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With the rise of product-led growth (PLG), companies have seen a big change in why people buy their products. In a sales-led model, users might be exposed to product demos, but they mostly buy before they have the opportunity to experience the product. But in PLG, the reverse is true - users sign-up and often become power users before they even decide to buy. Because of this, PLG companies put a lot of focus in providing a great user experience and customer feedback is a key factor in improving it.
The problem is, customer feedback can often be scattered, with feedback coming from multiple sources such as sales calls, customer support tickets, customer success calls, and product interviews. This can make it difficult for companies to get a clear and comprehensive view of what their customers are saying.
This is why centralizing customer feedback is essential for product-led growth companies. In this guide, we propose a few steps to ensure product teams have access to valuable customer insights.
Why bring all customer feedback together
As mentioned above, customer feedback is essential to build amazing products and a seamless experience from signup to pay. Here are some specific benefits of centralizing customer feedback for product development:
- Enhanced product development: every customer interaction is an opportunity to understand what they want and need from your product. By using this information, product teams can make informed decisions about the features that go into the roadmap.
- Improved customer satisfaction: not only new features go into the roadmap. Product teams must also make space to improve the usability of existing features. Customer feedback is a major help here, to identify and address these pain points and areas of dissatisfaction with the product. This can help improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Increased sales and revenue: By offering products and services that meet the needs and preferences of their target audience, companies can improve their sales and revenue.
- Greater efficiency: By centralizing customer feedback in a single location, your team can more easily access and analyze the feedback, which in turn helps them make better decisions about their products.
How to centralize customer feedback
Here is a step-by-step guide on how to centralize customer feedback:
1. Establish a system for collecting feedback
There are many ways to collect customer feedback, such as through surveys, online reviews, social media, and customer service interactions. Choose the methods that are most appropriate for your business and set up a system for regularly collecting and tracking feedback. For example, you can implement a system to tag your customer support tickets so you can easily extract main themes and identify trends over time. We use Notion to create the tag structure, you can make a copy for you here.
2. Create a central repository for storing feedback
Set up a centralized location where all customer feedback can be stored and easily accessed by the team. This could be a shared spreadsheet, a project management tool, or a dedicated customer feedback platform.
At Claap, we use two main databases: one for product requests and another to track user research.
The main one is where we collect all product requests no matter the source. For example, if we interview a customer and they make a request, we add it to this database. The same for requests made to the support team or even received in social media.
The second database is where we summarize user research calls. We identify the user, their company, add a few bullet points about the main ideas discussed and add also the link to the recording of the interview. You can copy our template here.
3. Regularly review and analyze the feedback
Develop a habit of regularly reviewing and analyzing customer feedback. Look for trends and patterns and use them to inform product development decisions. It's beneficial to have access to customers' words, so we recommend recording calls and annotating key moments. This way, when Product Managers or Designers need to investigate feedback, they can quickly watch customer interviews without spending a full hour looking for insights.
We have an internal workflow to give visibility to customer feedback, it’s like this:
- All customer calls are recorded with Claap and we use video annotation to highlight key moments.
- These calls are added to the dedicated topic “User Research” that, in turn, is connected with a dedicated Slack Channel #user-feedback”. This way, anyone in the team is automatically notified when a new call is added to the topic.
- In Notion, we have the dedicated database we mentioned before where we keep track of all user interviews and analyze key learnings.
4. Designate a team member to manage the feedback process
As your company grows, we recommend assigning someone to be responsible for managing the entire feedback process. Not at team level, but at company level. This person should be responsible for organizing the feedback coming from multiple sources, as well as communicating it to the rest of the team in a quarterly or bi-annual report.
What's next?
Once you collect, analyze and share customer feedback, it's time to act on it and incorporate key learnings into your product roadmap. Here are a few more guides to level up your async product management skills: