutions. Test and monitor the solution.

How we prioritize at Canny

Canny can help you effectively prioritize your feedback.

No two businesses are the same, so a custom prioritization formula will help serve your unique needs. Here’s how it works in Canny.

1. Define prioritization factors. Common factors include:
   • Impact factors
     • Customer impact
     • Revenue potential
     • User engagement
     • Votes
     • Churn impact
   • Effort factors
     • Development effort
2. Assign weights to factors. For example, you might decide that customer impact is twice as important as development effort. Weights help ensure that the most critical factors have the greatest influence on the final score.
3. Scoring system. Canny’s prioritization feature is flexible and supports any prioritization model you want to use. No matter which model you choose, it boils down to the Impact / Effort formula. Team Canny uses a weighted scoring method.
4. Instantly get the final score. Canny automatically gives you the final score for each piece of feedback. It calculates it by combining the weighted impact and effort scores. Canny normalizes these scores to ensure a balanced comparison. The formula is Score = Impact / Effort.

5. Adjust and refine. You can adjust the weights and factors as your business priorities change. This way your prioritization never goes stale and always aligns with your business goals.

Example of a custom prioritization formula

Suppose your business decides the following factors are important:

• Potential revenue (weight: 2)
• User votes (weight: 1.5)
• Churn impact (weight: 3)

If a piece of feedback scores:

• Potential revenue: 50
• User votes: 40
• Churn impact: 60

The calculation would be:

• Potential revenue: 50 * 2 = 100
• User votes: 40 * 1.5 = 60
• Churn impact: 60 * 3 = 180

Total impact score = 100 + 60 + 180 = 340

If the effort required is scored at 4: final score = (340 / 4) * 1000 = 85,000

Use this formula to compare scores for various feedback items and prioritize those with the highest scores. This way you’ll work on the most impactful features first.

If you don’t want to get into the weeds of calculating this, you can let Canny do this for you. Just decide what weight each factor holds, and Canny will do the rest.

Prioritizing by segment

You can also view feedback specifically from your target segments. Canny helps segment feedback by different criteria, such as customer type or product area. This makes it easier to identify and prioritize critical feedback from key segments.

For example, you might create a segment for your enterprise customers. You can check out what feedback they voted on and quickly understand what features they care most about. You can see the highest-scored items for just that segment. That lets you cater to this key segment by acting on their feedback.

Use feedback to build a roadmap

Now that you’ve collected, organized, and prioritized feedback, you can add it to your roadmap. The roadmap further organizes your feedback. It gives you a clear path of what you’ll build and when.

Link user feedback directly to planned features and improvements. Find high-impact features that address common pain points or add significant value to the user experience. Those should make it to your roadmap.

Here are a few roadmap templates to help you get started.

Closing the feedback loop

We’ve talked a lot about gathering, organizing, and actioning user feedback. Closing the feedback loop is often just as important. If you build a feature but don’t tell your customers about it, how will they find out? Keeping track of who left what feedback is an organizational challenge in itself. Having a tool that automatically does this solves that challenge. 

Consider these two main ways of closing the feedback loop.

1. Work-in-progress updates

When you select an idea, start working on it, or have updates, let your users know. In Canny, you can automatically email everyone who created, upvoted, or commented on a feature request.

Don’t keep your users wondering if you’re listening to their feedback. If they don’t see updates, they typically stop sending requests or hoping to see any changes. In contrast, when they see progress, they know their opinion matters. They are more likely to keep sending you ideas and getting engaged with your product. And when they’re engaged, they become loyal customers.

2. Product announcements

Without a feedback portal, you’ll need to manually collect emails from each person and connect them to every feature request.

If you use a dedicated feedback tool (like Canny), you’ll always know who wanted which feature. Then, you can automatically message each person and notify them about your new feature.

If you want to really boost customer loyalty, always follow up with the users who submitted feedback.

“It’s easy to forget how bad the feedback loop could be sometimes in many SaaS companies. That’s evident from the customer reaction we get. When a user submits feedback, and we respond almost right away, they’re really taken aback. “Wait, someone actually gets and reads this? I was expecting it to go into a black hole and never hear back,” – is a typical client response.”

Joey Muething, product manager at Appcues

Keep your feedback organized to inform product decisions

Collecting feedback is awesome, but it’s only the first step. That feedback becomes valuable only when you organize it well. To organize it, you should first put it all in one place. Then, you can sort, prioritize, and analyze it. Many people segment user feedback based on who submits it. This helps to build an actionable product roadmap.

Don’t forget to close that feedback loop to create trusting and loyal customers. If you follow all these steps, you’ll create winning products in no time!

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 organize customer feedback easily and effectively first appeared on Canny Blog.

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In my experience, many people in business still struggle to understand the exact job of customer success. This has been the case for 20+ years since its start.

The confusion is so widespread. Last year, 56.3% of customer success managers (CSMs) said they did customer support. This number barely improved to 51.2% when we asked again this year for our CSM Insights report. 

Today, let’s look at some clear insights. They show how a successful collaboration between customer success and support can work. But before that, I should go into why people are so confused.

Defining success and support

Customer success is a proactive business function. It is a department. It ensures that customers get value from a product. It does this through various tactics. These include:

• Onboarding optimization
• Proactive support
• Organizational goal-alignment
• Expansion and growth tactics

CSMs oversee account management. They ensure clients succeed with the company. And try to secure upsells or cross-sells, growing revenue.

On the other hand, customer support is a reactive business function in charge of customer service. Support agents oversee the ticketing system. They also oversee the customer feedback system. They step in to solve common customer issues or requests. They review feedback to decide what to pass up to the product team.

Main difference is in approach

Beyond other details, support and customer success teams differ fundamentally. One is proactive, the other is reactive. One focuses on customer goals. The other focuses on solving customer issues. Here’s a related side-by-side comparison.

So why the confusion?

I believe the main confusion between the two roles comes from the fact that CSMs are very good at service. Why? It’s simple. They know the account and all the common product or service issues. They are willing to help. In fact, the lead support agent often asks the account CSM for help. This happens when an issue is more hands-on or urgent.

I think that’s a good team-based way to keep service quality. But, only if it doesn’t disrupt the CSMs. But how does one ensure that? How do you make sure customer success management doesn’t become glorified support or yet another cost center? Where do you draw the line?

I am the founder and CEO of Custify, a customer success platform. This question has always been a balancing act for us and our customers. In what follows, I’ll go through some experience-backed tactics I’ve seen. 

How customer support and success can work together

1. CSMs step in and help as needed/upon request

The best way to ensure effective collaboration is the one we’ve already mentioned:

• Support agents notice issues that are urgent, need more care, or happen often.
• Support managers decide which issues are important. They decide when to draw in the customer success leader for each account.
• CSMs step in and assist according to customer needs, while the support agent retains ownership.
• When an issue is more complex, they give it to the customer success manager.

This may look very different for your success or support team. The details depend on your business model, but the basic idea remains. Some issues are too complex. They are also too time-consuming for the customer support team. In such cases, a CSM helping is more effective.

2. CSMs ensure customer goal alignment and collaboration

CSMs ensure customer focus. They talk about what the customer wants. And they work on realizing value, onboarding, and advanced CS tactics.

CSMs have many tasks. But, I think the most important thing is aligning customers’ desired outcome. It’s also vital to foster collaboration.

How does that happen? It implies a series of steps involving nearly all of those teams.

1. First, the head of CS makes a customer journey map. They work with all key stakeholders to ensure it captures the journey well.

2. Next, CS ensures that everyone in the company has access to the map. They also ensure that all who work with customers, like customer support teams, read and grasp it.
3. CS optimizes collaboration with other departments. This typically means:
   1. Customer support feels at ease working with CS. They work together on complex issues.
   2. A proper sales-to-CS handoff is in place. CS should have sales training from a sales rep.
   3. All customer-facing teams can work effectively with the product team.
   4. All the various cross-departmental software solutions and datasets are centralized.
4. The customer success team also tells other teams about customer goals. It ensures they see them using the CS software. It also ensures they see the feedback. They use product feedback software or other tools set by the company.

This alignment can grow to be company-wide. But, the core should remain among support, success, sales, and product teams.

3. Support agents communicate issues up the chain

Collaboration goes both ways. Reps need to also feel comfortable pushing issues to the product or customer success team. They should do this in any of the following cases:

• When there’s a frequent feature request
• When a high-value or best-fit account has a complaint or request for a new feature
• When there’s a frequent issue customers raise to support
• When an issue becomes so complex it requires its own script
• When they don’t know how to solve an issue
• When it’s clear there’s a poor customer-product fit

4. Support shares account info and scripts with CSMs

Customer support must also do its part to ensure alignment. Some examples:

• Write down details about customers. Write down details about their customer interactions.
• They share any scripts they make. CSMs can use them if they run into the same issue while talking to customers.
• You will help CS recover lost accounts. You will also help them stop churn.
• Help CS personalize customer interactions. Do this whenever needed.

5. Both CS and support work together

32.4% of people who talk to customers think personalized messages are the right way to do it. This is from the State of Customer Messaging. They think it is closely followed by product and service improvements based on feedback, at 27.4%.

Smart integrations can help CS and support work together. They can optimize both. CSMs can review support information. Support can review CS information. This brings together the pieces of the puzzle: customer value realization.

How both teams measure their success

Customer support measures the quality and speed of resolution. This is a combination of quantitative and qualitative factors. The balance will be up to each and every company to decide. You can also set different goals depending on:

• The message channel. If the interactions happens via text, it should be graded differently from a call, for example.
• The type of customer. If the account is high touch and frequently shows up in the help center, then it makes sense to have longer calls.
• The goal of the interactions. Some interactions are meant to put out fires. Others are meant for customer education. Others still might be about advanced features. Each of these should be graded differently.

Customer success, however, has far more diverse and complex KPIs and metrics. Depending on the organization, the focus of the customer success leader can be:

• Preventing churn, ensuring customer retention, growing customer loyalty. CSMs who have this as a priority need early warning systems for at-risk customers. They also need to set up proactive measures. The quality and effectiveness of these is measured by the monthly, gross, and net recurring revenue (MRR, GRR, NRR). Most also keep an eye on churn rate.
• Securing expansion revenue. CSMs today need to be seen as more than a cost center. They are eager to prove their role as true revenue generators. The best way to achieve that is by using their sales skills to get upsells, cross-sells, or feature additions. The number of upgrades is a good performance metric. So is the expansion revenue they bring.
• Increasing customer lifetime value. Lifetime value (LTV or CLTV) is one of the key metrics in CS. It’s often put together with customer acquisition cost (CAC), turning into the LTV:CAC ratio – a metric many use as a north star. By focusing on it, CSMs have to do everything in their power to grow their accounts. This includes upsells, churn reduction, and more.
• Facilitating customer value. Companies that are smarter or more  complex will reframe digital customer success to focus on customer value. After all, a customer that sees the value becomes loyal and is more likely to upgrade. The best way to track this is through a metric called Time to Value (TTV). Customers who get adequate training and customer onboarding reach this value sooner. Customer success must be able to track that.

All in all, you can see that success and support differ when it comes to measuring their performance.

Looking at customer success vs satisfaction vs experience

Many business people are even more confused. They don’t understand the difference. Customer success is not the same as customer experience. Even more confusing, there’s also customer satisfaction. Why do we need so many terms for more or less the same thing?

I tend to agree. However, let’s put it to rest with a few simple definitions:

• CSAT measures how satisfied customers are. You measure it through a survey. It’s often used in conjunction with the Net promoter score (NPS).
• Customer experience, aka CX, is used as a blanket term for the entire experience a customer has with your business. This can be experience with the product, services, or people within your organization.
• Both CSAT and CX are part of customer success in a way. CSAT is a tool that the success team uses. CX is something they oversee.

Closing the gap between success and support

The gap between customer success and support doesn’t need to be a roadblock to your success. 

It can be a bridge and an opportunity. It’s a path for both teams to work together. They can work towards the goal of pleasing customers. They can also work to grow the organization. Your growth will last only if the whole company’s cogs work together well. It all starts and ends with your customers’ success.

Philipp Wolf

As the CEO of Custify, Philipp Wolf helps SaaS businesses deliver great results for customers. After seeing companies spend big money with no systematic approach to customer success, Philipp knew something had to change. He founded Custify to provide a tool that lets agents spend time with clients—instead of organizing CRM data.

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However, managing mountains of feedback is tough, especially when it’s coming from many different sources. That’s why we’re excited to launch Canny Autopilot!

Autopilot is our suite of AI-powered features that automate feedback management and give you back your time.

“AI is exploding. It’s this new unlock in the world. Everybody is thinking—how can we use it to provide value to our customers? For us, there’s this obvious opportunity. Our customers are already tracking feedback. If we can do this for them seamlessly and automatically (and better than they can do it themselves), that’s a huge value-add right there.”

Andrew Rasmussen, co-founder

Autopilot uses AI to handle your manual tasks. It collects and sorts feedback, finds duplicates, replies to users, summarizes long threads, and more. This lets you focus on improving your product based on what users really need.

Our beta users are already saving time and getting better insights.

“I’m really loving the new [Autopilot] beta. It’s been awesome. It makes me engage with your product on a daily rather than every week or two. So, props to your team to developing this feature because it’s made our usage of your product to go up by a crazy amount!”

Keenan Jones, VP of Product at Credit Repair Cloud

Even if it only takes you a minute to capture feedback from a user, that still adds up to hours saved over time.

Let’s explore how Autopilot saves you time and helps you more effectively manage feedback.

What is Autopilot?

Feedback Discovery: automated feedback collection

Connect Autopilot with your favorite tools like Intercom, Help Scout, Zendesk, and Gong. Watch as it sifts through customer chats, detecting valuable feedback and funneling it right into Canny. This automation cuts down on manual sorting and ensures no feedback gets missed.

We’ve thoroughly tested and optimized our AI, and it very accurately extracts customer feedback. Autopilot is able to capture more feedback than humans.

“We don’t just have a single-stage process. We’re not going straight to the API asking, “What is the feedback here?” or “Is there a bug report in this?” Instead, we have a multi-stage process where we ask one small question at a time. This means we have higher fidelity and accuracy than competitors.

We also don’t cheap out on the models we use. No matter which Canny plan you’re on, you’re still getting the same level of accuracy with extraction and deduplication.”

Niall Dickin, engineer

We spent a lot of time building, iterating, and perfecting Autopilot’s feedback discovery. It started as a proof of concept that one of our engineers built. Then, we built an MVP and released it to beta users. After six months of beta, we’re incredibly excited to take it live.

“The rate at which the field is advancing is a little challenging. Lots of things are happening at once. Canny is a small, bootstrapped team, and we have to keep up with other projects as well.

I’ve been the dedicated engineer on this project, so my daily tasks have included keeping up with AI news, benchmarking new models, and using what’s best for our customers.”

Niall

Organize feedback in one place

Autopilot puts all new and detected feature requests in one spot. You can connect various feedback sources and automatically extract feedback from them. Autopilot will also identify duplicates and merge them to keep your feedback tidy.

You can go with full automation and let Autopilot create posts and votes for you. You’ll be able to see a log of all actions and easily undo them if need be.

Autopilot doesn’t just collect feedback. It also connects it back to the users. Even if feedback is collected automatically, we ensure users are connected to their requests. This way, you can still segment and better understand the urgency of requests. They also get updated as you work on their suggestions. This enhances user satisfaction and trust in your product.

Smart duplicate management

Autopilot is great at spotting when the same feature request pops up more than once. It merges these duplicates and upvotes them for your customers. This keeps your feedback boards clear and focused.

“Autopilot will automate and bring home feedback that would otherwise get missed. Support moves quickly. Canny Autopilot can follow behind and pick up those crumbs to help you build a better system. You don’t need to train your teams or customers to do anything new.”

Jacques Reulet, customer support

Engage better and faster with Smart Replies

Autopilot responds to every feedback post with intelligent questions that sound like you. It helps you uncover additional context. This means you can quickly ask for further details without typing everything yourself.

“You can really understand the sentiment of what your customers are asking for. This way, you can thoughtfully take care of their needs.”

Julia Valade, customer success

Save time with Comment Summaries

Autopilot can also summarize the main points from really popular ideas with many comments. This helps you see what matters most without reading through every single comment.

Seamless integrations

It’s simple to connect Autopilot with your favorite customer support tools. Whether you use Intercom, Zendesk, Help Scout, or Gong, setting it up is straightforward. We’re always adding more integrations, too.

If you have a feedback source we don’t support yet, send text in via our API endpoint and Canny will detect feedback there as well.

Why you’ll love Autopilot:

• Never miss feedback again. Be confident that you’re catching nearly all customer feedback.
• Save time. Let Autopilot handle the routine tasks so you can focus on making important decisions.
• Understand your customers better. Get a clear view of what your users really need and want. This will help you choose which features to work on next.

Not just about AI

We want to be very clear—Autopilot was not made to check the AI box. We want to transform how you manage feedback and AI helps us do that. You can count on Autopilot’s reliability and accuracy to many Canny your source of truth for feedback. With Autopilot, you can reach your goals faster.

How Autopilot fits into Canny’s vision

Canny Autopilot aligns perfectly with our vision—building better products through feedback. That’s hard to do at scale and Autopilot solves that.

Autopilot makes capturing feedback easier and more reliable than ever. With its high accuracy, you won’t miss out on valuable insights. This not only saves you time but also ensures that every voice is heard and considered.

“Canny’s Autopilot ensures feature requests never fall through the cracks. We’ve seen an 80% increase in requests logged since introducing Autopilot.”

Owen Doherty, COO, Orca Scan

A more complete and organized feedback collection process helps you better understand your users. It also lets you prioritize the features your users truly care about. This alignment with user needs drives product development forward.

Managing feedback across a growing customer base becomes challenging. Autopilot scales smoothly with your growth. It handles increased volumes of feedback without losing accuracy. This makes it an ideal solution for larger clients who need robust feedback systems to match their scale.

“We are a small, agile, and bootstrapped team. We’re not at all worried about impressing VCs with fancy terminology. Our number one investor is our customer. We aren’t going to ship functionality that doesn’t work.”

Dan Murray, engineer

Bottom line: Autopilot reduces manual work, saves time, and improves performance

Canny Autopilot takes the manual work out of feedback. This lets you focus on building better products. It makes managing feedback realistic for teams at any scale. 

Ready to put your feedback management on Autopilot?

Sarah Hum

Hey there, I'm one of the co-founders of Canny. As a founder, I dabble in pretty much everything but my expertise is in product design. Outside work, I enjoy digital illustration, a cappella, and hanging out with our dog, Emmy.

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Not a fan or engaged customer in sight. Except for maybe your mom? (Hi, mom!)

But here’s the deal. 

You need customer engagement.

As a software developer, product manager, or customer support rep, your customers are your bread and butter. They’re the captains of the ship; without them, your role would look a lot different (as in nonexistent).

However, learning how to engage with customers can often feel like a full-time job. How can you be responsible for managing a team, creating and testing new products, and keeping up with this vital marketing goal? 

The answer is to harness customer engagement strategies that align with your company’s unique growth goals. That’s it! 

Feeling stuck on what or how that could look like? We’re here to help. 

In today’s article, we’re revealing what customer engagement is, why it matters, and the benefits of implementing it. We’re also covering engagement strategies and a formula you can use to measure their success. 

Ready to learn how to make the most of customer engagement?

Let’s begin!

What is customer engagement? 

Customer engagement is how present customers are when they stumble upon your brand.

For instance, do they stop and read your blog content (like you’re currently doing with ours? 😉)

Do they respond to your questions in social media posts? 

Do they take the action you’ve asked them to take in your newsletter’s CTA?

If yes, you’re effectively creating an emotional connection between your brand and customer. 

Customer engagement ultimately focuses on: 

• The quality of your customer relationships
• How often customers engage with your brand 
• How customers engage with your brand 

When you explore the quality of your customer relationships, you might take a look at:

• Context: In what context do customers interact with your brand? 
• Time: How much time are customers investing when interacting with your brand?
• Frequency: How frequent or sporadic are your customer interactions with your brand?

Why does customer engagement matter? 

Measuring customer engagement lets you know how effective your marketing and product design efforts are. 

Without deep insights into how your customers think, feel, and absorb your brand, you’ll find it difficult to pivot when things go awry. 

Customer engagement strategies can help you create a thriving business. They could involve uncovering product design glitches, feature favorites, or even which marketing staples your customers prefer. These valuable insights are very representative of the whole customer experience. 

Measuring customer engagement can help you learn how to:

• Create personalized experience 
• Refine or redesign your product 
• Make adjustments to product features and pricing
• Tailor your communication style to your audience
• Prevent customer service and experience mishaps
• Match and even exceed customer expectations

Customer engagement benefits 

Measuring and applying customer engagement strategies comes with a whole host of benefits.

Building trust and loyalty

Like with any relationship, the more interactions your customers have with you, the more they’ll begin to know, like, and trust you. You can nurture this trust by consistently showing up and delivering tremendous value. Many businesses are now creating engaging Instagram stories to build customer trust and engagement. This leads to engaged customers and brand loyalty.

Developing meaningful customer relationships

Building trust over time can help your company develop meaningful customer relationships. Do you offer tailored onboarding, demos, and meetings? Use these crucial customer-facing moments to learn names, solve pain points, and form ongoing relationships. This helps with the overall customer satisfaction.

Encouraging repeat purchases

One of the best things about customer loyalty is reaping its monetary rewards. A loyal customer is notorious for repeat purchases—that’s why they’re considered “loyal.” 💕 Explore what customer behavior leads to a repeat purchase and try to replicate that customer experience.

Gaining valuable feedback

When customers engage with one of your product polls, surveys, or questionnaires, you get valuable feedback. Use it to improve your product and business. Customer feedback is a goldmine — don’t overlook it.

Customer engagement strategies 

Here are six customer engagement strategies you can employ to kick off your next campaign.

1. Use SMS 

SMS — or text messaging — is one of the only ways to communicate directly with your customer besides email. We’ll discuss email marketing in a bit.

As text messaging increases responses by 45%, it’s considered one of the most engaging ways of customer interaction. 

2. Collaboratively design and develop products with a CMS platform

Engage with your customers in powerful ways by bringing them along for the product development ride. 

3. Encourage safe and secure engagement

Data privacy awareness has rapidly risen and shaped the online world’s trajectory. 

As a result, businesses rely on data protection to manage data availability, security, and integrity. This also helps prevent data misuse. 

Why does this matter?

For customers to engage with your brand, you need to make sure they feel safe enough to do so. 

Laws like General Data Protection Regular (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) help here. They provide data guidance on improving users’ rights over their private information. This requires businesses to have a comprehensive data privacy policy. 

Product businesses increasingly rely on data analytics to drive decisions. Therefore, creating a comprehensive and transparent privacy policy about how you collect data is crucial. 

4. Fall in love with email marketing 

In 2021, US users spent nearly 172 minutes checking their personal emails and around 149 minutes checking their work emails daily. Given this usage, it’s no wonder brands can’t afford to ignore the power of email marketing.

Segment your email marketing campaigns by customer group to boost your email engagement rates. Then, personalize each campaign accordingly to form a strong customer relationship. 

You can send welcome emails to welcome a new customer, help an existing customer make the most of your product, and even create a real brand advocate with an effective email strategy. Do you have an actively disengaged customer? A tailored email marketing campaign can help bring them back, too.

Using CTAs and questions to encourage customers to talk back to you and complete an action is crucial. 

For instance, ask your customer base what they think about a product feature you just rolled out. To nudge them along the sales funnel, you might ask them to download a freebie or sign up for an upcoming webinar. You can also use email to measure your net promoter score.

Email is an effective user engagement tool. Use it wisely.

5. Take video marketing seriously 

Digital video-on-demand viewers in the US keep growing every year. In fact, the number of viewers in the US is projected to increase from 177.3 million in 2021 to 202.6 million in 2027.

In other words, using video content continues to be an effective customer engagement strategy. For example, it can boost brand awareness. A potential customer can discover your brand. A new customer can watch product tutorials. An existing customer can learn more about your services. This also helps your customer success team – educational videos can take some of the work off their plate.

One of the best ways to take advantage of this strategy? 

Create short-form videos to feature on social media — especially TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

For instance, the following YouTube video by Tailor Brands has 2.9 million views. It is an excellent example of an engaging video. In just 44 seconds, the brand shows how its platform can help aspiring entrepreneurs set up their online businesses.

6. Use social listening and respond to comments 

Use a social listening tool, like Brandwatch, to track and respond to all social media comments referencing your brand.

When responding, do so with intention. 

Respond using four or more words and ask a question to keep the conversation going. 

When possible, always present solutions to customer pain points. And don’t forget to respond to negative comments with a professional tone. If you notice spam, bots, or cyberbullying, report and delete those comments if they’re attached to your posts.

You can also use your social listening tool to grab valuable brand mentions and visuals for social proof in future marketing campaigns. 

How do you measure customer engagement? 

One of the most pivotal aspects of any customer engagement strategy is a hard focus on recorded customer data. 

Recording and referencing customer data is essential to designing customer engagement campaigns personalized to your audience. 

Using tools like customer data platforms can provide you with a 360-degree view of your customers, their pain points, and their needs. 

It’s also important to measure your engagement efforts so you can make adjustments when needed.

Thankfully, measuring customer engagement is pretty straightforward. 

Here’s a simple formula you can use:

Engagement rate formula = active users in a customer segment over a specific time period / total users in the customer segment

For instance, if you created a project management app, you might measure customer segments, like:

• Project managers
• Business analysts
• Project team members 
• Project planners 

From there, you can measure engagement more granularly, for instance:

• By channel 
• By month, week, or day
• By feature 

Applying this formula to your business and product will and should depend on your company’s unique growth and engagement goals.

The future of your customer engagement 

Customer engagement is the key to unlocking your brand and product’s potential. 

By understanding how your customers feel and think, you can create more opportunities for them to engage with your brand.

Customer engagement will continue to change over the years. But some things, like recording and referencing customer information, will stay the same. 

So, stay data-focused. Stay goal-focused. And always, always stay customer-focused.

That’s it for today, friends. 

Are you ready to boost your customer engagement efforts in 2023? 

We hope today’s article has inspired you to do just that. 

Mike Bandar

Mike Bandar is an award-winning UK-based entrepreneur. A founding partner of Turn Partners, the startup studio focused on the acquisition, turnaround or creation of digital businesses. Through Turn Partners, Mike co-founded Hopper HQ – the Instagram planning and scheduling tool, working with thousands of influencers, brands and agencies around the world.

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The post 6 valuable ways to drive customer engagement in 2024 first appeared on Canny Blog.

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A few weeks ago I closed my 25,000th support ticket in Intercom. I want to share a bit about my customer support strategy and how it transformed over the years.

The before times

For the first 75,000 interactions, when I got a customer inquiry with feedback, I had nothing in my arsenal but a spreadsheet. I would track their comments there with a quick note and maybe a link to the call/transcript. Customer feedback accounted for up to 20% of customer interactions, so that spreadsheet soon became an unwieldy mess. I had to choose between:

• Keeping it clear, merging suggestions, and tallying votes or…
• Actually communicating and solving a customer issue

 The latter always took priority, so the data was incomplete at best.

 Then, I started managing my own support team. Asking my customer care team to try tracking feedback using a similar manual system was almost pointless. Tagging conversations was helpful but gave us no meaningful insight into the profiles of the clients making requests. I spent entire days manually poring over each customer interaction.

 When the planning meeting came around, and I presented my findings, devs were skeptical. They needed to know which accounts these top requests were coming from. I’d have to say something like:

“I can stay late tomorrow and crunch the numbers, but I didn’t have time to compile all that data. And it’s not something I can do regularly unless that is my only job.”

As a result, the customer service team spent countless work hours on gimmicky features that were rarely used. Meanwhile, the core functionality our users needed fell by the wayside. You can imagine what that did to the customer satisfaction. My pulse on the frontlines often validated my initial instincts, but I lacked the data to back them up.

A few years of wasted development cycles passed. Eventually, my hunches were much more seriously considered. But they were still only hunches. 

To sum up, my daily life looked something like this: 

• Misdirected development efforts: we built features that didn’t resonate with users.
• Customer happiness declined: their valuable feedback felt lost in the abyss.
• Wasted resources: we spent countless hours manually digging through conversations.

Frustration is often the name of the game when scaling up a support team. Little did I know, it didn’t have to be.

Enter feedback tracking

When I first used Canny, I immediately wished I had a time machine. It was a tool I had needed my whole career. It felt like I had regrown a limb I didn’t know I had lost.

Suddenly, that 20% of my interactions could be handled by the user clicking a single button and upvoting an existing feature request. And for the few who still wrote in with feedback, I could easily deflect it to the app. However, unlike other deflection methods, this was a massive improvement in the customer experience as well. Now, they weren’t just given empty words assuring them they’d been heard. They had a verifiable URL to reference their input and track its status.

I could now easily submit bugs and suggestions I ran into as an employee. I didn’t have to escalate things to tier 2 dev support or ask if we were aware. I could just throw them into Canny for easy tracking and triage.

When it came time to plan, I could now represent the voice of the customer with actual data — data that didn’t take days to compile. In fact, with the roadmap function, the voice of the customer at Canny is now almost fully automated.

In my previous role, we had three people answering support tickets and one doing analysis full-time for around 13,000 existing customers. My current role at Canny requires just me for that same figure. And it’s better — not just for the company, but for the end-users. Don’t take my word for it — I work here. Head to G2 or Capterra to see what actual users say about Canny’s support.

It’s easy to overlook support and assume it’s a necessary evil. In reality, support is the rudder of your ship. It can sit down there collecting barnacles that need the occasional sick day. It can get you through the occasional storm. Or it can guide your organization to where your clients tell you they need you to go. Support is often the key to customer retention.

If you want to improve any aspect of your organization, a dedicated support and customer service team that is paying attention will have some valuable insights for you. For example: 

• Should we offer a French version of the app?
  • We handle a lot more tickets in Spanish than in French.
• Should we prioritize that integration with Salesforce?
  • We get a lot more people asking about HubSpot.
• How do we decrease churn?
  • Paying users and prospects are usually concerned with ____.

The best part is – they just have to use Canny. It allows them to answer each question in seconds.

Effect on customers

Using a customer feedback tool also improved the customer experience.

Good customer service starts with listening. When a client takes time to submit a feature request, they want to be heard.

Great customer service is about acting on feedback. Just providing your customers with a way to submit feedback and saying “thanks for your feedback” isn’t enough. If customer loyalty is your goal, you have to exceed customer expectations, not just satisfy customer needs.

Excellent customer service happens when users feel valued. When they know their opinion matters. And when their ideas turn into features. That creates a really satisfied customer.

Of course, none of that matters when users don’t know about it. But if they see an update and know they affected this change, they feel a special connection to the brand. We call this customer loyalty. That drives up the net promoter score and makes for a happy customer. That’s what we call exceptional customer service.

When I got my hands on Canny, I could suddenly do all that and more. Customer relationship management became simpler for the customer success team. Customer satisfaction score soared.

I’ve learned a lot about building a customer support strategy throughout the years. Here are a few best practices.

How to build a customer support strategy

Knowing what I know now, this is how I’d build a customer support strategy from scratch.

1. Make a plan

I’d start with the overall strategy and ask myself:

• What support channels will we provide?
• Who is responsible?
• What will we do with feedback/complaints/bug reports?
• What metrics are important?

2. Get the right tools

Pick a support tool for your team. We use Intercom for example. It lets us chat, create tickets, build help docs, and more.

Then, add other tools that will streamline feedback even further. A dedicated feedback tool, like the one I found in Canny, is a game-changer. It streamlines collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback. This isn’t about replacing your team with software. It’s about giving them superpowers.

3. Actively listen

Listening is the cornerstone of great support. But active listening? That’s where the magic happens. Encourage your team to not just hear but understand what customers are saying. This means going beyond the surface level and really digging into the problems your customers face.

4. Turn feedback into action

Listening is only half the battle. The real test is turning that feedback into action. This means prioritizing feedback that aligns with your business goals and addressing it in your product or service updates. Show your customers you’re not just listening, but you’re also making changes based on their input. Making them feel heard can really boost satisfaction.

5. Measure and iterate

What gets measured gets managed. Track how changes based on customer feedback affect your customer satisfaction score and support metrics. Use this data to continuously refine your strategy, ensuring it always serves your customers’ evolving needs. In my job, I look at the following:

• Comparing churn rates of users who have feedback attributed vs those who don’t
• NPS scoring
• Support satisfaction follow-up surveys

6. Empower your team

Lastly, empower your support team. They’re not just problem solvers; they’re your frontline strategists. Provide them with the training, tools, and authority to make decisions that will improve customer satisfaction. When your team feels empowered, they’re more engaged and effective.

Lessons from 100,000 support tickets

My journey with 100,000 customer talks taught me a lot. Using a tool like Canny changed everything. We went from drowning in feedback to using it smartly. This wasn’t just easier for us; it made our service better and our customers happier.

We learned key lessons. Listen well, act on feedback, and keep checking the results. This makes customers feel heard and builds loyalty.

Looking ahead, customer-focused support is key. It’s more than solving problems; it’s about using what customers tell us to improve. This approach has made our support team a big part of our success.

Let’s go beyond fixing issues to understanding and surprising our customers.

Ready to transform your customer service strategy? Invest in a dedicated feedback tool and empower your team to become data-driven champions for your customers.

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 100,000 reasons to track client feedback first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post 100,000 reasons to track client feedback appeared first on Canny Blog.

In tech, female voices can get lost. But these female product leaders stand out. They use feedback to make products better and lead by example.

This post guides product managers on enhancing feedback management. We wanted to specifically highlight women in product today.

Let’s see how these 14 women lead the way to success.

Why feedback is important for product managers

First of all, why should you care about feedback? Besides the obvious – pleasing your customers.

Feedback is crucial for product managers – it provides direct insights from users. This information helps develop better products.

Listening to feedback shows managers what to change and which features people love most. This helps decide where to focus efforts.

Feedback helps in fixing problems before they become bigger. It helps pick new features that users want. This way, products keep getting better, and users stay happy.

Collecting feedback effectively

Gathering feedback is crucial. It helps managers understand what customers need and want. This process involves various methods. The goal is to gather a broad spectrum of insights.

Here’s how product managers can collect feedback effectively.

Surveys

Customer surveys help you quickly gather quantitative data from a large audience. You can collect structured feedback on specific aspects of your product. 

“For internal feedback, consider regular 1-1 meetings or distributing surveys every quarter. In terms of user feedback on the product experience, ensure your product incorporates prompts for users to provide feedback. Dedicate time each week to thoughtfully review user feedback and incorporate relevant insights into the product roadmap.”

Deborah Bittencourt, product lead at Bagley Tools Inc

Want to design an effective survey? You need to be clear and concise and, of course, ask the right questions. 

Focus your surveys on product areas that customers actively engage with. You’ll get more actionable insights that way.

Customer interviews

Surveys can’t capture everything. This is where user interviews come in. They uncover qualitative insights that surveys might miss. Surveys also help you understand user experience better. They surface customers’ motivations, challenges, and real thoughts.

Don’t assume you have to do it alone. Involve your team.

“Crowdsource feedback collection for quantity. This is not just the product team’s job. Sales, CS, support, and even engineering can get involved. But make sure you hold the bar high to ensure quality. Set up the structure and train your team to ask better questions. Otherwise, you’ll get noise, and you won’t be able to draw insights from it.”

Christine Siu, VP of product at Net Purpose

Feedback tools

A dedicated customer feedback tool (like Canny) helps product managers centralize and manage user feedback efficiently. Users can submit their feedback inside the product interface. When leaving feedback is that easy, more customers will do it.

This also opens up a discussion, allows for follow-ups, and helps to close the customer feedback loop.

Research

Conduct secondary research to get additional context and insights. Check out:

• Industry reports
• Competitor offerings
• Market trends

Understand the broader market landscape. This will help effectively position your product and find unique value propositions.

Diverse feedback sources = key

Have you found a feedback collection method that works for you? Great! But don’t stop there. Look for more ways to capture user sentiment. You never know what will be the most valuable.

For example, you might only focus on positive feedback. This is an excellent source of motivation, but it does little for your progress.

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Julie Zhuo, co-founder at Sundial

Look inside and outside of your organization. Try to get as much feedback as possible. Only then can you really make conclusions about customer sentiment.

Organizing feedback

After getting feedback, figure out what it means.

Organizing feedback is a bit like sorting through a big pile of Lego. Imagine each piece of feedback as a different colored Lego. You need to sort them to see what you’ve got and figure out what you can build. So, take all that feedback and sort it by colors or themes. Then decide which feature requests you should act on to make your product better. It’s all about listening, organizing, and then making things better for your users.

A tool like Canny helps you organize all feedback with categories, tags, separate boards, and more.

“You have to be a good steward of actionable feedback. Store and organize it so you can reference and potentially act on it later. For example, for every feature request in your backlog, add links to customer conversations where relevant feedback was shared.”

Michele Hansen, co-founder at Geocodio

Analyzing and prioritizing feedback

Your feedback is now organized. What’s next? Which feature will be the most impactful? Is it the most requested feature? Or the one a very prominent lead asked for?

“When feedback arrives, we need to start with an empathetic and curious mindset. The goal is to understand the context in which that feedback has been delivered. Then, we need to really explore, understand and identify the most valuable problem to solve. It is critical to look for patterns and themes within feedback that we can turn into actionable insights. Those insights refine focus and help deliver the most customer and commercial impact.”

Amanda Ralph, Accessibility Product Lead at Canva

To find answers, analyze your feedback. What patterns can you spot? When users ask for a certain feature, what’s driving them?

“It’s a mistake to conflate success with shipping a large quantity of features.”

Julie Zhuo, co-founder of Sundial

Good product managers know that not all feedback is created equal. Some require immediate action; other feedback can wait. 

Some feedback isn’t actionable at all. Try to identify it too.

To do it right, the best PMs follow a structured approach. Which approach exactly? There are lots of options, which is both great and confusing.

Some product managers start by categorizing feedback into themes, like usability or functionality. Then, they weigh the feedback based on factors like:

• Frequency of the comments
• The impact on user experience
• Alignment with the product vision

They always ask: “Will this move us closer to what our users need and our business goals?”

“It is easy to be distracted by the loudest voice in the room and the continuous stream of feedback from many different sources. But we also need to ensure that the team has the focus they need to deliver on existing priorities. We need to make the judgment: does this feedback represent a distraction, or a refinement towards greater success? In the face of feedback, stay curious but stay focused!”

Amanda Ralph, Accessibility Product Lead at Canva

If you want to learn more about how to manage feedback, check out this free guide. It breaks down each prioritization technique, gives examples, and helps you choose the best method.

Implementing feedback into product development

After sorting and prioritizing feedback, it’s time to really roll up your sleeves. This is where feedback becomes reality.

First, break down the feedback into clear tasks and add them to your roadmap. Think about how each piece fits into your current work. Ask yourself, “How can I make these changes real? What steps do I need to take?” 

Next, talk to your team. Share what you’ve learned from users. Explain why their feedback matters and how it can make your product better. This is your chance to get everyone on the same page and excited about what’s next.

Now, it’s time to start making those changes. But remember, it’s not just about adding new things. Sometimes, it’s about making what you already have even better. And sometimes, some ideas need to wait. That’s okay – your goal is to make the most impact right now.

As you make changes, keep an eye on how they’re doing. Are users happy with the updates? Are they using the new features as you hoped? This is how you know if you’re on the right track. In other words, don’t stop collecting feedback. Continuous feedback is crucial for ongoing improvement. Incorporate feedback collection in your app so you can keep tabs on user experience.

Communicating feedback outcomes

Finally, don’t forget to tell your users about your updates. Let them know you listened and acted on their suggestions. This makes them feel valued and more likely to share their thoughts in the future. A changelog tool can really help automate things here.

Here’s a simple way to close the feedback loop.

1. Tell users what changed

Use simple emails or messages in the app to say what you improved because of their feedback. For example, “We made searching easier – just like you asked!” Don’t overwhelm users with those updates, though. A dedicated space for release notes is usually the best.

2. Say thanks

Always thank your users for helping you. A simple “thanks” can make them happy and encourage them to keep sharing their ideas.

“The most critical step in truly impressing the customer is to personally follow up with them when their feature requests have been acted on. This follow-up creates tremendous customer goodwill. Very few organizations complete the cycle, yet those that do see a high ROI.”

Michele Hansen, co-founder at Geocodio

3. Keep asking for feedback

After you’ve made changes, ask your users if they like them. This shows you really care about their opinions. 

Also, watch how users react to the changes. Are they using the new features? Do they seem happier? This helps you know if you did the right thing.

Sometimes, you might want to say a special thanks to someone who gave really helpful feedback. A quick personal message can make a big difference.

Building a feedback-friendly culture

It’s one thing to say: “We love feedback, share your ideas!” You can even install a widget on your site that lets users submit feedback. Those are great first steps.

You can take it even further. When you close the feedback loop (like we explained above), you show that you mean what you say. You take those ideas, and you bring them to life. You deliver on your promises and establish trust.

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes for a second. Let’s say you use a project management tool daily. You’re a happy customer, but there’s one thing that’s really bugging you. If only that was resolved, you’d save up so much time daily.

So, you go and submit that feature request.

Scenario 1: Crickets. You never hear back. Maybe you even discuss this issue on Reddit or Twitter, and other users agree – this is frustrating! If only they could fix it.

Scenario 2: Attention. You get a reply from the app’s team. They thank you for your feedback and promise to keep you updated.

Then you see that your request is getting some traction. Turns out other users agree with you! So they go and upvote your request. Some even leave comments.

Some time passes, and the status of this request changes to “In progress.” Now it gets really interesting. You get a bucket of popcorn, sit back, and watch what happens. You can see the app’s roadmap and estimated delivery date. You get updates from the team on the progress, too.

One day, you wake up to an update in your email. Your feature request is now a real feature! You check it out, and it really works. Thanks to your feedback, the app is better, and so many other users will have a better experience.

Not only did you improve your workflow, but you helped others. And you took part in improving the product you truly love. How good does that feel?

Nothing is stopping you from giving this extraordinary experience to your users. That’s the power of feedback management.

“Companies often treat us as if our experiences, opinions, and suggestions don’t matter. Even if the company claims to care about our feedback. That’s depressing. But it also means that smart organizations have an opportunity. They can stand out and build customer loyalty by putting effort into how they solicit, manage, and follow up on customer feedback.”

Michele Hansen, co-founder at Geocodio

Conclusion: how feedback leads to product success

Feedback shows you what works and what doesn’t in your product. And it never stops. Feedback keeps coming, and you need to continuously manage it.

“Iterating is 80% of Agile. You’ve got to get customer feedback, and you have to iterate. And that’s the whole point – that you’re getting things in front of customers. You’re getting feedback, you’re coming up with new ideas. You’re seeing what you’re right or wrong about. And so you have to build that into the whole process. None of that is easy. If you can do it, it’s a great way to build products.”

Laura Klein, UX and product lead at Users Know

You’re much more likely to succeed when your product decisions are powered by feedback. That’s the point behind customer feedback management.

We hope these remarkable female product leaders inspired you to build better products. Follow our blog for more inspirational ideas like these. Happy International Women’s Day!

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 Feedback management tips from 14 leading female product leaders first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Feedback management tips from 14 leading female product leaders appeared first on Canny Blog.

Imagine you’re a detective whose case is to make your product awesome. User interviews are your clues. They show you what to do next.

Also, when you talk to your customers, they feel special. This makes them like your product even more.

In this post, we’ll show you how to do these interviews well. We’ll talk about picking the right people, asking great questions, and what to do with what you learn. Ready to be a user interview detective? Let’s crack open our case!

Who should interview users?

You need to be careful when deciding who talks to customers. Here are some ideas.

Product team

A product manager is often the best choice. Why? They know the product inside out. They understand what they need to learn from users to improve the product. Plus, they can ask more detailed questions since they know exactly what info they need.

They’ll action the feedback they get faster. No broken telephone or misinterpreted messages.

Growth team

Members of the growth team can uncover insights directly linked to user acquisition and retention. They’re typically focused on metrics and growth strategies. This allows them to ask how features or changes might attract or retain users.

Customer success

This team can use interviews to understand customer challenges and successes. This will help them craft strategies to improve the user experience. They’re already used to talking to customers, so they’re a great choice.

Customer support

These folks talk to your customers daily. They know the common issues and questions your customers have. They can delve deeper into these issues and then provide critical feedback to the product team for improvements.

Design team

If your team has a UX researcher, they can be a great pick. They’re trained to understand user behavior and needs. These skills can be very useful for user interviews. Like product managers, they are very close to the product, so they’ll know what to ask and how to act on that feedback.

Your design team can explore how your product makes the users feel. Is it intuitive enough? Does the design make sense? Does it enable them to get things done?

Founders

Founders bring their big vision to the table. When they talk to customers, it shows how much the company cares about user feedback. Founders can ask:

This helps keep the product true to the vision they started with.

Neutral team

Sometimes, having someone not directly involved with the product is good. This can be someone else from your team or even an outside consultant. Why? They can be more objective and might not influence answers based on their own biases about the product.

When should you conduct user interviews?

Knowing when to chat with your users is as important as knowing how. 

“When a product team develops a weekly habit of customer interviews, they don’t just get the benefit of interviewing more often, they also start rapid prototyping and experimenting more often. They do a better job of connecting what they are learning from their research activities with the product decisions they are making. I believe continuous interviewing is a keystone habit for continuous discovery.”

Teresa Torres, product discovery coach at Product Talk

Keep in mind: sometimes you can’t really choose when to talk to your customers.

If you can choose the time, here are some key times to consider.

When planning your roadmap

Before deciding your product’s future, ask your users for their input. Questions like: “What should we do next?” can be super helpful.

Need help with your roadmap? We’ve got free templates right here!

“Injecting the actual customer who uses the software into the development process is key to creating value.”

Zarar Siddiqi, co-founder, Raptors Republic

Talk to users before you even start building. Ask:

This can guide you to build features that users really want.

After launching a new feature

Once you launch something new, check in with your users. Ask:

Their answers can help you tweak and improve.

Our customer success team has regular checkins with our customers. They set goals, assess metrics, and build a plan for success.

Lots of feedback comes up during those meetings, so we always know what’s top of mind for our users.

When you notice changes in usage patterns

If you see users behaving differently with your product, it’s time to ask why. A simple: “What’s changed for you?” can uncover a lot.

“I track our customers’ usage. If I see that someone doesn’t use Canny to its full potential, or if someone’s doing a really great job using the platform, I reach out. I want to see their workflow and help them utilize the platform even more. The aim is to collect feedback, help customers become more efficient, and learn from their experiences.”

Julia Valade, customer success at Canny

Regular check-ins

Don’t only talk to users when there’s a significant change. Continuous interviews, like once every quarter, can give you ongoing insights. You can ask:

Remember – timing is everything. Chatting at the right moments can give you the best insights to make your product excellent.

When customers churn

This is the most difficult customer interview to get. When a user decides to not use your product anymore, they’re usually not interested in giving you feedback. This is normal – if you decided to cancel your subscription, you wouldn’t spend too much time explaining why, right?

There are some exceptions. Sometimes, customers churn not because they’re unhappy. Here are a few examples:

• This department is experiencing a budget cut and can no longer afford your product
• There’s an objectively better tool that does more than yours
• This team’s strategy changed and they’re no longer focused on the problem your tool solves

If you’re lucky enough to get churning clients like this, use this opportunity. In these cases, it’s best to have the founders reach out. Churning clients will feel valued even though they’re leaving. Founders can have an honest conversation and get extremely valuable feedback.

“Even when I’m really busy, I make time to talk to customers when it comes to product gaps. Especially when they are an important customer and/or are churning. I get so much value from a 20-minute call. 

During the chat, I make sure to let them do most of the talking. If they’re churning, I’ll also mention what we have on the roadmap that might solve their problems. Even if we’re parting ways, I want them to know the door is always open.”

Sarah Hum, co-founder at Canny

How to conduct user interviews

Conducting user interviews is like going on a treasure hunt. You need a map and a plan to find the gold – a valuable insight. Here’s how you can set yourself up for success.

Set interview goals

Before you start, know what treasure you’re looking for. Your goals guide the whole chat. 

Example: you’re introducing a new feature. Goal – understand what users expect from this new feature.

Define clear objectives for each interview

Break down your big goal into smaller targets. If your goal is about a new feature, the objectives could be:

• Finding out what users like about similar features
• What problems do they face with current options

Clear objectives keep your interview focused and efficient.

Example: you’re noticing your NPS score go down. Interview goal – understand what is driving that score down.

Your customers are doing you a favor by agreeing to an interview. So use their time wisely!

Choose the right customers

You need to pick the right participants for these interviews. But how do you know who’s “right”? Here are a few ways.

Look for a mix of users. You want the super fans, the occasional users, and even the critics. Each type of customer will give you different insights. Only choosing happy customers won’t give you the whole picture. Focusing just on unhappy users won’t do that either. You need a good combo.

“It’s a matter of understanding whose feedback is the most valuable right now. If you’re having issues with retention, it’s best to talk to customers who are slipping away. If onboarding is an issue, talk to customers who just signed up.”

Dan Murray, engineer at Canny

Use CRM data and social media. Your CRM is a treasure trove of info. It can tell you who’s using your product a lot and who’s just started. Social media can show you who’s talking about your product. Both are great tools to find customers who really engage with your product. They likely have something to say.

“You need to design creative metrics to filter out the customers you want to talk to. Ideally, you need customers who are at the intersection of these two things: they’re in the most receptive state to accept the interview, and they are most likely to answer your specific questions.”

Dan Murray

Use screening questions to filter participants. Ask questions to make sure you get the right mix of customers. You might ask how long they’ve used your product or how exactly they use it. This helps you find people who fit your target audience.

When you know what you’re trying to achieve with these interviews, picking a participant will be easier.

“Spend time early on understanding their specific use case. Maybe they’re using the product in an unorthodox way, or they’re not your typical product market fit. Their feedback can still give some good insights and potentially “unlock” more business with similar use cases.”

Jacques Reulet, customer support at Canny

Example: to understand why your NPS score is decreasing, pick customers who gave you lower scores.

Remember – interviews are costly. They take up valuable time from your team and your customers. So be very strategic.

Design effective questions

Crafting the right questions is crucial for an effective user interview. Here’s how to design them effectively.

Focus on open-ended questions for depth

Open-ended questions let users share more than just yes or no. They can provide stories, feelings, and ideas. 

Example: don’t ask: “Do you like our new feature?” Ask: “How has the new feature impacted your daily tasks?”

“Feedback is a gift. Not everyone wants to or has time to give you that “gift.” People typically buy your product because they want it to take work off their plate, not add more work.”

Dan Murray

Avoid leading questions to get unbiased insights

A leading question suggests an answer and defeats the purpose of the whole user interview.

Example: don’t ask: “Don’t you think our new feature is helpful?” Ask: “How do you find our new feature in terms of usefulness?”

Prepare more questions than expected

It’s better to have too many questions than too few. This doesn’t mean you have to ask all of them, but it allows you to explore different topics based on the conversation flow.

Include questions that approach issues from different angles

Tackle the same topic in various ways to get a fuller picture. If you’re asking about a feature, also ask how it fits into their workflow. Add a question like:

Use questions as a guide, not a script

Be flexible. If the conversation takes an interesting turn, follow it. Your interview guide is there to keep you on track, but the real value often comes from unscripted moments.

“Converse, don’t interview. The best [interviewers] converse with their guests instead of interviewing them. They start out with a planned question or two and then let the response dictate the conversation. 

“Everybody Writes,” by Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs

Example: you’re investigating a decrease in usage. Begin with a neutral question like:

This open-ended question doesn’t presume any change in usage and allows the user to describe their experience freely. Based on their response, a good follow-up could be:

“Be prepared, but don’t read off a script. Conversations aren’t scripted, and you want an interview to feel like a conversation.”

Kerry O’Shea Gorgone, Marketing Smarts podcast host

Your questions should encourage users to think and reflect. This will give you in-depth and genuine responses. You never know where you’ll find that critical actionable insight!

Prepare the interview environment

Setting the right environment for your user interviews can make a big difference. Whether it’s in person or online, a comfortable setting helps users open up. 

This might seem obvious, but it’s worth reiterating. Here’s how to prepare for your user interview:

Ensure a comfortable setting – physical or virtual

First, prepare your interviewees. Explain how the interview process will unfold. Describe how you will interview participants – what kind of questions will you ask? Mention how long it’ll take and how you’ll use their responses. When people know what to expect, they tend to relax more.

For in-person interviews: choose a quiet, private space. Make sure it’s a neutral setting like a meeting room, free from distractions. Comfortable seating and a pleasant temperature are important too. Offer refreshments and snacks if you can. 

For remote interviews: check your tech setup beforehand. Good lighting, clear audio, and a stable internet connection are key. Remind participants to find a quiet space where they won’t be interrupted.

Start with small talk for a relaxed atmosphere

Begin the interview with a light conversation. Ask about their day or comment on something general like the weather. This isn’t just filler – it sets a friendly tone and makes your interviewee more comfortable.

If it’s a virtual interview, you might also spend a minute ensuring they are comfortable with the technology. For instance, ask if they can hear and see you well.

Making the participants feel at ease, respected, and ready to share openly. The right atmosphere can lead to more genuine and insightful conversations.

Execute the interview

Your number one research goal is to run the interview effectively. You must respect your participants’ time and not waste your own. Here’s how to make the most of your conversation.

Listen more, talk less

Your main job is to listen. Let the users do most of the talking. Be patient, even if there are pauses in the conversation. Sometimes, the best insights come after a moment of silence.

“The focus should be on the value for the customer. Think about the reason they took the call. To get some value out of it, right? So you need to answer their questions and address their concerns first. Then, see if you can interweave your questions in the interview. This way, the customers will feel like this conversation was for them.”

Dan Murray

Follow up for clarity, but don’t lead the conversation

If something isn’t clear, ask follow-up questions like:

Avoid questions that lead them to a specific answer.

“If you’re trying to get specific information out of an interviewee, you’ll want to guide the conversation a bit, of course. Don’t just let it wander off into a tangential rabbit hole.”

“Everybody Writes,” by Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs

Use semi structured interviews for natural flow

Start with a clear plan and key questions, but remain open to new directions. If a user shares something intriguing that’s not on your script, dive into it. This unexpected turn could lead to a valuable insight you hadn’t considered before.

“Keep things on track but still free-flowing. Practice what Matthew T. Grant calls “laser listening.” Look for the threads of the response to naturally pick up in a subsequent question. Don’t just jump to the next question on your list just because, well, it’s on the list.”

“Everybody Writes,” by Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs

Explore unforeseen topics and elaborate on responses

When users bring up topics or issues you hadn’t planned to discuss, see it as an opportunity. Ask follow-up questions like:

This shows you’re interested in their perspective and allows you to gather detailed insights.

Avoid judging or educating interviewees

Keep your opinions and knowledge to yourself during the interview. Your goal is to understand their perspective, not to correct or inform them.

Focus on gathering as much information as possible within the limited time.

Process the insights

After the interview, it’s crucial to process what you’ve learned effectively. Here’s how to handle the insights.

Organize and analyze feedback

Start by organizing the feedback. If you have notes or recordings, review them and highlight key points. Look for patterns or recurring themes. For example, if several users mention difficulty finding a feature, that’s a pattern. AI comes in handy here – you can ask ChatGPT to summarize your findings for you.

Use tools like spreadsheets or qualitative data analysis software to categorize and analyze the information. This makes it easier to identify trends and prioritize actions. Check out some great AI tools here!

Use insights for product development

Translate these insights into actionable steps for your product. For instance, if users struggle with a feature, consider redesigning its interface.

“The best way to delight and customer? Fix their problem. Let’s say they named a major blocker during the interview. And that fix will take you half a day to develop. Don’t even think about it. Just ship it and show them how much you value their feedback.”

Dan Murray

Share these insights with your team. It’s important that everyone understands user feedback – from developers to marketers. This way, the whole team can be aligned on what needs to be improved.

Our team adds the notes to Canny, Hubspot, and a corresponding Slack channel. Then, customer success and product meet to discuss action items.

Don’t forget to track changes made based on these insights. Monitor how these changes impact user experience and satisfaction.

Canny is a great tool for tracking feature requests. You can add votes on users’ behalf and quickly see how impactful that feature is. Try it for yourself!

Processing insights helps you convert raw feedback into concrete product improvements. It’s about turning user voices into actions that enhance their experience.

“Getting those pulse checks with customers helps you get a better understanding of your product’s perception externally. You can also make better decisions going forward. If you’re choosing what to develop next, you can rely on that feedback to see which feature is the most pressing. You can even take that data, add it to Canny, and evaluate the feature’s impact further.”

Dan Murray

Foster relationships post-interview

Conducting a user interview is important. However, building ongoing relationships with your interviewees is crucial.

Show appreciation to participants

Right after the interview, thank them for their time and insights. A simple thank you note or email can make a big difference.

Consider sending a small token of appreciation, like a discount code or a gift card. This gesture shows that you value their input and time.

Follow up with participants after the interview process is complete. Let them know how their feedback is being used. For example, if you update a feature based on their input, send them a message about the change.

You can automate this task with Canny. Our changelog automatically notifies everyone who submitted, voted, or commented on a particular feature.

For instance, you could say:

This follow-up shows that you take their feedback seriously. It also keeps your users engaged with your product’s journey.

Fostering relationships with your interviewees turns them into more than just participants. They become part of your product’s community. This ongoing engagement is key to building a loyal user base that feels heard and valued.

Limitations of user interviews

User interviews are a powerful tool, but they come with limitations. It’s essential to be aware of these and know how to address them.

Social desirability bias occurs when participants give answers they think you want to hear. Instead of sharing their true thoughts, they tell you what they think is “the right answer.”

For instance, they might overstate their satisfaction with your product to avoid being negative.

To combat this, ensure you create an environment where participants feel comfortable being honest. Reassure them that all feedback, positive or negative, is valuable and appreciated.

Want to take this even further? Use interviews in combination with other user research methods.

Example:

• Surveys for quantitative data
• Analytics to understand user behavior
• A/B testing to test specific hypotheses
• Feedback boards for more informal and even anonymous feedback
• Usability testing to see rather than hear about product usage

You can cross-validate findings and gain a richer, more accurate picture of user needs and experiences. This multi-faceted approach will help you make better product decisions.

“Make it a point to observe the customer when they are using your app. I use PostHog’s session replay feature and am amazed watching videos of how customers use the product compared to how I think they use it.”

Zarar Siddiqi, co-founder, Raptors Republic

Conclusion: how to interview customers for best insights

User interviews are more than just conversations. They are a direct line to understanding what your customers think, feel, and need. These interviews can really shape the future of your product.

You need to carefully select who to interview and what to ask to make this worthwhile.

The actual value of user interviews – connecting you with your customers on a deeper level. They are not just about gathering data; they’re about building relationships.

User interviews are powerful, but they should be part of a broader research strategy. Combine them with other methods for the best results.

Listen to your users. You’ll build a great product and create a community around it.

Subscribe to learn more about feedback, product management, and more.

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 conduct user interviews to uncover the best insights first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post How to conduct user interviews to uncover the best insights appeared first on Canny Blog.

Collecting feedback

So why is feedback important? By taking the time to actively solicit feedback, you can create a comprehensive approach to growth. That feedback will be unique to only your product.

Collecting feedback is important. It can provide:

• Excellent overview of customer trends and industry development
• Better understanding of your customers
• A deeper dive into their needs
• Valuable insight into your products and services (and how they’re meeting customer needs)
• Areas for improvement
• Better problem-solving skills
• Culture of continuous improvement
• Edge against your competition
• User buy-in

“Users who provide feedback feel like they have more of a stake in your product and are more likely to stick around.”

Jacques Reulet, customer support at Canny

Here are different types of feedback that your team can look at:

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

Diverse feedback is the key here. It’s important to get feedback from many places. This includes:

• From customers: like reviews and social media comments.
• From your team: your team sees things from the front lines.

Are you not getting enough feedback? Try the following ideas:

• Rewards: give something back to users who share their thoughts
• Keep it simple: make giving feedback easy and quick
• Regular surveys: ask for feedback often, but keep it short

All of that can help you find new opportunities and make better decisions.

“Giving customers a way to give feedback increases engagement. We’ve run our own analysis and noticed a pattern. Clients who leave feedback are 24% more likely to stick around.”

Dan Murray, engineer at Canny

Analyzing feedback

After collecting feedback, the next step is understanding it. This helps make your product better.

Sorting feedback

First, sort out the feedback. Here’s how:

• By type: is it about a bug, new feature, or service? Put similar feedback together.
• By urgency: decide what needs a quick fix and what can wait.

Using AI for smarter analysis

AI and machine learning can make sense of lots of feedback fast. They spot trends and patterns you might miss. This tech can:

• Quickly read feedback: AI goes through comments fast and saves you time
• Find hidden insights: It can uncover helpful ideas in the feedback

Here’s an example. We introduced our first AI feature – smart replies! Canny can now automatically reply to collect more details about each feature request. You won’t have to manually return to each post and clarify the ask.

By analyzing feedback well, you’ll know what your users want. You’ll also stay ahead in the market.

Managing feedback

Collecting and analyzing feedback is great. But then you need to do something about it. The next step in your feedback process is managing it. It’s about seeing patterns and finding an ongoing working method of managing feedback.

There are many ways to do that. But having a centralized portal is by far the easiest way. There are tools out there that will simplify this process.

Ideally, you want to:

1. Put all feedback in one place
2. Allow people to comment and upvote the requests
3. Add tags and segment feedback
4. Set prioritization criteria
5. Add winning ideas to the roadmap
6. Push those tasks to your project management tool
7. Keep your teams and your customers up-to-date on the progress
8. Post changes and updates to the changelog

Let’s talk more about prioritization.

Prioritizing feedback

Knowing what to do first matters. Think about:

• User impact: how much does it affect your users?
• Easy wins: can you make quick improvements?
• Long-term value: will it make your product better over time?

There are lots of prioritization frameworks and methods you can try. We compiled a list of the best ones here – check it out.

Integrating feedback in development

Feedback should shape your product. To do this:

• Hold regular reviews: look at feedback when planning new updates
• Implement fast: try to find low-hanging fruit for quick improvements
• Evaluate ideas: prioritize feature requests to find the best opportunities
• Use feedback in design: use user ideas when designing new features

By managing feedback well, you help your product grow. It also shows your users that their voices matter.

Pleasing customers

Gathering and managing feedback can also lead to a stronger customer relationship. You’ll also get a better understanding of your brand – how your customers see it.

Happy customers don’t typically complain. And super happy customers become your brand ambassadors. They tell their friends and bring business to you. They tweet about you when you don’t even ask. And those are the best referrals you could ask for.

How can you use customer feedback to please your customers? Here are a few ideas.

• Quick fixes: solve small problems fast. It shows you’re listening.
• Customer-inspired features: add features or services your users ask for. It makes them feel heard.
• Regular updates: show you’re working on their feedback. Keep them in the loop.

Canny has a built-in changelog feature that helps with that. Everyone who voted for that feature gets notified as soon as your update is live.

Building a feedback culture

Creating a culture that values feedback is vital in any organization, especially in fast-moving sectors.

A feedback-friendly environment starts with open communication:

• Regular meetings: hold team meetings where everyone can share ideas and feedback
• Easy way to give feedback: encourage your team to speak freely and share honest feedback 

Some tools might help with that. For example:

• Internal surveys: to gather anonymous feedback from employees
• Collaboration platforms: platforms where employees can easily share ideas and feedback in real time

Feedback management is a skill and requires continuous learning. How can you advance it?

• Workshops: conduct workshops on how to give constructive feedback
• Feedback as part of performance reviews: incorporate peer feedback into evaluations

Management should lead by example. Act on the specific feedback you receive. Show that employee feedback leads to action.

Building a feedback culture improves your product and empowers your employees. It creates a sense of ownership and pride in their work. This boosts employee satisfaction.

Moving forward

So why is feedback important?

It keeps you on track and gives you a competitive edge. It shows you’re listening and caring about what your customers think. This builds trust and loyalty. Happy customers tend to stay and even become advocates for your brand. They’re your best marketers, sharing their positive customer experience with others.

The future of feedback management

Feedback management will likely evolve in the near future. Expect to see:

• More AI and automation. AI will play a more significant role in analyzing feedback and spotting trends faster.
• Integrated systems. Feedback tools will become more integrated with other platforms.
• Proactive feedback collection. Businesses will actively seek feedback at every customer touchpoint.

Want to hear more predictions? Check out our recent blog about top SaaS trends for product managers in 2024.

Long-term benefits of a feedback system

A robust feedback system brings long-term gains like:

• Continuous improvement. Regular feedback leads to ongoing refinement of products and services.
• Customer-centric innovation. Feedback-driven innovation ensures that new features and services truly meet customer needs.
• Building a loyal community. Customers feel valued and part of your product’s journey.

The critical role of feedback in 2024

In 2024, feedback isn’t just nice to have. It’s essential. It’s the key to understanding your market, improving your product, and increasing customer satisfaction. The ability to quickly adapt based on user feedback can make or break a business.

Feedback can help you stay focused on the right goals and give you an edge over your competition. When you show your customers that you care about their opinions, they’ll be over the moon. They’ll trust you more and stick around because they know your product is constantly improving. Moreover, it’s improving in the way that they want it to. What’s not to love?

Don’t forget about employee feedback too. It helps employee engagement and job satisfaction.

Start managing user feedback and boost your growth in 2024!

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 🐕‍🦺

All Posts - Website · Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn

The post Why feedback is your ultimate growth hack for 2024 first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Why feedback is your ultimate growth hack for 2024 appeared first on Canny Blog.