Practical Learnings — Customer Surveys, Questionnaires & NPS for Product Management

steffenbuenau
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

“Talking to your customers” is one of the key tasks of product management.

Sounds obvious, is correct, but unfortunately not necessarily easy, especially in a growing company. The number of customers grows, the sales team grows and information gets lost.

That is the critical time for product management to get feedback from the customer in. Especially important in B2B products which become integrated into organisations or other solutions and where the sales cycle lengthens with deal size.

You want to get at least two kinds of customer feedback: direct interviews with key customers (check out for example this great piece by the team at Firstround, the VC: http://firstround.com/review/the-power-of-interviewing-customers-the-right-way-from-twitters-ex-vp-product/). While we are at it, do read Ben Horrowitz on Product Management again: https://www.khoslaventures.com/wp-content/uploads/Good_Product_Manager_Bad_Product_Manager_KV.pdf)

But you also want to take a wider snapshot of your customer base. That is because quantitative data is sometimes a better guide than anecdotal evidence. Plus you simple will not have the time to talk to 500 customers prior to making a decision.

What follow is my observation from my own work and other companies are associated with. As practical as possible.

What do I mean by customer survey:

An automatically send questionnaire (typically email). I’d include both multiple choice, rating and open questions.

Email marketing rules apply: good subject lines for high opening rates, segmentation of your email database (e.g. customers with X USD purchases, time of first purchase, region, etc) and automatic follow ups. Yes, you will need 3–4 follow up emails, sounds like you are annoying the customer but is necessary. You really want that feedback.

Tip 1: Send them from your own email and write as personal as possible. Email opening rates are around 50%, response rates around 10% — your problem is to get responses, not to have a clean email inbox.

Tip 2: Use something simple to do the survey. Google Forms is fine. Again, your problem likely is to get answers and interpret them. Probably you are not gonna get anything statistically significant anyway. Don’t over engineer but ship it.

What are the reasons for customer surveys:

The key reasons from my perspective — this matters to explain why you need the internal resources (your time, engineering resources, allowing to write emails to the sales teams accounts, etc.).

Understand if your product does the job or “is good enough”

This is more difficult than it sounds. You need to know if the product does the job for the customer. Use an NPS score. And do it quarterly.

You need to know if the product is actually solving the problem of the customer. From the perspective of the customer. Doesn’t matter if you think the product fits to your strategy, doesn’t matter if design thinks its is beautiful, doesn’t matter if marketing thinks it is good to market, doesn’t matter if engineering thinks the engineering work is ingenious. Get brutally honest candid feedback.

Understand what customers want

You should have hypothesis here — this can be anything you think matters. For example: different colour, different features, different pricing model (API calls vs. monthly subscription), white labelled products. Whatever.

Get the input from Sales. Get the input from Marketing. Get the input from engineering.

Do multiple choice, tick boxes or scale of 1–10 for this.

Improve your go-to-market

Work with marketing. Work with sales. Ask your customers where the heard about you: SEO, Events, Referral?

Ask your customer if they plan to use/expand/cancel your product in the next quarter. Multiple choice question.

Discover “unknown unknowns”

Many things about your product you know that you don’t know. That is why you asked the hypothesis questions above. But other things you don’t know that you don’t know and therefore cannot ask. Does not matter that you are the smartest guy or girl.

Include an open question for any feedback. Really ask for that feedback.

Take the customers with you

Building a dialogue with customers, sharing your roadmap and outlining where you are going is tricky. Should you reveal that information to the competition (they are also talking to your customers)? Will you be embarrassed when you don’t or can’t deliver on the roadmap?

Both are fair arguments. Sharing a roadmap is tricky. A less intrusive way is to get your customers feedback to let them know what you are thinking about and give them a chance to voice the feedback directly to you (obviously, the sales team is the other key channel here)

Send out customers surveys this quarter. Even if you have 10 customers, if you have no other question than ask for an NPS. Don’t over-engineer, just email people.

steffenbuenau

Written by

Interested in how things work. Product and company strategy for management and investing. Other writing: https://www.sbuenau.org/

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