3. Build a Customer Listening Machine

Customer listening at scale is fundamentally about finding signal within noise. It is the process of sifting through what your customers are constantly telling you about how they use your software and what is working and not working for them.

While customer discovery is to understand your user and identify sharp problems, customer listening helps you refine your product and user experience. It’s also a way to test whether your assumptions about sharp problems and their solutions are correct.

How to Encourage Feedback

Asking for feedback is the simplest way to fuel your customer listening machine. This also ensures your feedback will be more representative—not just from your most delighted or more disgruntled customers.

Here are a few ways to encourage feedback:

Embed feedback in your app (obtrusively and unobtrusively)

Customers should be able to go a place in your app to submit feedback whenever they like. Its should be a consistent, well designed place.

Ask at key milestones

Sometimes you need to be more proactive and ask for feedback and key junctures in the user experience. Since this interrupts the customer, do so sparingly, such as:

Launching a new feature

Point of churn

Onboarding

Post activation

Don’t inundate your customers with feedback requests. Only ask for feedback when it is relevant, and even then, just survey a sample. One exception to this is we advise teams to collect 100% churn feedback.

Build a product community

When carefully designed, can be a place for customers to support each other but also to have a conversation with your team about various aspects of your software.

This conversation can be tuned quite easily towards feedback for your product team.

Social media

If you have the right kind of product (B2B2C, strong user experience component, viral, etc.) social media can function as a decent proxy for a community.

For the right segment of customers, your customer will use social media as a support, complaint or hype channel.

Remember that <= 10% of customers will ever say anything. Social media posts should be viewed as ‘high excitation’ post and treated accordingly.

Bug reporting

If your community is tech savvy, let them file actual bugs - issues with ways to reproduce that can be directly addressed by engineers. This is often the case for companies that do SaaS that addresses the developer or infrastructure workflows.

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