How we built a customer feedback loop that works
The first rule of the Startup Club: ‘Get out of the building and talk to real people.’ Talk to your customers, to those who might be them, or to those who used to be them. So we go to the wild, we talk to people, we get the bunch of useful (or not so much) information. What’s next? Is every feedback equally important? And if not — how do you choose? And how do you make it actionable?
At Vigi, on demand on item insurance mobile app, we had all those questions popping up around our customer feedback. Once the user base started to grow — we started to get more questions and comments. We are definitely lucky here. User feedback is pure gold for us, it is a great source of inspiration for product development, experiments and tests. Then it’s our turn to act on it… but how? I must confess — some lessons we’ve learned hard way. For instance, a small change in the flow, requested by some customers, once led to the massive drop down in conversions. So we had to put some kind of a science behind our actions on customer feedback.
Vigi’s customer feedback loop
Our feedback loop consists of 4 elements and looks like this:
Element 1. Feedback channels
Users can always reach out to us via in-app chat (we use Intercom), social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) or email.
Besides, we reach out to our users regularly as part of customer development experiments. We of course want to hear from many of our users. That is why we aim on making it very easy for them to response. Thus, in the experiments where we used email survey we put one very concrete question and add buttons as possible responses. With one easy click our users can share useful insights. Once they’ve clicked, they are redirected to a thank-you-page, where we ask if they’d be willing to share more details during a phone call. We use Calendly to make calls scheduling easy for everyone.
Element 2. Trello board
Customer feedback from all channels is added to the Trello board. It goes to one of the following lists:
- Bugs — ‘X doesn’t work for me,’ ‘I can not do Y,’ etc.
- Feature Request — ‘Can you add X,’ ‘Would be cool if Vigi had Y,’ etc.
- UX — ‘How can I do X,’ ‘Where do I find Y,’ ‘I tried to do Z, but…,’ etc.
- Product — ‘How Vigi works?,’ ‘Are you cheaper than X,’ etc.
- Insights — ‘I usually use Vigi when…,’ etc.
Tip 1. When users are sharing feedback on the same topic, we create one card and add it all as comments there. Trello counts the number of comments, and this way we can see straight away how many users share the same feedback.
Elements 3 and 4. Customer success team sessions and Backlog or kill it
That’s where it becomes actionable. Every week we sit to evaluate the feedback that was added to Trello. First of all we put it against our vision and goals. Does the feedback relate to our vision for Vigi? Will it help to solve our users’ problem better? If the answer is ‘No,’ we push the card to Archive. If the answer is ‘Yes’ we discuss how urgent is the issue. In case it’s urgent — we push it directly to the backlog for further actions (experiments, development, etc.). If the feedback is relevant, but not urgent, we keep it in the list. The only exception here are Bugs — those we only evaluate on urgency including the number of people who reported it.
Tip 2. It it important to go through the relevant but paused feedback periodically — it can be the case, that later this same feedback will become way more timely.
Who does this?
In principle, everyone at the Vigi team can handle customer requests — every team member has access to Intercom and Trello. We do have one person, our UX designer, responsible for the whole flow however. The Customer success team sessions are a must for a product owner, UX designer, and customer developer. Everyone else can join, and once in awhile we do these sessions with the whole team. We do believe it is necessary for all team members to be aware of what our customers actually think. That’s a reality check and a starting point for new ideas — how can we improve Vigi for real users.
This setup is probably not the one-size-fits-all kind of thing. Might be that it works quite well for us because we are a small team and need this high level of involvement from every team member. It is however a clear framework that makes us reachable for our customers at any moment, and lets us act on their feedback in a relevant way. One last thing to mention here. We do not expect to find solutions in our customers feedback. What we hope for is to hear about their pains and gains. Then it’s our responsibility to come up with ideas that will make Vigi awesome for our users.
More learnings about customer development and growth hacking is coming soon! Stay tuned. 🤘🤘
