Secrets of SaaS: How to make your customers love you even more

Unlock the power of customer feedback with this simple process

Image credit: Thanks to Josh Henderson,Flickr

How to close the feedback loop

Whether it’s feature requests, ideas, insights or general feedback, customers are an amazing source of data for your roadmap yet capturing & using this data effectively is a real challenge in SaaS.

If you can collect, measure & understand customer demand, it opens a goldmine of opportunities to be a hero to your customers while also ensuring you are building a product that drives the growth of the business.

Here we walk through a section from our webinar — Roadmap Fuel: Customer feedback — which shows how a simple process can have a huge impact on customer satisfaction.

Step 1: Prepare your customer-facing teams

Image credit: Thanks to Brickset, Flickr

The key to reaping all of the benefits of welcoming customer demand comes from enabling your front line to handle it well.

This includes how customer success and support teams respond to initial requests and how they get back in touch with customers once their requests are reviewed, updated, or released.

When a customer submits an idea, they’ve taken their time to help make your product better; handling these interactions well can turn customers into your most powerful advocates.

Ensure customer-facing teams respond with gratitude and clarity then follow up with customers when their feedback & feature requests are reviewed and updated.

Step 2: Capture customer demand data in one place

You don’t want everyone who is talking to customers to have their own spreadsheets and notes on what customers are asking for. If you centralize the data it allows you to really use the information to your advantage.

This is a huge help for product teams because they know there is one source of customer demand information they need to access.

For smaller — mid-sized organizations, using a Google Doc, Airtable or Trello can work well to start with or you can introduce specialist software from day 1 which will scale with you all the way to Enterprise.

If you take a look at our Roadmap Fuel: Customer Feedback webinar, you will be able to access our customer feedback templates for each of the systems we have mentioned above.

Enterprise companies, and those scaling up will have slightly different challenges and we will be writing a blog post exploring that in more details early next week so watch this space!

In the meantime, there’s a great section at the end of our webinar which looks at how the process is different for larger organizations which you can access on demand from this page.

Step 3: Make sure everyone understands the process

Think about which teams handle customer feedback, feature requests, ideas and insights in your organization. Usually customer success, support and product will be closely involved with this data.

Ensure the relevant teams have access to the central system that customer demand data will be stored in. This improves efficiency across the board and it means the data is accessible at all times.

Run a short meeting with the relevant stakeholders in your organization. Explain:

• The benefits of capturing customer demand in one place;
• Which system you will be using to capture the data;
• How to respond when a customer submits an idea, feedback, insight or feature request;
• How to follow-up when you have an update for a customer
• When & how you will review & use the customer demand data

Again, if you access our on demand webinar, you will be able to download a template which you can use to run this meeting effectively.

Step 4: Use templates & shortcuts to communicate back to the customer

An effective way to empower your customer-facing teams and achieve consistency, is to create templates that everyone can use to respond to customer requests.

A way to make this super efficient for customer-facing teams is to use a text expander, such as Gorgias. This allows you to save responses and pop them into emails (and online) using one keyword.

For example, if a member of the support team receives a customer feature request, they can use a saved response to thank the customer and give them instructions on where to submit their feedback (or they can submit it for them). It’s really key here to tell customers want the next steps are so their expectations are properly set. This will make you really stand out against your competitors.

Good templates combined with an agreed process let’s you welcome customer requests and leave behind generic and evasive responses behind:

If you are a Receptive customer, this whole process is automated; customers and internal team members receive updates as requests change status so no manual work is required.

The end result — Congratulations, you’ve created an effective feedback machine!

In summary, a few tweaks and an agreed process with the relevant teams in your organization will create a feedback machine that works for everyone.

Remember to:

• Capture customer demand data in one place
• Have a good process in place
• Get your teams aligned
• Create templates to help customer-facing teams respond to requests with confidence and consistency.

These simple steps mean your customers are listened to, you build trust and transparency and take your customer experience to the next level.

Receptive helps SaaS product teams listen to the right people and build the right product, Learn more

Originally published at www.receptive.io on January 30, 2017.