How to get customer feedback whenever you want it

The most critical thing we can do as product marketers is something that most of us continue to fail at: talking to customers. Customer feedback is arguably THE essential ingredient in developing strong strategy — it enables us to identify gaps, service customers in the way they want, shows us what our true key differentiators are and where our competitors have an edge on us.

It is simple, though not always easy. Talking to customers is the one thing that we all know is the key to narrating around great products, and yet, it tends to be a second priority to product launches, quarterly releases, GTM campaigns and sales enablement. I ran an experiment recently where I tried to massively increase the amount of customer feedback I was getting in quickly, with a huge caveat — I work primarily with our resale partners who wouldn’t give me access to customers.

What I learned was that I was being held back by the traditional definition of “customer feedback” — aka that feedback is this really formal thing that you do by setting up a user interview, document a customer win story, shadow a real sales demo and asking the customer questions throughout it, making a formal interview guide, etc. These activities can take weeks or more to get rolling and it can feel like it’s going to slow down your team when you’re under pressure. However, customer conversations are constantly happening around us. Everyday, every hour. There are so many ways that you can tap into your customers and “hear from them”.

Pool customer feedback from different sources to show multiple sides of the story

As mentioned above, what is limiting us is our definitions. I encourage you to expand your list of ‘sources of customer feedback’ alongside the definition itself. If you do not have direct access to customers, you likely have direct access to people who directly speak to customers all the time. BDRs, SDRs, CSMs, partner sales & support teams, customer marketing, sales engineers, professional services to name a few. Interview them and collect their experiences with customers. What are customers saying to them? What are customers raving and complaining about? They don’t have to be formal sessions either. Just jump on a call or schedule an ad-hoc meeting. You’d be surprised how much is uncovered in this exercise, it blew my mind — try it out.

Pay close attention to what is happening on Social

Customer tweet and tag companies and products they love (and hate) all the time. A quick way to get a pulse on what your customers are currently thinking is looking up their engagement on your social platforms. If your customers are not engaged on social, that is feedback in itself as well.

Find your customers on the internet using all the social networks out there. Launch polls, ask them questions or answer their queries. Try having just one conversation with the customer this week using a tool or a platform that you haven’t used before. It is also useful to check out adjacent sites where your customers hang out and review products (ie. product hunt). Are they talking about you there? Take a peak.

Shadowing is quick and easy if you want it to be

Various people in your company are talking to customers daily. Shadow a customer call, even for 5–10 minutes and take advantage of this. For example, your customer success team. Shadowing onboarding calls are great if you want to know whether users understand how to start using your product. Churn calls are great for understanding the pain points that led to a customer leaving. A regular check- in is usually good to see how the user is adopting your product.

Sales engineers demo the product all day long and you’ll get a sense of commonly asked questions on a later stage of the sales cycle. Where are customers still confused after even seeing the product live in action? Each of these calls is an opportunity to listen, to learn, and maybe ask a few questions.

Formalise feedback and draw connections with what matters to the business

Now you are at the stage where you need to figure out what you do with this conversational feedback when you get it. Documenting it in neat and readable notes (readable for those who were not apart of the original conversation) will take some time. Do this soon after the feedback sessions occur (try and also record them) while the conversations are fresh in your mind. Document everything you heard — don’t keep anything out, even if you think it sounds useless. I would organise this source file of feedback (google document) by the teams you collected it from. Ie. CSM team feedback has a section, sales engineering team feedback has a section, social media observations, NPS survey review, customer advisory board review etc..

The next step is to find themes from feedback that are reoccurring across sources/teams and draw connections to strategies your business can act on. I suggest somewhere between 3–6 themes maximum. This is what makes the feedback impactful and not just a fun research project with too many data points and overwhelming transcript like documents. I’ve copied an example from my feedback deck below for you to see as a template. The title of the slide is one of the 3–6 key themes (ie. CX is hot) and the information below it are the deeper dive details on this theme. Feedback is summarised to the most important points on the left, team impacts & takeaways on the right. This format makes the feedback exceptionally actionable.

Map insights back to your buyer personas and journeys

Taking the feedback to the next level would be to trace it to the buyer personas (ie. which persona / type of user does this feedback pertain to most) and the customer journey (what stage of the buying process does this feedback pertain to most). This will help you further visualise where you are getting more feedback vs. less (ie. TOFU customers seem happy but there is a lot of confusion around BOFU content, activities). Read between the lines and identify what customers actually need from you.

Share everything you learn with as many teams as possible

In order to be a truly customer centric company, ALL your teams must be focused on consuming customer feedback. Hold sharing session with sales, engineers, product, CSMs, the larger marketing teams, leadership teams… everyone. I guarantee you they will appreciate the hard work you have put into this and will takeaway many insights, as much as you would take away for your own marketing strategy and direction. This is how you become a linchpin in your organisation. My ask for you is to take just one of these methods, try it out and let me know how it goes. Thanks for reading, ciao for now.

About the author

I’m Ashima. As a current product marketer I consider myself the CMO of the products I represent. I currently work at RingCentral on the EMEA PMM team. I’m passionate about cloud storytelling and creating impactful customer experiences. I love my work and if I could pick one word to describe how I’d like to live my life it would be “bold”