Top Considerations for Developing Your Customer Feedback Loop
Asking for customer feedback is far and away one of the best tools in any SaaS organization’s arsenal for improving and optimizing the customer experience. After all, your customers are your best sounding board because they live the customer relationship every day. As CSMs and customer success leaders, it’s easy to get ‘too close’ to your project plans, issues, and implementation items that you lose sight of the bigger customer success picture. Taking a step back, asking for customer feedback, and then putting this feedback into action is a great way to re-center and re-focus on what is essential.
Why customer feedback is important
While it may seem as though CSMs go above and beyond for customers, they also provide a valuable service to customer success teams – and SaaS organizations in general. They are on the front lines of product usage, testing, and making sure solutions provide value. They have worked with every department within an organization and can tell you first-hand what the customer handoff process is like. As an organization, how can you know if something is wrong or off in your processes unless your customers bring it up to you? This is why gathering customer feedback is so important.
Top considerations for developing your customer feedback loop
Here are some of the top things to keep in mind when gathering, reviewing, and leveraging customer feedback:
- Plan how you are going to ask for feedback. Will this be an informal conversation between your CSM and the customer or a planned survey or questionnaire the customer needs to complete?
- Understand the scope of your feedback. Are you going to ask all of your customers for feedback at the same time for a scaled project or gather feedback one by one across all of your customers?
- Make sure your team is on board. Gathering customer feedback is a big deal, and your customer success team members need to be aware of the impact potential here. Your CSMs also need to make time for any feedback discussions if required.
- Ensure your customer feedback is documented correctly. All of your CSMs should be documenting and sharing customer feedback with your larger team in the same way, whether in the same place or submitting reports to the same person.
- Be clear about how you will use this feedback. When you ask your customers for feedback, be transparent on how this will be used. Are you going to update onboarding processes or implement new tools to make things easier? Let your customers know what your goals are going in so they can provide more detailed feedback.
- Seriously consider customer feedback. This may be the most important thing to focus on, especially if you are open and transparent with customers. If you receive direct, actionable responses from customers, make sure you address it in some way so that customers know you are listening to their input.
Want to learn more?
You can check out these additional resources from ClientSuccess to learn more about gathering customer feedback: