How to create a customer feedback tracker your PMs will use
How to create a customer feedback tracker your PMs will use

An automated way for support teams to gather customer feedback and share clear + relevant insights with product managers.

An automated way for support teams to gather customer feedback and share clear + relevant insights with product managers.

Charlotte Espeland

John Scrugham

Hi there! When I joined Coda back in 2019, I was our first full-time Customer Champion helping transition Coda from a Beta product to having our first paid customers. My days consisted of chatting with hundreds of customers and helping them build amazing Coda docs for their personal and work lives; many of these conversations included great ideas and insightful feedback.

At first, I shared this feedback one-off in Slack or in my 1:1s with PMs, but as the size of our customer base increased, I needed an easy way to capture all product feedback and clearly communicate this to the product team (which is often a full-time role itself).

Since the majority of our internal tools are on Coda with endless options for customization, it’s no surprise that each Product Manager and team have different planning cycles and preferences. Some like to see all feedback coming through on a regular basis, while others might want to only see a high-level view before their quarterly planning kickoff. For this reason, I created multiple channels for each team to consume product feedback in their own unique way.

How we share customer feedback at Coda:

FEEDback: We created an automated email, or feed, that is sent to each Product area with the requests that came in that week. Anyone at Coda can subscribe to a given product team’s feed for maximum visibility. This level of constant communication between support and product is normally really time consuming, but I was able to automate it all. Learn more here

Product Area Feeds⁠

Quick takes: On Wednesdays, we have a company-wide meeting called CSTATS (Coda statistics) where we look at metrics and KPIs across our business. I give a high level view of our most common requests and other notable trends with customer needs. Learn more here

Weekly Stats Meeting⁠

Product Planning summaries: Before we go into planning for the next quarter, I create a report for each team that links to all the relevant feedback in this doc. This helps bring the customer voice into our planning and prioritization. Learn more here

Quarterly Planning⁠

If you’d like to use this framework at your company, you can:

Copy this doc

⁠

When creating this doc, Coda’s data obsession was top of mind. I asked myself: “How can I effectively bring our customers’ voices into planning discussions?” This meant trying to find a way to highlight the quantitative (we’ve received 12 requests for ___ this week) and qualitative (here’s a direct quote from the customer on the impact of this feature change).

By the way, if you like to see how I put this together, here’s a

really fun webinar⁠

that I did with Maria showing off this Customer Feedback doc.

⁠

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/customer-feedback⁠

⁠