Feedback is a gift. And feedback from customers is the best gift of all.
At Automattic in the enterprise B2B division we wanted to increase the amount of feedback we received. We then wanted to make sure our teams were reacting to that feedback… celebrating, discussing, reprioritising.
For our product we had fewer high value customers from organisations such as Salesforce, Capgemini, NASA than a B2C product company might have. For us, structured quantitative feedback was less important than frequent qualitative feedback and your mileage may vary.
I took and adapted the One Question Survey technique. Whenever we launched a new screen, or new functionality, and a little before we began work on a screen, we would add a “Give Feedback” button to the top right.
I implemented a Give Feedback button using a Pendo Guide, and we kept the design, user experience, and position of this button consistent for years. The first time a customer saw the feedback button it would pop a little dialog asking for feedback, with just a simple inviting text area… no numerical scales, no CSAT or NPS, just a simple text area where the customer could type “this is great”, “I wish I could do XYZ”, “this takes forever argh”, “wow we just launched, thank youuu!”, or any of a hundred other messages to our product team.
So yes, feedback is great… but you know what’s better?
Discussing that feedback in the product team.
Deciding if that feedback means you need to reprioritise the team’s attention.
Leveraging that feedback.
To spark discussion and action we piped every piece of feedback into a relevant Slack channel1. Small pieces of positive news would get Slackmoji reactions (🚀 📈 ❤️) from the team. When a customer was confused or frustrated I’d see the team pile into a thread off the feedback to discuss and brainstorm what could be done: “we need to speed up that API”, “can we get Simon to have a chat with them to dig in more”, “we need to rethink when we’re doing the advanced export options”.
Making it super easy for our customers to give us feedback, and then making sure the feedback was seen by the team was a real advantage for us. On one notable occasion we realised from a frustrated message that our backup process was hanging at a critical point during the launch flow, and the team was able to dig in, diagnose, and fix the issue. Without this direct feedback, we might not have uncovered the issue for some weeks.
The team also saw some really heartwarming messages from customers who appreciated their work, and that’s important too.
How do you facilitate feedback and taking action on feedback in your teams?
- The work to show customer feedback in team Slack channels was custom development by one of our talented engineers. We used Pendo’s webhooks to receive every Guide submission then choose where it needed to go. The routing was a bit of a hack, but I love it: you just added the #slack-channel-name to the name of the Guide. ↩︎