How Apple and Atlassian listen at scale
Apple
Apple has a perception of being unlike every other company in the world. A special beast altogether. While that may be true for some of their category defining products, that’s not the case with their stores. Apple used an easy to understand methodology to create world-class store experiences for their customers. Now, I have to caution you here. This tactic is easy to understand but not always easy to implement. It required rigor, discipline and above all else an unshakable trust in data.
During the first six months of operation, 100% of purchases made in an Apple store location would result in that customer having direct follow up by phone. Someone from headquarters would call the phone number given at the counter the next day with two simple questions:
1. How likely are you to recommend Apple Stores to a friend?
2. Why?
What did Apple do with this information? Was it used to discover problem employees or under performing stores?
No. While there was a process for following up with individual stores in case a customer has a particularly bad experience, the main thing that Apple was interested in was collecting lots of “Why?” answers.
Each month Apple would collect all of this “Why?” data and mine if for trends. How many people complained that the stores were too bright? How many loved the bright friendly stores? Did lots of people feel that having so many staff members in store was a nuisance? How many came looking for a 3rd party accessory?
After separating this data into trends, Apple could just look at the numbers for an ordered list of actionable changes that could be made to their stores to improve the average customer’s experience.
Six months, six iterations. Incredible dedication.
Atlassian
Atlassian isn’t a well known brand name to some but it is an incredible company. Atlassian is an Australian enterprise software company with a market cap above six billion dollars.
In 2015, a full twelve years into their journey, Atlassian changed the way they talk to their customers.
For years Atlassian had been gathering feedback from the customers that they knew best, the people that actually paid for the products.
What they discovered was that the people who make purchase decisions within a company have very different opinions about software than the people who actually use it every day. Being an enterprise software vendor, Atlassian might only have a relationship with three or four people in the IT department at a company while thousands at the company use their product. So how did they get feedback from all of these hidden end-users?
Atlassian uses an in-application NPS survey widget to gather feedback from all of their users across tens of thousands of companies.
Every piece of feedback received is categorized and the cumulative numbers of those categories are used to drive product decisions across the company.
Are lots of people complaining about performance? Prioritize that over the next three months instead of building more features. Are lots of people asking for a specific feature that we didn’t know was important to them? Build that instead of what our “gut” tells us.
Tactical takeaways & things you can action:
- Are you listening to each user individually or aggregating your customer feedback.
Listening to individuals is valuable early on but at scale it becomes difficult to discern the needs of the masses. Aggregation wins. - Find out if you’re listening to all of your customers or just a small subset.
Why is that? Are there ways to listen more broadly? Is there value in listening more broadly? These are all questions that a product team should be able to answer. - What aggregations make the most sense for your team or business?
In SaaS, typical categories are things like reliability, performance, feature requests, and complexity. In e-commerce it may be different, what makes the most sense for you?
I’m Wes, a co-founder at Ask Inline where I help teams listen at scale by creating great customer feedback campaigns. We keep things on Medium fairly short and sweet. If you’re after something more in-depth, check out training.askinline.com where we publish new product iteration and customer insight resources every week.
