How Do You Get More Customer Feedback? Bake It In Your Product

One of the first metrics we put in place for our customer success process is everyone’s favorite, the NPS score.

I know, I know, there could be debates for days on whether or not NPS is great, terrible, or somewhere in between. For us, we decided it was a good way get a general temp of things, and more importantly to trigger proactive calls to customers who were happy or pissed.

We thought it would be this great source of insightful feedback and happily emailed thousands of users, excited to get all this great info!

We got 5 responses. Whoop de do.

We had started to notice a trend at this time. Our response rates for any type of feedback or outreach when we emailed was pretty dismal. On the other hand, feature usage in the product was pretty solid, so the decision came to bake it into the product.

Response rate immediately jumped up by 30% and we got some really great pieces of feedback, as well as rescued some customers who were unhappy due to miscommunication and not knowing where certain features were.

Bottom line, if you want to collect any responses or interactions from your customers, build it into the product, don’t rely on email.

One caveat, no one likes to jump through a bunch of hoops, so limit the number of feedback mechanisms in your product to the essential ones.

*These short Customer Success posts are meant illustrate things we’ve learned at Proven, so they may not translate perfectly to your company / industry. For context, the majority of our Saas customers are low LTV “pro-sumers” who are generally SMBs*