Learn four effective ways to gather customer feedback: participating in churn calls, regular check-ins, joining sales and support teams, and utilizing chat-enabled features. Interacting with customers on social media and creating a Facebook group can also lead to valuable discussions. Consistently gather feedback and build relationships with different teams to obtain valuable insights.
Expanding the definition of customer feedback to include interactions with sales, customer success, support, and marketing teams can provide valuable insights for building great products.
Leveraging conversational feedback by sharing it with the entire product team allows for continuous feedback loops and insights, leading to more informed product development decisions.
Deep dives
Importance of Talking to Customers
One of the main points discussed in the podcast is the importance of talking to customers for product people. The host mentions that product teams often fail at getting enough customer feedback, which is crucial for building great products. The host emphasizes that customer feedback is not limited to formal user interviews. Instead, there are various sources of feedback within the company, such as the sales team, customer success team, support team, and marketing team. By expanding the definition of customer feedback and tapping into these teams, product people can have more conversations with customers and gain valuable insights to inform their product development.
Methods to Interact with Customers
The podcast suggests several methods for product people to interact with customers and gather feedback. First, they can join customer success calls and ask questions at the end of the calls to learn about user understanding, pain points, and product adoption. Second, they can participate in sales demos to understand how customers engage with specific product areas and even help close deals. Third, they can collaborate with the support team, responding to bugs and feature requests, to gain feedback from customers who are already facing challenges. Additionally, if chat is enabled within the product, having contextual conversations with active users can offer quick and valuable insights. Lastly, product people can find customers on the internet through social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, engaging in conversations and transforming them into one-on-one interactions for deeper feedback.
Sharing and Leveraging Conversational Feedback
The podcast highlights the importance of leveraging conversational feedback by sharing it with the entire product team. By collecting feedback from various sources and sharing it with the relevant teams, product people can exponentially increase the amount of customer feedback they have access to. This allows for continuous feedback loops and insights, leading to more informed product development decisions. However, the podcast acknowledges that engaging in conversational feedback is simple but not easy. Product people need to be open and available for feedback, build relationships with other teams, and be willing to engage in unstructured conversations with customers. Despite the potential challenges, talking to customers and obtaining their feedback is a high-leverage activity that can significantly contribute to building a successful business.