Collecting customer feedback is the magic that turned our company and made customer centricity part of the lifeblood of our organization. We agilely implemented the feedback for our product and improved the customer journey. Our monthly new customers rate doubled and product trials went up by 155%.
Klaus-M. Schremser, Head of Growth
This article is an adaptation of Klaus-M. Schremser’s talk at virtual summit The Journey to Customer Centric Growth.
Hey everyone, my name is Klaus-M. and in the past 20 years, I have been in the B2B industry, always surrounded by web technology. I love what you can do online and how technology shapes our world. I was always into marketing, and sales and had a narrow relationship with the customers.
Today, I’m a passionate head of growth at Usersnap. Usersnap is a SaaS company providing a versatile user feedback platform to gather feedback along the digital product life cycle.
If you prefer not to read the post, maybe, you want to watch the talk (33 min) about how we approached customer centricity with the magic power of feedback.
I want to describe how we found our way to leverage customer centricity and how our product became a feedback platform.
We started out many years ago with a solution for quality assurance and user-acceptance testing. What we were good at was visual bug tracking because we built it based on a problem we had in our own projects. Understanding the issues in projects from clients and users can be really hard.
Regularly, we received emails saying “This button is not working as expected”. And we were like: “What is this button? And what did you expect?” We had 100 of “this button” on our site, and it was hard to understand what the user meant or expected. So a lengthy back-and forth-between us and the user started to play out.
Our solution to this problem was a simple screenshot functionality, that allowed users to take an annotated screenshot and show what they were talking about. This shortened the back and forth dramatically and made it easy to understand what the users meant. This built the foundation for customer-centricity in our organization.
A lot of companies started using our solution, amongst them companies like Microsoft and Facebook. But after some years the growth flat-lined.
We started thinking about new ideas and areas where we could get customers on board. We wanted customer centricity to not just be a slogan on paper, but a guiding value in practice. And of course, we looked at fast-paced startups like Intercom. Intercom was pretty new at that time.
When we saw what Intercom was doing, a new idea popped up in our heads. “Why not build a customer service chat solution with a visual feedback component?” That screenshot feature will make us rich and famous.
And yes, we talked to potential customers… but only when we wanted to sell them our solution. From what I can remember our questions were leading, and persuasive and our listening was biased. We dug into our product data and saw that some customers connected our solution with a customer service tool.
At the end of a very short research phase, we were sure that this must be the 1 billion dollar solution back then.
We came up with a cute name: Alpaca. Everyone in the company liked the Alpaca. We still have t-shirts with Alpacas on them :).
But we couldn’t onboard customers after we spent a year on development. A whole year!
It seemed as if it never satisfied their needs and brought them no value.
Every time someone was interested, they asked questions about how to use it which went in a different direction than we initially thought of it. We failed to deliver, and we had to swallow the hard pill and stop the product. There we were, back to our original visual feedback product. We wasted one year of development.
But do not worry. I will not leave you without a happy ending.
There we were flat-lining with our initial product and limited traction.
We started to dig into our existing customers and initiated qualitative customer interviews to understand their existing workflows and pains. We queried our customer database, sent out a bunch of emails, and asked for help on telling us more about their current usage, their pains, and needs.
To make this process as easy as possible, we used
Don’t think that interviewing is just about asking a few questions and magically customer centricity appears. Luckily, one of our team members was experienced in doing interviews, and that saved us from wasting time on asking leading questions. This time we wanted to do it right and learn first more about what the customers thought.
For the qualitative interviews, we followed the guide from Harvard. This guide was helpful in educating the team and me to run successful qualitative interviews.
When I created my first questionnaires, I had to rework them several times because I often had a solution in mind. And my questions were already going in a certain direction. We recorded the interview and wrote little summaries of each interview with the key findings. We analyzed the interviews and improved our interview skills with each interview we did and became better every time until it was easy to do.
The summaries we did right after the interview made it easier to digest all the interviews we did, and others could quickly understand what we learned from the interviews.
We completed 32 qualitative interviews in a period of 2 months, and the key findings of the interviews regarding what they are using Usersnap for were:
These findings were surprisingly coherent with what we learned from the responses to our feedback widget on the website and in the product. From a total of 52 responses that did not address a specific issue (bug, question, other complaints) during a time frame of one month, we got the following:
At this point in time, we thought that our solution was mainly for “Visual bug tracking”.
The learning that customers were using our solution to collect feedback from customers was interesting and worth more attention.
We got this from what our customers told us in our customer feedback widget. This was clearly a turning point in how we looked at our existing product and the potential of expanding into the field of user feedback beyond visual bug tracking. This sort of aha moment often occurs when looking to build customer-centricity into your company.
We learned about what kind of segments we were solving problems at that time. We identified four distinct segments:
From this analysis and especially from analyzing the feedback of churning customers, we learned that the software segment stayed for longer with us. They used our product on an ongoing basis and not only for a limited time to collect bugs during a project and before going online with that project.
Then, we decided to dive deeper into this segment, where the customers were stickier with our product.
Several customers, amongst them, known ones, such as Hawaiian airlines and Canva, collected customer feedback via Usersnap. We knew we were onto something and continued beating the drum of customer-centricity in our organization. We wanted to understand what potential customers with the feedback solution were looking for.
Before we made our next steps, we looked at the current product development life cycle. Software companies are providing digital products. We wanted to understand how our customers used user feedback to influence their product development lifecycle.
Based on recent studies, 93% of companies proclaimed an agile product development process. The agile development process is essentially based on the lean startup method (https://www.lambdazen.com/process).
Build – measure – learn → What is interesting about this lifecycle, in our opinion, is that there is a lack of the voice of the user. User interviews gave us so many insights, so how should we integrate that into our day-to-day decisions? Also, our customers were telling us that they were using the feedback they obtained to decide on what to build next.
Marching to the beat of customer centricity, we decided to extend the product development life cycle to:
This is how we wanted to explicitly introduce the needs and pains of our users into our development lifecycle and only build features that bring value to the user and solve a pain point for our customers.
At this point, it was clear to us that we had to find out more about our customers. We crafted emails reached out to the existing customer base, and tried to learn how they are using Usersnap. The existing customers couldn’t tell us why they were buying back then, and the way they are using the product after some time is different from how new customers use the product or why they bought it in the first place. So we decided to expand our research into potential customers and those who are trying our product for the first time.
From our customer research, we understood that the key personas were product managers, customer service people, product owners, and founders. Those were the ones who started searching for a customer feedback solution. We wanted to learn more about these personas and their reasons for looking for a solution.
So, how did we start our customer feedback journey? In the next step, we wanted to include customer feedback loops in every step of the customer journey.
We were reaching out to our key personas, which we identified in the first step via social media platforms, specifically LinkedIn because on these platforms, it’s easier to target a specific audience.
Our team started a customer discovery & feedback process and searched for people who matched our initial hypothesis of what our perfect customer could be. We connected with a lot of people through personal messages.
With some help from tools (like Linked Helper), we could even reach a broader audience with more or less personal messages to reach statistical significance. We asked for customer interviews, asking them what jobs they have to be done in their role as product managers, customer service managers, and customer experience managers, and what their current challenges are.
We got a variety of teachings from here. Specifically, we learned that product managers want to collect customer feedback and to have a tool to analyze better and categorize customer feedback to have a more efficient feature prioritization.
With this knowledge, we enhanced our existing persona pages with validated information.
What we learned:
As a next step, we wanted to actively invite interested visitors to give us feedback on our website. These were people who were looking for a solution and found us. Were they finding what they were looking for, and what were their challenges?
We implemented non-invasive popup messages on our website with a person from our team on it to make it very personal. Asking visitors for interviews was very successful and helped us to get 5 interviews per week.
Additionally, we used simple surveys on the website. These were short open questions, and they were either initiated by triggers after some time or at specific locations where the visitor was.
We got a lot of feedback from these requests on the website. Today, our product is doing this for us.
The data we got from the simple questions on the website gave us a good direction. We were not sure whether we could trust the data. After we had the analysis from the customer interviews, we had the proof that micro feedback had a similar outcome but with a much broader base and significance.
We, for example, did validation on integration with Jira. We had some initial hypotheses about how integration with Jira could help us, and we asked visitors on our landing pages about Jira. On the other hand, we did qualitative interviews with customers about Jira integration. Both methods brought similar results.
This strengthened our assumptions about building a customer feedback solution within Usersnap.
What we learned:
To learn more about the prospects who signed up for a free trial, we implemented personalized messages in our product.
These were the central questions at that stage. We learned much about the AHA moment and their expectations from collecting customer feedback.
When prospects tried out our product, they got their first AHA moment when a new feedback item appeared in the dashboard. It showed them how this feedback solution would help them in the future to gather more insights into their customers.
Feedback was hard for us to collect. I don’t want to give you a false impression that you just have to ask and your customers will tell you everything you need to know.
In our experience, no user came to our product or website intending to give us feedback. They had a job to be done, and most of the time, the reason they gave us feedback was that something was not working as they expected.
When we didn’t get enough feedback, we started experimenting with time-based triggers and sent a request for feedback when they were doing something specific. We showed a little bubble with the question popping up from the feedback button.
Triggering a feedback request at the right time was important to collect responses that were not only circling problems and bugs of our product but what their challenges were.
We did not want to interfere when they were doing something because it might distract them, and they might feel disturbed. So we asked for feedback when a certain process was finished after:
Based on the click rates, we had 30% more engagement with this method.
I don’t want to miss out on mentioning that it was super helpful that we have an amazing customer success team which was always helpful along the way. We could get much feedback from conversations through our customer service chat.
What we learned:
And then we are also talking to customers. In this stage, we talk to those who finally decided to jump on our product train.
As we know that 30% of our customers are coming directly to our website and via word-of-mouth, it was important for us to find out whether they would further spread the word and become ambassadors themselves.
To measure how likely they would recommend our solution to their friends and colleagues, we asked them to rate us based on NPS (Net Promoter Score). This one measures how likely it is that your product gets recommended by the rating person.
And we asked for this feedback every 90 days. We got not only a trend line on their product loyalty represented by the NPS score, but the open follow-up question gave us valuable qualitative insights.
We learned that we had quite a good NPS rating and could see changes in this metric.
Additionally, we were reaching out via simple emails to segments of our customers who used the customer feedback use cases and asking them for interviews.
We tried to keep the emails as personal as possible, and we started distributing this activity throughout all teams. To prioritize customer-centricity, we had to involve everybody from sales and marketing to product and development. Everyone needs to understand the customer, and the best method to achieve this is by talking directly to the customer or at least hearing it in their own words.
Before we built a feature, the person requesting a feature had to show proof of the need and the pain of customers. We have a Confluence template for feature requests where you must state the customer value and prove it with data and references.
I can remember that in conversations with product managers, we repeatedly heard the pain of not having a central place for collecting these product ideas.
We also heard in the interviews that product requests are coming in via many channels, and it’s unclear where to store them. Spreadsheets can be easily overwhelming and are lacking collaboration functionality.
The term “ideas portal” came up many times, and after some more research, we decided to build a new use case in our product to make it easy to collect feature requests.
What we learned:
One last stage should not be unmentioned because there is no other time of great honesty at the moment the customer decides to leave you behind.
Although it’s sad when they go, you can still get something out of it. We extended our cancellation form with a mandatory field for why they want to cancel their subscription. Surprisingly most feedback was very helpful, and only a few people complained about a mandatory field about the reason or filled it with nonsense.
When the feedback items from churning customers came in, we started using labels to cluster these feedback items.
Clusters were helping us to identify recurring patterns. From a six-month analysis period, we had 81 times the reason they left us because “the project was over.” 50 times the reason we were too expensive for them and 32 times the reason they didn’t get enough value for them. Digging the “not enough value” reason, we understood that it was often related to a project being finished. Hence, their value during the development process diminished once they finished the project.
What we learned
Since initially, not everybody was involved in collecting and processing the user feedback, we thought it might be a good idea to share the key learning with the team. We created a presentation and shared the learning from the customer interviews and the qualitative feedback from our widget with the team in an all-hands meeting. Everybody was amazed.
Soon after this meeting, we realized that they couldn’t recall the information about what we learned from the customers. The information was not sticky. We started thinking about how to get the teachings to the team so that it became part of the daily work routine.
Our learning was that a single, specific statement or quote from a customer in their own words was way stickier than if we told them what we learned. So we came up with a simple idea: “What if we share quotes and feedback items directly with the team (via Slack), and they can read the feedback themselves?”
With an automated integration to Slack, we automatically shared all incoming feedback with the qualitative answers and the ratings with our team through Slack.
I can remember the moment when we discussed in a heated conversation that we needed a new feature, and one of the developers jumped into the discussion and recalled two feedback items he had recently read in the channel that would support building this feature. This was when it became clear that we had to continue sharing feedback and even double down on it.
Let me quickly recap what has happened so far.
We implemented feedback on all touch-points, from potential over-buying to churning customers. The same method to collect feedback did not work for all stages. At each stage, a different method was more successful in collecting feedback.
We brought feedback together in one system and used labels to get statistical data from qualitative feedback. We integrated the feedback collection with other tools to break out from the data silo and introduce feedback into the daily routine of every employee.
Our current state is that software companies are the right target customers for us. We deliver more value across multiple stages and for a longer period.
By focusing on user feedback, we will reduce our churn and increase our lifetime value per customer. As a result of this process, our product has transitioned to a versatile customer feedback tools platform for software companies.
We are solving multiple use cases for our customers who stay longer with us.
Since we started our new feedback platform over a year ago, we have doubled the monthly subscriptions.
We also increased the number of trial signups by 155% in the last 12 months.
Before making customer-centricity a pillar, our leadership decided about where the company should go and what the company should build. They understood the pains and needs of the customers and the market the best because they were having all the conversations and could transfer the information in a meaningful way to the team.
By involving in the collection of feedback and sharing all of it with the team, we enabled the team to make decisions by themselves. This transformed our company into a more customer-centric organization.
The question “And how is this helping our customers?” is a constant companion.
We changed the way we make decisions. We use customer data and quotes from customers to make our product decisions.
Using and managing customer feedback was the most practical way for how Usersnap could turn customer-centricity into a tool for our company.
Make feedback matter
We believe feedback-driven and customer-centric companies provide the best products to people. We put customers and their stories first: we listen, learn, improve, and evaluate, and we enable our customers to do the same.
Add user and customer feedback to your customer journey with Usersnap. Trying at least is for free.
Learn more about Usersnap today!
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