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<strong>TWO</strong> <strong>EARS</strong>,<br />
<strong>ONE</strong> <strong>MOUTH</strong><br />
The guide to SAAS customer feedback<br />
JOE DANIELS
Two Ears, One Mouth<br />
Copyright © Receptive Ltd 2017.<br />
Acknowledgements:<br />
Cover Art - Carrie Morris<br />
Book Layout - Simon Ross-Hill<br />
Special Thanks - Hannah Chaplin, Aly Mahan<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth
Contents<br />
Foreword ------------------------------------- 2<br />
Part 1: The Age Of The Customer --------------- 3<br />
Part 2: Two Ears, One Mouth -------------------19<br />
Part 3: I’m An Actor, Darling ------------------- 36<br />
Part 4: The Storm Is Clearing ------------------ 53<br />
Bibliography --------------------------------- 58<br />
About Receptive ----------------------------- 59<br />
About The Author ---------------------------------------- 60<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 1
Foreword<br />
An Introduction by Hannah Chaplin,<br />
Receptive CEO.<br />
Thank you for downloading our first book about customer<br />
feedback in SaaS.<br />
We chose this topic because at the heart of every SaaS<br />
organization is the same challenge - we all have limited<br />
resources so you have to get really good at working out<br />
which projects will have the highest impact.<br />
Customer feedback plays a huge role in this. It helps you<br />
develop your product in a way that supports the goals of<br />
your organization yet gathering, understanding and using<br />
that data can be really tough in the fast-paced world of SaaS.<br />
This book is an introduction to the key principles which will<br />
ensure you can use customer feedback effectively alongside<br />
data from your internal teams and the market.<br />
We hope it inspires you to think about how customer demand<br />
data can play a crucial role in building a successful product<br />
both for you and your customers of today & tomorrow.<br />
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Part 1<br />
The Age Of The Customer<br />
Why Customers Are More Powerful<br />
Than Ever Before<br />
Conduct a Twitter search for the latest “customer feedback”<br />
tweets and you’ll see thousands of conversations between<br />
massive corporations and people lying in bed on their<br />
phones.<br />
Wave after wave of these tweets, back and forth. It’s almost<br />
hypnotic.<br />
It’s also extremely revealing.<br />
Why is it that these colossal conglomerates and product<br />
powerhouses are so determined to speak with these average<br />
members of the public?<br />
Why do they invest a wealth of time and money into their<br />
customer support teams?<br />
Why do they care?<br />
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The only answer you can possibly discern from this line of<br />
questioning is that they care because they have to.<br />
They care because their customers demand it. And in the<br />
21st Century, you’d better realize that when a customer<br />
wants, a customer expects to get.<br />
Now, we aren’t saying<br />
that you should listen to<br />
your customers and<br />
instantly act on their<br />
feedback. That would be<br />
both terribly taxing and<br />
incredibly ineffective.<br />
You’d end up with a<br />
product reminiscent of<br />
Frankenstein - and we<br />
both know how that ended up.<br />
So you need to balance customer feedback with internal<br />
demand, the market, and your overall vision or strategy.<br />
But it’s still worth listening. And here’s why...<br />
Since the internet brought us all together, connected us all in<br />
a global bubble, we’ve become empowered. Finally, we have<br />
a platform. We all have our opinion, and we’re ready to shout<br />
it from the digital rooftops.<br />
Most of us have felt compelled to share our feelings towards<br />
a certain company who have wronged us, whether through<br />
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directly contacting them or by indirectly venting our<br />
frustration to our social networks.<br />
As customers, we expect, nay, demand, to be heard.<br />
We’re the “little emperors” of the online world, and god help<br />
you if you ignore us.<br />
Ruby Newell-Legner claims that on average it takes 12<br />
positive experiences to counter 1 unresolved negative<br />
experience. 1<br />
This tells us two things...<br />
Firstly, that negative experiences should be avoided at all<br />
costs.<br />
Secondly, that customers expect companies to listen.<br />
Note the key word in Ruby’s claim: “unresolved”. It isn’t<br />
merely the negative experience which weighs on our<br />
customer’s mind, it’s the thread being left dangled in the air.<br />
It’s that feeling of being ignored that really grinds on us.<br />
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Let’s put it a different way. Have you ever sent a co-worker<br />
an email, expecting a prompt reply? When that reply didn’t<br />
come, how did that make you feel? You probably felt a little<br />
frustrated, maybe even irrationally angry. How dare they<br />
ignore you?<br />
With the advent of cloud technologies and agile development<br />
process, this new dawn of connection with the customer<br />
base is now highly relevant to B2B SaaS organizations.<br />
Eons ago we would ship CD-ROMs (remember those?) with<br />
patches and releases that were months in the planning. Now<br />
updates can be rolled to a live environment within hours.<br />
This is a paradigm shift and one that presents many exciting<br />
opportunities and challenges for SaaS businesses to really<br />
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satisfy the pain points of their current and future customer<br />
base.<br />
Customers now expect a quick reaction to our queries. When<br />
they submit a request for a certain feature, they’re spending<br />
their hard-earned time to help you make a better product.<br />
If you ignore that request, if you bury your head in the sand,<br />
then they’ll go elsewhere.<br />
If you don’t care about the customer, the customer<br />
won’t care about you.<br />
And the best way, bar none, to show the customer you care<br />
is to listen to them. Pay attention to their needs and wants,<br />
dig deeper and uncover their actual pain points, and then use<br />
those insights to build a kickass product.<br />
Customers have the power to make or break companies. With<br />
140 characters they can wreak havoc or sing your praises.<br />
It’s not just Twitter. They can use Facebook, contact forms,<br />
email, forums, face-to-face, letters, Reddit, petitions, and<br />
famously even songs 2 , to get their message across.<br />
If you don’t at least take customer feedback on board, then<br />
you’re annoying the very people you’re trying to please.<br />
Besides, if you ignore their feature requests, feedback, and<br />
ideas then you’re missing out on a mountain of gloriously<br />
useful information about what to build in order to drive the<br />
growth of your business.<br />
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But if you open your ears, and point them in the direction of<br />
your customers, then you can start listening. You can hear<br />
what they have to say, and not only that, you can act on<br />
what they say.<br />
You have two ears for listening, and one mouth for<br />
communicating.<br />
It’s better for you, it’s better for them, it’s better for<br />
everyone.<br />
Welcome to the age of the consumer. Please watch your<br />
step.<br />
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Ignore Customer Feedback At Your<br />
Peril<br />
As mentioned in the previous section, ignoring your<br />
customers makes them angry. In fact, research from<br />
Conversocial found that around 25% of customers would<br />
cease doing business with a company altogether if they<br />
were ignored on social media. 3<br />
Can you really afford to lose a quarter of your business? Most<br />
people certainly couldn’t!<br />
But one company, way back in 2011, must’ve thought they<br />
could. Their name? Netflix.<br />
Now one of the biggest video services in the world, spawning<br />
much loved shows and even becoming part of the global<br />
lexicon (Netflix and chill, anyone?), Netflix are a bit of an<br />
institution.<br />
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That’s what makes this story all the more surprising and all<br />
the more educational for SaaS organizations.<br />
In the Summer of 2011, Netflix rather abruptly announced<br />
that they would split up the two sides of their product, DVD<br />
rental and live-streaming. 4<br />
They also decided it was a good idea to hike up their prices.<br />
This was perceived as a personal attack on their poor old<br />
customers, who just wanted to watch a film.<br />
“Surely,” we hear you cry, “Surely they listened to what their<br />
customers had to say on the matter?”<br />
But this was the murky waters of 2011, when companies<br />
hadn’t quite yet realised how mobilized and responsive their<br />
customers were.<br />
By September, Netflix lost around 800,000 subscribers<br />
(‘churn’ is an understatement) and their stocks plummeted<br />
to a fifth of what they were pre-announcement.<br />
It was, quite plainly, an unmitigated disaster.<br />
And the worst thing? They were warned.<br />
As it turned out, Netflix started off on the right foot and<br />
conducted a lot of focus groups, gathering as much<br />
customer feedback as they possibly could. They did the hard<br />
bit. All they had to do was listen to what they were being told.<br />
As we now know, they didn’t.<br />
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And the whole debacle was brought to a depressing end, as<br />
they appeared on a list of “The Ten Most Hated Companies In<br />
America”.<br />
This is really frustrating. They opened their ears but they<br />
didn’t listen. They only pretended to listen.<br />
26% of the customer conversations which were analyzed<br />
suggested that they would be cancelling their subscription<br />
should the proposed changes be rolled out.<br />
The writing was on the wall. Netflix’s customers were<br />
warning them. They told them not to do it. And yet they went<br />
and did it anyway.<br />
They blatantly ignored their customers, and they paid the<br />
price.<br />
Let this be a lesson to you.<br />
Always consider what your customers have to say.<br />
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The Biggest SaaS Companies Are The<br />
Ones Who Listen<br />
Of course, Netflix’s story has a happy ending.<br />
They are currently bossing the on-demand video streaming<br />
industry. Reports suggest a value of roughly $33 billion. 5 For<br />
context, the U.S. network CBS has a value of almost $31<br />
billion.<br />
Netflix has sailed straight through the storm of 2011 to beat<br />
the major networks at their own game. Impressive is an<br />
understatement.<br />
Now, you may be forgiven for wondering why we bothered<br />
warning you in the previous section. Sure, they had a blip,<br />
but Netflix came through in the end. What’s the problem?<br />
The issue is that a lot of companies wouldn’t be able to<br />
survive that sort of fall from grace. We guarantee that 99% of<br />
SaaS businesses would simply collapse in those<br />
circumstances.<br />
That’s the bad news.<br />
The good news is that you can avoid the mistake that Netflix<br />
made.<br />
Would you like to know how Netflix turned their fortunes<br />
around? How did they reach the shore with their ship still<br />
intact?<br />
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The simple explanation is that they started listening to<br />
their customers. 6<br />
First on the to-do list: An apology. CEO Reed Hastings<br />
publicly apologized for the whole mess, confessing that he’d<br />
grown over-confident as a result of Netflix’s prior successes.<br />
This helped to defrost some of the animosity between Netflix<br />
and its customers.<br />
Next, they started improving the product, with the<br />
customers’ pain points in mind. Their core product offering<br />
started to improve and improve, with a wealth of new<br />
features added. The key to this process was listening to what<br />
customers wanted, seeing if it fitted into their strategy, and<br />
then building it.<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 15
Perhaps, though, the biggest reason for the success that<br />
Netflix now enjoys is that they started producing original<br />
content.<br />
We’ve all heard of their flagship productions: House Of Cards,<br />
Orange Is The New Black, Stranger Things.<br />
What you might not have heard is how House Of Cards (and<br />
the shows which followed) were even conceived. 7<br />
Think of all the data Netflix collects from its customers. They<br />
can see everything we watch, how long we watch it for, the<br />
ratings we assign, and then split it up by a range of<br />
demographics such as age, gender and location. They know<br />
that if you like this one show, you’ll like this other show.<br />
They know a lot.<br />
And they decided that they could use this goldmine of<br />
information to figure out what their customers enjoyed<br />
watching the most, and, more importantly, what they would<br />
want to watch most in future.<br />
Netflix took a massive risk and decided to produce a whole<br />
television show that they figured their customers would<br />
enjoy, purely based on the data they’d gathered.<br />
They took the time to ‘listen’ to the data from their<br />
customers and they used that to inform their product - in<br />
this case an original TV production.<br />
You could argue that Netflix’s original content is the primary<br />
reason for their climb to the top. Their competitors can<br />
stream other films and other TV shows, and they have made<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 16
inroads to producing their own content, but only Netflix have<br />
these much-loved shows.<br />
The moral of Netflix’s story is that there are huge rewards to<br />
be gained by collecting, measuring and understanding<br />
demand data from your customers.<br />
If you currently feel like you’re Netflix in 2011, the good news<br />
is that there’s still time to turn things around.<br />
And you start by listening to some guy from Ancient<br />
Greece…<br />
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Part 2<br />
Two Ears, One Mouth<br />
How To Listen To Your Customers<br />
Those Greek philosophers were a pretty smart bunch. One<br />
such philosopher, Epictetus, was a stoic. 8 He believed that<br />
external events were out of our control, but that our internal<br />
actions could be guided by self-discipline.<br />
This seems to make a lot of sense but we probably wouldn’t<br />
invite him to our office party.<br />
Technically, we should credit Epictetus for the title of this<br />
book and, not at all coincidentally, the title of this part of the<br />
book.<br />
It was our favorite Greek philosopher who said: “We have two<br />
ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as<br />
we speak. 9<br />
This is a beautifully simple quote that perfectly illustrates<br />
what we’re trying to say with this book.<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 19
“<br />
We have two ears and one<br />
mouth so that we can listen<br />
twice as much as we speak.<br />
- Epictetus
Were he around today, Epictetus would be a kickass<br />
product manager because he realized the importance of<br />
listening.<br />
But before you delve into the depths of customer feedback,<br />
you need the tools to find your way. As we’ve mentioned<br />
previously, there are so many feedback channels available to<br />
your customers. This can make it incredibly difficult to gather<br />
it all in one place.<br />
Most companies will have a feedback form either on their<br />
website or built directly into their product. Other methods<br />
include sending out surveys or asking customers<br />
face-to-face.<br />
All of the above systems will work for collecting customer<br />
feedback.<br />
Have your feedback form ready to go and point customers to<br />
it when you feel they have valuable feedback to give. Make<br />
sure your customer-facing teams are always on the lookout<br />
for any useful feedback which they can submit on the<br />
customer’s behalf.<br />
As a SaaS organization, you have a great opportunity to give<br />
your customers an open channel so they can add and<br />
prioritize their requests whenever they like. Let’s face it -<br />
everyone changes their mind from time to time.<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 21
The little niggles you can pick up through an open channel,<br />
that otherwise would go ignored, can be extremely helpful<br />
and lead to a lot of quick wins from the word “go”.<br />
Of course, taking in all this information is one thing, but<br />
storing and managing it is another thing entirely. In fact,<br />
storing customer feedback is one of the biggest challenges<br />
that SaaS companies face, and it’s best to make sure your<br />
system is in place before you’re inundated.<br />
If your feedback tools are your ears, then your storage<br />
system is your memory.<br />
Imagine if you had to spend your day listening to people<br />
without any memory devoted to what they say. Chances are<br />
you’d end up relatively confused.<br />
It’s the same with<br />
customer feedback. You<br />
need to collate your<br />
information in one easily<br />
accessible place.<br />
Where you keep it depends<br />
on your preference. Some<br />
companies will create a<br />
spreadsheet and log the<br />
feedback in there. Others<br />
create a Trello board with lists of potential features to build.<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 22
Some use a system like Receptive where customers can add,<br />
vote for, and prioritize their requests ongoing.<br />
The main things to consider are how easy it is to update<br />
with new feedback, how easy it is to organize and<br />
manipulate the information, and how accessible it is to<br />
everyone in your company.<br />
If you can implement a system that scores highly on those<br />
criteria, then you’re good to go.<br />
And always, always, always, remember Epictetus and his<br />
sage advice.<br />
Lesson 1 - Centralize your data. Map all the places you<br />
gather demand from your customer base and ensure it’s<br />
flowing into a single system. Educate your teams so they<br />
know what to do when they receive a customer request.<br />
Lesson 2 - Consider opening a channel for customer<br />
requests within your SaaS product to capture the<br />
day-to-day annoyances that can collectively transform<br />
how your customers feel about your product.<br />
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Who’s Responsible For Customer<br />
Feedback?<br />
The simple answer is: everyone.<br />
In the past, customer feedback has been the domain of<br />
customer support and account management teams. This<br />
makes a lot of sense; they’re the ones on the frontline after<br />
all.<br />
But where this falls flat is communication. The customer<br />
support team can’t do a thing with a customer’s feature<br />
request. So when it comes in, they then have to somehow<br />
pass on the message to the product teams.<br />
Unfortunately, a lot of the time things get lost in<br />
translation, or even just lost altogether.<br />
This is, of course, a huge problem because you’re missing out<br />
on data which will potentially transform your product<br />
roadmaps and your organization’s growth trajectory.<br />
It can lead to a lot of missed ideas and insights that could be<br />
extremely important when it comes to designing an effective<br />
product roadmap. Not to mention the fact that your<br />
customers will feel like they’re being ignored. As you should<br />
already know by now, that is a big no-no.<br />
There’s also another issue.<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 25
Sometimes members of teams other than customer support<br />
will receive customer feedback in some form. If they don’t<br />
have access to the feedback system, then the information is<br />
essentially falling on deaf ears.<br />
They need to be able to input the feedback into the system<br />
themselves rather than pass it on to another team.<br />
The obvious solution here is to brief everyone in your<br />
company on customer feedback. Make sure they know<br />
the procedure you’ve put in place, how to receive<br />
feedback, how to submit it, how to act on it.<br />
You could even give them a copy of this book... (Nudge<br />
nudge, wink wink!)<br />
If you don’t have all of your internal teams on board with<br />
customer feedback, then it’s an uphill battle.<br />
Think about the lifecycle of a feature request.<br />
It starts with a customer inputting their feedback into your<br />
form. Next, that request needs to be processed and put into<br />
your system. The product teams then need to see whether<br />
it’s worth building or not and they need to review whether or<br />
not the request fits the organization’s strategy. Finally, you<br />
need to close the communication loop and make sure your<br />
customer is up to date with their feedback.<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 26
Now think of all the gaps in that cycle that need to be<br />
plugged. At any stage, information can be lost or forgotten.<br />
Feature requests can be reworded or instantly rejected.<br />
There’s a lot that can go wrong.<br />
For the customer feedback cycle to work perfectly, you<br />
need to ensure everyone knows what their part is. They<br />
need to know the bigger picture.<br />
By involving your internal teams with all stages of the<br />
process, you can streamline and improve the efficiency.<br />
You’re able to gather multiple points of view on feature<br />
requests, ideas, feedback and general insights.<br />
Customer facing teams, such as Customer Success, Support<br />
and Sales, will be in the know about which features are in the<br />
process of being built and can communicate that to existing<br />
and potential customers too.<br />
To remove the problem of shoulder tapping - whereby other<br />
team members are constantly asking their product manager<br />
for the latest information - you can share a high-level<br />
roadmap and a release log which everyone in your<br />
organization has access to.<br />
It makes everything so much easier.<br />
When it comes to customer feedback, it’s best to get all<br />
hands on deck.<br />
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Lesson 3 - Involve your teams. Adding transparency &<br />
communication to the process by having one accessible<br />
place where everyone can view the status of requests,<br />
understand what is on the roadmap and what has already<br />
been released will drive your efficiency through the roof.<br />
Go team!<br />
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If You Ignore Your Customers, Then<br />
They’ll Ignore You<br />
POP QUIZ: Can you remember the stat given in the last part<br />
of this book?<br />
If you can then congratulations, you get a cookie. If you can’t,<br />
then let us remind you...<br />
25% of customers would cease all contact with a brand if<br />
they were ignored on social media. This figure really is worth<br />
repeating.<br />
Customers want to be heard. They demand to be heard.<br />
But this can be easy to forget when you receive a new idea,<br />
piece of feedback, or feature request.<br />
If you aren’t careful, you might receive the request and focus<br />
on getting that feature built and rolled out without so much<br />
as a thank you note to the kind customer who spent time<br />
giving their feedback. We call this the Black Hole. (Ooh!<br />
Scary!)<br />
The SaaS world is fast-moving, dynamic, constantly ebbing<br />
and flowing. You have the ability to roll out new features as<br />
quickly as you can make your engineering team work….but<br />
that doesn’t mean you should.<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 30
And in the midst of this whirlwind, your poor little customer<br />
can be forgotten.<br />
Whether you choose to explore a customer request in more<br />
detail, go ahead and add a new feature, or simply decide it’s<br />
not right for your product, the tragedy of this story is that if<br />
the customer doesn’t realize you’ve reviewed their request,<br />
then they may pack up and head elsewhere.<br />
Sure, you might have shiny new features, but if you’ve lost a<br />
customer because you don’t communicate well then was it<br />
really worth it? (The answer is no, if you’re wondering.)<br />
So, what’s the solution?<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 31
The key is communication. The second part of Epictetus’s<br />
wisdom involves speaking. We have two ears and one mouth.<br />
Yes, you should be listening twice as much as you’re<br />
speaking, but that doesn’t mean you should remain silent.<br />
You need to maintain an appropriate level of communication<br />
with any customer who has taken the time to contact you<br />
until the issue is no longer an open request.<br />
We call it “closing the feedback loop”, and it’s crucial if you<br />
want to keep your customers happy. And we’re sure you do.<br />
You aren’t monsters.<br />
Now, there are two ways you can go about closing the<br />
feedback loop: manually or automatically.<br />
If you do it manually, then you should assign one of your<br />
customer support team members (or anyone in the know) to<br />
be in contact with the customer when there is an update on<br />
one of their requests.<br />
We aren’t talking about waking up and sending a good<br />
morning text, that would be overkill. We just mean that<br />
whenever the status of their feedback changes that you<br />
should let them know.<br />
It could be you tell them that you’ve started work on their<br />
feature. It could be that you’ve fixed a bug they found. It<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 32
could be a polite dismissal of their feature request once it’s<br />
been reviewed by your product teams.<br />
For larger, or scaling SaaS organizations it’s best to automate<br />
this process. When you work at scale it’s much harder to keep<br />
everyone in the loop. Knowing that updates are sent<br />
automatically as requests change status is a huge weight off<br />
your mind.<br />
Your product and customer-facing teams can act in<br />
confidence knowing that customers are kept informed every<br />
step of the way and you can even combine this with a<br />
personal call for that extra flourish at any time during the<br />
process.<br />
But regardless of method, or whether the news is good<br />
or bad, you need to tell them… they’ll thank you for it.<br />
Staying silent will damage your company far more than<br />
giving some bad news. Sure, you might expect a customer to<br />
be angry if you reject their feature or idea, but at least you’ve<br />
let them know. We’ve seen over & over again that if you add<br />
transparency and communication to your feedback process,<br />
customers don’t actually care if you don’t implement<br />
everything they’ve been asking for.<br />
When you were a kid and you made a big, long list for Santa,<br />
you weren’t disappointed when you woke up on Christmas<br />
Day and only had some of the toys that you’d asked for. You<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 33
appreciated the fact that you had at least some of them to<br />
play with.<br />
The same feelings apply to feedback and feature requests,<br />
only with no awkward family gatherings or your drunk uncle<br />
telling borderline offensive jokes.<br />
A good process gives your customers something really<br />
valuable - a window into how your product is developing. If<br />
they can view the status of appropriate features and<br />
feedback, they are less likely to contact you for updates<br />
directly. They can understand that even if you aren’t building<br />
everything they request, you are making progress and<br />
actively developing your product.<br />
We’ve all had bad customer feedback experiences, where<br />
we’ve suggested some improvements or spotted an issue<br />
only to never hear back from the company. We know how<br />
that feels.<br />
The aim here is to avoid your customers ever having to feel<br />
that way.<br />
Avoid the Black Hole of Customer Feedback. Keep them<br />
in the loop. They deserve it.<br />
Lesson 4 - Put a process in place for keeping your<br />
customers updated on the status of their feedback. It’s a<br />
game changer.<br />
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Part 3<br />
I’m An Actor, Darling<br />
Where Customer Feedback Goes To Die<br />
Walt Disney was an amazingly practical man. 10 If something<br />
needed doing, he’d just do it. Perhaps that’s why Disney are<br />
where they are today.<br />
They understand the importance of acting (pun most<br />
definitely intended).<br />
Walt once said, “The way to get started is to quit talking and<br />
begin doing.” 11<br />
SaaS companies understand this too. Here at Receptive, we<br />
aim to roll out new features, fixes and content as fast as<br />
possible. We call it GIFRO (Get It F***ing Rolled Out).<br />
We could talk and plan things out for ages, but where<br />
would that get us? Have a strategy, but make sure you<br />
execute.<br />
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“<br />
The way to get started<br />
is to quit talking and<br />
begin doing.<br />
- Walt Disney
The software industry moves fast, as we’ve already<br />
mentioned, and you need to stay ahead of the curve.<br />
This makes it all the more shocking when we hear of<br />
companies who have painstakingly collected feedback, only<br />
to leave it gathering dust on the shelf.<br />
Why?<br />
Why waste time listening if you aren’t going to act on it?<br />
Netflix’s near-death experience came about as a result of not<br />
acting. They listened to their customers. They went out and<br />
they researched the hell out of their proposed changes. But<br />
then they appeared to have forgotten all about the feedback<br />
they’d received. They put it on the shelf.<br />
And because they refused to act on the data, well, we all<br />
know what happened next. (Unless you’re reading these<br />
parts in the wrong order, in which case you need to head<br />
back to Part 1.)<br />
Netflix are definitely not the only ones guilty of letting<br />
customer feedback die. It happens all the time.<br />
There are a lot of reasons why this happens.<br />
Sometimes you receive feedback but you don’t understand<br />
it. The answer here is to communicate with the customer.<br />
Ask them to clarify or explain further. They won’t mind.<br />
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Or maybe the issue is that you have so many feature<br />
requests scattered all over the place that you don’t know<br />
what to do with them. The solution is to centralize the data<br />
and prioritize. (We’ll have more on that later.)<br />
The final reason could be that you don’t trust your<br />
customers. You don’t believe that they really know what they<br />
want, or, on the flipside, you think that you know what they<br />
want more than they do.<br />
To that, we simply say to try and step into your customer’s<br />
shoes and see things from their perspective. (Again, we’ll go<br />
into more detail later.)<br />
For now, we want to really drive home the point that<br />
collecting all this data, from customers, internal teams,<br />
and the market, is a pointless activity if you aren’t going<br />
to act on it.<br />
Parts 1 and 2 of this book mean nothing if you won’t<br />
implement Part 3.<br />
Don’t let all of your hard work go to waste. Don’t leave your<br />
customer feedback to die a horrible death. Don’t hide behind<br />
the curtain.<br />
Get up on that stage and act!<br />
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Lesson 5 - Actually go ahead and use all that glorious<br />
customer demand data, balancing it with demand from<br />
your internal teams and the market.<br />
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Get Your Priorities Straight<br />
If you’ve ever been faced with a multitude of different tasks,<br />
all competing for space on your to-do list, then you’ve<br />
probably employed some form of system for prioritizing<br />
those tasks.<br />
You might rank them by deadline, or maybe the effort<br />
required, or perhaps the importance of them.<br />
Organizing things in this way helps you to deal with the<br />
tasks at hand.<br />
Likewise, when you’ve opened up your ears and listened to<br />
what your customers have to say, you’ll likely be left with a<br />
long list of feature requests, ideas and general feedback.<br />
Unless you have an army of developers, you can’t possibly<br />
everything. And even if you did have some sort of developer<br />
army, you really shouldn’t be building every feature that is<br />
requested.<br />
If only there was a way to organize all of these ideas,<br />
feedback and feature requests….<br />
Well, you’re in luck, because there are two ways to do just<br />
that.<br />
First up: Prioritization.<br />
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Chances are, your customers would happily want everything<br />
from your feature backlog, much like a kid in a candy shop.<br />
But if you ask them to prioritize, then it changes everything.<br />
(And you also spend a lot less on sweets.)<br />
If you put in place the opportunity for your customers to<br />
constantly prioritize features, and re-evaluate those<br />
priorities, then you have an up-to-date log of what your<br />
customers truly want.<br />
As for stakeholders, a lot of discussions aim to unearth some<br />
sort of miracle framework with which they can prioritize<br />
feature requests.<br />
Here’s our two cents… Your stakeholders shouldn’t be<br />
prioritizing. We know, it’s weird, but bear with us.<br />
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Most of the frameworks heap all the work on one person. We<br />
know that a lot of Product Managers are superhuman but<br />
that’s beside the point.<br />
A Product Manager is one person. And one person can’t<br />
possibly balance all of the demands from different<br />
departments. Not to mention that each department will have<br />
a variety of different individuals, each with their own<br />
demands and perspectives. It’s exhausting just to write it.<br />
On top of that, priorities are always changing, sometimes on<br />
a daily basis. Using these old frameworks results in you<br />
working with outdated, and possibly irrelevant, data.<br />
But by allowing everyone (customers, internal teams, the<br />
market) to constantly update their priorities, you free up a lot<br />
of time.<br />
This allows Product Managers to focus on the strategy and<br />
decision making parts of their job. And we’re willing to bet<br />
they enjoy that more than burying their heads in boring old<br />
spreadsheets.<br />
This brings us onto the second method of organization:<br />
Segmentation.<br />
Like an orange, you should be breaking up your customers<br />
into chunks. Unlike an orange, you shouldn’t be eating them.<br />
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Instead, you should be segmenting your data in order to<br />
glean insights into what different types of customer want,<br />
and then use that to work towards your goal.<br />
Imagine, if you will, that your big goal for the next quarter<br />
was to gain more Enterprise clients. You could then segment<br />
the data so that you can only see what you high-paying<br />
clients want. It follows that if your current Enterprise clients<br />
want certain features, then prospective Enterprise clients<br />
will want them too.<br />
Segmentation enables you to focus in on specific data which<br />
is relevant to your current goal or strategy.<br />
Using both prioritization and segmentation to organize<br />
your data means you can be sure you’re making the best<br />
decisions.<br />
Lesson 6 - Reader beware! Lists of feedback and votes for<br />
feature requests are dangerous. Unless you understand<br />
priorities, the data can do more harm than good.<br />
Lesson 7 - When you segment demand data from your<br />
customers, internal teams and the market you can<br />
understand what you are building, why you are building it<br />
and who you are building it for.<br />
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The Guiding Light Of Customer<br />
Feedback<br />
When sailors are forced to navigate close to the shore in the<br />
dark of night, they rely on lighthouses to keep them oriented.<br />
Without those beacons of light they’d be lost. They might sail<br />
right by the land or, even worse, end up smashing into the<br />
jagged rocks.<br />
It wouldn’t be a pretty sight.<br />
But an even uglier sight as far as we’re concerned is when a<br />
company crashes and burns because they’ve failed to use<br />
customer feedback to the best of their ability.<br />
Even with the methods of prioritization we discussed in<br />
the previous section the path isn’t always clear. It can be<br />
full of hidden rocks waiting to sink your ship if you get too<br />
close.<br />
As our painful analogy should make clear, you need a guiding<br />
light, your own lighthouse, to help you reach the shore.<br />
But what is that light? How do you find it?<br />
The key lies with your product and company strategy. (We<br />
could write a whole separate book on this topic and maybe<br />
we will…)<br />
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If you don’t have a strong strategy, you have no focus and<br />
those amazing customer insights you’ve gathered will be<br />
useless.<br />
Never forget that customer feedback is one of three inputs<br />
into your product roadmap. You also have internal demand<br />
and prospect demand. Any data which is relevant to you<br />
today may not be tomorrow.<br />
The underlying reason you make your product is to solve<br />
your customer's problems, right? They’re the reason you do<br />
all of this. To please them.<br />
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Your customers are your lighthouse. Let them guide you<br />
within the framework of your strategy.<br />
Of course, if you’ve gathered enough customer feedback,<br />
then you’ve got a pretty good insight into exactly what your<br />
customers want.<br />
They’ve literally told you the problems they need to<br />
solve.<br />
Sure, some customers want certain features or<br />
improvements more than others. There won’t always be a<br />
consensus. But hoarding all of this data in one place enables<br />
you to easily spot any glaringly obvious pain points.<br />
You have your light source. Now you just need to focus it.<br />
And that’s where your judgement comes into play. Don’t<br />
worry, it’s not as scary a responsibility as it sounds.<br />
We suspect that most companies reading this will have an<br />
idea of their target customer. The ideal person who would<br />
buy your product. Some of you may even have gone all out<br />
and found a photo of this person.<br />
If you don’t have a target customer, then think about one of<br />
the customers you currently have instead.<br />
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As long as you have someone relevant in mind for this<br />
process, then you’re good to go.<br />
The trick is to put yourself in their shoes. Become that<br />
person. And once their shoes fit you perfectly, then ask your<br />
new persona some questions.<br />
Why do you want<br />
that feature? What<br />
will it help you<br />
achieve? Which pain<br />
point does this<br />
solve? How often will<br />
I use it?<br />
Could I do without<br />
it? Are there other<br />
features which are more important?<br />
Seeing things from your ideal customer’s point of view<br />
will show you the route you need to take. It will focus that<br />
beam of light, enabling you to traverse those dangerous<br />
rocks.<br />
If you’re ever feeling lost, even with all your customer<br />
feedback, even with all your prioritization, then the solution<br />
lies with your customers.<br />
You need to act like your customers to see what they<br />
really want.<br />
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If you’re ever feeling lost, even with all your customer<br />
feedback, even with all your prioritization, then the solution<br />
lies with your strategy. No strategy, no plan, no progress.<br />
Lesson 8 - Without a strong product and company<br />
strategy, customer feedback data isn’t very useful. You<br />
have to know where you are going and why so you know<br />
which data to explore.<br />
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Part 4<br />
The Storm Is Clearing<br />
The end is near. And so we face the final curtain. Or<br />
something like that.<br />
Our time together has been short and sweet, and we hope<br />
you’ve learned a lot about how to utilize customer feedback<br />
to its maximum potential.<br />
This final section is going to summarize what you’ve learned<br />
using the rather obvious analogy of sailing a ship through a<br />
storm.<br />
We’ve tried our best not to go too overboard (apologies) with<br />
the analogy. But we may well have done, so we’re afraid<br />
you’ll have to live with it.<br />
RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 53
Chart Your Course<br />
Before you set sail across the ocean of customer feedback,<br />
you need to know where you’re going.<br />
In this case, your map is your strategy. Once you have a<br />
strategy in place, you can think about the best method of<br />
gathering your feedback.<br />
Think about how you’re going to manage the various<br />
aspects of it.<br />
How will you collect the data? How will you store it and<br />
access it? How will you decide what to act on? How will you<br />
communicate back to the customer? How will your frontline<br />
handle customer requests? What is the feedback process<br />
between different teams?<br />
If you know the answers to all of these questions, then you’re<br />
good to go and the customer feedback ocean won’t seem<br />
half as scary.<br />
But steady on Captain, you aren’t quite ready to set sail just<br />
yet.<br />
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Gather Your Crew<br />
For a ship as big as yours, and an ocean as dangerous as this,<br />
you need a strong crew.<br />
Remember that customer feedback is everybody’s<br />
responsibility.<br />
Every member of every team should realistically be able to<br />
access your customer feedback system, understand the<br />
processes involved, and be able to chip in where necessary.<br />
As a wise sea urchin once said, your ship is only as good as<br />
your crew.<br />
Once you get your internal teams on board, all hands on<br />
deck, then you’re finally ready to set off into the great<br />
unknown.<br />
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Set Sail<br />
Okay, we’re finally here. The exciting bit.<br />
This is where you start collecting your customer<br />
feedback, acting on it, and communicating back to your<br />
customers.<br />
This is where you set sail.<br />
You’ll be standing at the wheel, watching as your crew man<br />
the sails. We’ll be stood at the harbor tearfully waving you<br />
goodbye.<br />
You know that you need to listen to what your customers<br />
have to say. You know that you need to prioritize your<br />
feedback and feature request lists. You know that you have<br />
to maintain open lines of communication at all times.<br />
You’ve got this.<br />
And so, as you sail off into the sunset, becoming a distant<br />
dot on the horizon, you’re ready to rock customer feedback<br />
like never before.<br />
Good luck on your journey, Columbus, and don’t forget to<br />
send us a postcard…<br />
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Lesson 9 - Never stop learning. Head over to our<br />
Resources section to learn more about Product Demand<br />
Intelligence.<br />
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Bibliography<br />
1: How long does one bad experience last in a customer’s mind? -<br />
http://bit.ly/2m8dvQR<br />
2: United Breaks Guitars - http://bit.ly/1p6Adjq<br />
3: Conversocial Study - http://bit.ly/2lyCQR1<br />
4: Netflix’s Lost Year - http://cnet.co/2mdbl2S<br />
5: Is Netflix Worth More Than CBS? - http://bit.ly/1OjtPC3<br />
6: How Netflix Rose From The Ashes - http://bit.ly/2lTgiNx<br />
7: How Netflix Uses Analytics - http://bit.ly/1f3HthQ<br />
8: Epictetus, Wikipedia Entry - http://bit.ly/2k9UmLn<br />
9: Epictetus Quote - http://bit.ly/2m80zub<br />
10: Walt Disney, Wikipedia Entry - http://bit.ly/1ha7YTE<br />
11: Walt Disney Quote - http://bit.ly/2mEEyBk<br />
A: Netflix Logo - http://bit.ly/2mnfjmz<br />
B: Reed Hastings Image - http://bit.ly/2miD7H8<br />
C: Epictetus Image - http://bit.ly/2nvQrZK<br />
D: Walt Disney Image - http://bit.ly/2nl9YwZ<br />
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About Receptive<br />
Receptive are the leaders in Product Demand Intelligence<br />
enabling companies to make data-driven product decisions<br />
by translating demand from customers, internal teams and<br />
the market into actionable insights.<br />
If you're interested in finding out how you can use Receptive<br />
for your own business, then please get in touch to arrange a<br />
demo or start a trial.<br />
Head over to our website and get started right away!<br />
https://receptive.io/<br />
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About The Author<br />
Joe Daniels is the lead Content Strategist at Receptive,<br />
having joined the company in February 2017.<br />
This book is the first piece of long-form content he's created<br />
for Receptive so be nice.<br />
Joe regularly blogs on both Receptive's site and his own<br />
Medium profile.<br />
You can find him skulking around on Twitter (@receptivejoe)<br />
so feel free to follow him and tweet your thoughts on his first<br />
swim in the ocean of SaaS.<br />
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