How We Work With Customer Feedback at Personio
Feedback from customers is essential to the success of any organization and should be a key focus, not just for product teams but for every part of your business. However, that feedback might not always come from the sources you expect. Surveys and interviews are excellent feedback sources, but in our experience the most frequent (and honest) feedback is shared ad hoc — in conversations with customer support teams, social media comments on a new release, and in online communities. It is your job to process all this incoming feedback, respond to customers, separate signal from noise, and leverage the insights the feedback provides.
At Personio, we’re lucky that our customers are incredibly engaged with the products and services we offer. In this blog post, I want to share what we have learned about working with the feedback our customers provide on a daily basis. I’ll start with outlining feedback workflows that have worked well for us, followed by a section about the challenges we are facing and where we need to improve. I hope that sharing our learnings will help you see the value customer feedback can bring!
When done well, feedback isn’t just a powerful input that informs your product and business strategy — it can help you form a trusting relationship between you and your customer base.
Drinking from the Firehose: How We Process Customer Feedback at Personio
At Personio, where we’ve just hit 10,000 customers and hundreds of thousands of active users, we receive thousands of individual pieces of feedback every month. But even for smaller organizations, the amount of incoming feedback can grow surprisingly quickly. Every touchpoint your customers have with your team, like conversations with Support, Growth, or Implementation, are opportunities they will take to share feedback.
On a smaller scale, product teams often make use of in-app questionnaires to validate and fine-tune new features before release. Add to that the various NPS, CSAT and satisfaction surveys that are common in B2B companies, and it quickly becomes clear that a structured approach is needed to process all this data.
While we view customer feedback holistically at Personio, I do want to highlight two sources that are key to how we work with feedback and have considerable influence on our product development: the Personio Community and the Feedback Catalog, an internal data product we use to collect input from our customer-facing teams.
Personio Community
We have grown the Personio Community to over 9,000 users on the German platform and over 2,000 in English since we launched it in 2020. It’s one of the most direct ways in which customers can share their feedback. The community provides a space to discuss Personio releases, share tips and tricks, and talk about HR topics in general.
Most importantly, for the purpose of collecting feedback from customers, is a part of the community we call Ideation. In Ideation, users can post their ideas for improving and developing the Personio product and upvote or comment on existing ideas. Using this input, our community team drives discussions about important Ideation topics and shares status updates, like when a frequently requested feature is addressed by a product release.
Feedback from our customers drives discussions within individual product teams, and we share frequently upvoted ideas with product leaders to align the development of Personio’s product with our customers’ needs. We also encourage Product Managers to engage directly with users in the community. (While many already do, this is an area where we are still working towards a stronger, more direct connection between the community and Personios developing our product.)
Feedback Catalog
Despite the great growth we’ve seen in our community, not all Personio customers are a part of it. Many of these share their feedback in regular conversations with their Growth or Success Manager, or during interactions with our Support team. Channeling this feedback in a way that makes it actionable for our product teams has long been a challenge for us. To solve for this, we built our own solution to process customer feedback collected by our teams in Customer Experience, which we call the Feedback Catalog.
At its core, the Feedback Catalog functions similarly to Ideation in the Personio community. Personios working directly with customers interact with the application to share new customer feedback or “upvote” existing feedback. Because the app is integrated with our customer communications tool, Zendesk, we are able to associate both new and existing feedback submissions directly with customer data. This allows us to determine how many customers have shared a certain feedback topic and calculate further data, like the aggregated revenue connected to each feedback.
Since its launch in early 2022, the Feedback Catalog has become a key resource for Personio’s Product teams and other stakeholders. Its reports are among the most-accessed in our department, and top feedback items are included in strategic discussions like our quarterly business reviews.
The Feedback Catalog contains over 1,000 individual feedback items, some of which have been connected to hundreds of customers. This aggregation, which also allows us to parse feedback by customer segments and markets, provides an impactful database that helps product teams and decision makers better prioritize new developments.
Signal vs Noise: Turning Customer Feedback into Insights
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of working with customer feedback is how to reliably turn raw data into insights that are as impactful as business goals, adoption data, and other inputs that inform decisions about our product and business.
To solve for this, we’ve ensured that customer feedback is self-serve and can be accessed by anyone at Personio, that individual pieces of feedback can be aggregated to form larger themes, and that we allow for segmentation of our feedback data to best understand the needs across our diverse customer base. This means that the impact of customer feedback is not limited to the odd customer quote on a slide, but that it is positioned as a key building block of driving product and business strategy at Personio.
Self-serve Customer Feedback
Not every role has the same amount of touch points with customer feedback, but its usefulness isn’t limited to product managers and UX researchers. Feedback data may be needed to review the effectiveness of an implementation process or to build close communication loops with customers. Showcasing that incoming feedback is taken seriously and actioned upon also builds trust with the customer-facing teams responsible for capturing most of the feedback.
At Personio, anyone can analyze and interact with customer feedback directly. We strive to make feedback data widely accessible, its structure easily understood, and flexible enough to allow for answering a wide variety of business questions. Since 2022 we’ve been working in Tableau to provide reporting for key sources like the Feedback Catalog. This has had a substantial impact with feedback reporting being adopted across Personio and increasingly referenced in the decision-making process, particularly for product developments.
Why Aggregation and Segmentation Are Key
Individual pieces of customer feedback don’t exist in a vacuum but require context. Which market does this customer operate in? How urgently do they require a response? Has this feedback been shared before or are we hearing it for the first time? As organizations scale, the need for being able to aggregate and segment feedback data becomes critical. At Personio we have seen first-hand how challenging it can be to generate real insights from feedback for multiple products and while operating in multiple European markets. Product managers and researchers no longer ask “What are our customers saying about Personio?” but instead “What feedback are our customers in Spain sharing about the Performance & Development product?”
Processes for collecting customer feedback at Personio are therefore built with the purpose in mind of later aggregating and segmenting the feedback data. Our reporting enables us to deliver meaningful context on data points like our customers’ market or segment. An answer to the earlier example of a product manager wondering about feedback from Spanish customers on the Performance & Development product is just two clicks away with interactive filters allowing us to slice and dice the feedback data as needed.
Next Steps: An Evolution in our Feedback Processes
Over the past 18 months we have changed our ways of working with customer feedback from largely unstructured feedback collection to processes that allow us to systematically aggregate, segment, and prioritize feedback data. These developments will continue as we work to integrate more feedback sources, ensure that the data we collect is more accurate and that internal stakeholders can understand feedback more easily.
One aspect of our feedback processes that we’re working to improve is using incoming feedback to drive direct communication loops with our customers. Currently there are too many layers of complexity between customers sharing their feedback (or the customer-facing team members recording it on their behalf) and the Personios responsible for driving outcomes for our product and business.
To be more precise, we want our Product Managers, Researchers, and Designers to be as close to customer feedback as our Growth and Success Managers are. These roles should not only understand the customer’s needs, but respond to them and communicate the impact of their feedback as transparently as possible. Enabling our teams to create closer feedback loops with customers will require us to rethink some of our existing processes. Ultimately, though, I hope this approach will help us demonstrate more clearly to our customers the impact customer feedback has on everything we do here at Personio.
Interested in joining our team? We’re hiring for multiple roles in Customer Experience — check them out on our careers site today!
