TWO EARS ONE MOUTH

TWO EARS, 

ONE MOUTH 

The guide to SAAS customer feedback 

JOE DANIELS

Two Ears, One Mouth 

Copyright © Receptive Ltd 2017. 

Acknowledgements: 

Cover Art - Carrie Morris 

Book Layout - Simon Ross-Hill 

Special Thanks - Hannah Chaplin, Aly Mahan 

RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth

Contents 

Foreword ------------------------------------- 2 

Part 1: The Age Of The Customer --------------- 3 

Part 2: Two Ears, One Mouth -------------------19 

Part 3: I’m An Actor, Darling ------------------- 36 

Part 4: The Storm Is Clearing ------------------ 53 

Bibliography --------------------------------- 58 

About Receptive ----------------------------- 59 

About The Author ---------------------------------------- 60 

RECEPTIVE • Two Ears, One Mouth 1

Foreword 

An Introduction by Hannah Chaplin, 

Receptive CEO. 

Thank you for downloading our first book about customer 

feedback in SaaS. 

We chose this topic because at the heart of every SaaS 

organization is the same challenge - we all have limited 

resources so you have to get really good at working out 

which projects will have the highest impact. 

Customer feedback plays a huge role in this. It helps you 

develop your product in a way that supports the goals of 

your organization yet gathering, understanding and using 

that data can be really tough in the fast-paced world of SaaS. 

This book is an introduction to the key principles which will 

ensure you can use customer feedback effectively alongside 

data from your internal teams and the market. 

We hope it inspires you to think about how customer demand 

data can play a crucial role in building a successful product 

both for you and your customers of today & tomorrow. 


Part 1 

The Age Of The Customer 

Why Customers Are More Powerful 

Than Ever Before 

Conduct a Twitter search for the latest “customer feedback” 

tweets and you’ll see thousands of conversations between 

massive corporations and people lying in bed on their 

phones. 

Wave after wave of these tweets, back and forth. It’s almost 

hypnotic. 

It’s also extremely revealing. 

Why is it that these colossal conglomerates and product 

powerhouses are so determined to speak with these average 

members of the public? 

Why do they invest a wealth of time and money into their 

customer support teams? 

Why do they care? 


The only answer you can possibly discern from this line of 

questioning is that they care because they have to. 

They care because their customers demand it. And in the 

21st Century, you’d better realize that when a customer 

wants, a customer expects to get. 

Now, we aren’t saying 

that you should listen to 

your customers and 

instantly act on their 

feedback. That would be 

both terribly taxing and 

incredibly ineffective. 

You’d end up with a 

product reminiscent of 

Frankenstein - and we 

both know how that ended up. 

So you need to balance customer feedback with internal 

demand, the market, and your overall vision or strategy. 

But it’s still worth listening. And here’s why... 

Since the internet brought us all together, connected us all in 

a global bubble, we’ve become empowered. Finally, we have 

a platform. We all have our opinion, and we’re ready to shout 

it from the digital rooftops. 

Most of us have felt compelled to share our feelings towards 

a certain company who have wronged us, whether through 


directly contacting them or by indirectly venting our 

frustration to our social networks. 

As customers, we expect, nay, demand, to be heard. 

We’re the “little emperors” of the online world, and god help 

you if you ignore us. 

Ruby Newell-Legner claims that on average it takes 12 

positive experiences to counter 1 unresolved negative 

experience. 1 

This tells us two things... 

Firstly, that negative experiences should be avoided at all 

costs. 

Secondly, that customers expect companies to listen. 

Note the key word in Ruby’s claim: “unresolved”. It isn’t 

merely the negative experience which weighs on our 

customer’s mind, it’s the thread being left dangled in the air. 

It’s that feeling of being ignored that really grinds on us. 


Let’s put it a different way. Have you ever sent a co-worker 

an email, expecting a prompt reply? When that reply didn’t 

come, how did that make you feel? You probably felt a little 

frustrated, maybe even irrationally angry. How dare they 

ignore you? 

With the advent of cloud technologies and agile development 

process, this new dawn of connection with the customer 

base is now highly relevant to B2B SaaS organizations. 

Eons ago we would ship CD-ROMs (remember those?) with 

patches and releases that were months in the planning. Now 

updates can be rolled to a live environment within hours. 

This is a paradigm shift and one that presents many exciting 

opportunities and challenges for SaaS businesses to really 


satisfy the pain points of their current and future customer 

base. 

Customers now expect a quick reaction to our queries. When 

they submit a request for a certain feature, they’re spending 

their hard-earned time to help you make a better product. 

If you ignore that request, if you bury your head in the sand, 

then they’ll go elsewhere. 

If you don’t care about the customer, the customer 

won’t care about you. 

And the best way, bar none, to show the customer you care 

is to listen to them. Pay attention to their needs and wants, 

dig deeper and uncover their actual pain points, and then use 

those insights to build a kickass product. 

Customers have the power to make or break companies. With 

140 characters they can wreak havoc or sing your praises. 

It’s not just Twitter. They can use Facebook, contact forms, 

email, forums, face-to-face, letters, Reddit, petitions, and 

famously even songs 2 , to get their message across. 

If you don’t at least take customer feedback on board, then 

you’re annoying the very people you’re trying to please. 

Besides, if you ignore their feature requests, feedback, and 

ideas then you’re missing out on a mountain of gloriously 

useful information about what to build in order to drive the 

growth of your business. 


But if you open your ears, and point them in the direction of 

your customers, then you can start listening. You can hear 

what they have to say, and not only that, you can act on 

what they say. 

You have two ears for listening, and one mouth for 

communicating. 

It’s better for you, it’s better for them, it’s better for 

everyone. 

Welcome to the age of the consumer. Please watch your 

step. 



Ignore Customer Feedback At Your 

Peril 

As mentioned in the previous section, ignoring your 

customers makes them angry. In fact, research from 

Conversocial found that around 25% of customers would 

cease doing business with a company altogether if they 

were ignored on social media. 3 

Can you really afford to lose a quarter of your business? Most 

people certainly couldn’t! 

But one company, way back in 2011, must’ve thought they 

could. Their name? Netflix. 

Now one of the biggest video services in the world, spawning 

much loved shows and even becoming part of the global 

lexicon (Netflix and chill, anyone?), Netflix are a bit of an 

institution. 


That’s what makes this story all the more surprising and all 

the more educational for SaaS organizations. 

In the Summer of 2011, Netflix rather abruptly announced 

that they would split up the two sides of their product, DVD 

rental and live-streaming. 4 

They also decided it was a good idea to hike up their prices. 

This was perceived as a personal attack on their poor old 

customers, who just wanted to watch a film. 

“Surely,” we hear you cry, “Surely they listened to what their 

customers had to say on the matter?” 

But this was the murky waters of 2011, when companies 

hadn’t quite yet realised how mobilized and responsive their 

customers were. 

By September, Netflix lost around 800,000 subscribers 

(‘churn’ is an understatement) and their stocks plummeted 

to a fifth of what they were pre-announcement. 

It was, quite plainly, an unmitigated disaster. 

And the worst thing? They were warned. 

As it turned out, Netflix started off on the right foot and 

conducted a lot of focus groups, gathering as much 

customer feedback as they possibly could. They did the hard 

bit. All they had to do was listen to what they were being told. 

As we now know, they didn’t. 


And the whole debacle was brought to a depressing end, as 

they appeared on a list of “The Ten Most Hated Companies In 

America”. 

This is really frustrating. They opened their ears but they 

didn’t listen. They only pretended to listen. 

26% of the customer conversations which were analyzed 

suggested that they would be cancelling their subscription 

should the proposed changes be rolled out. 

The writing was on the wall. Netflix’s customers were 

warning them. They told them not to do it. And yet they went 

and did it anyway. 

They blatantly ignored their customers, and they paid the 

price. 

Let this be a lesson to you. 

Always consider what your customers have to say. 



The Biggest SaaS Companies Are The 

Ones Who Listen 

Of course, Netflix’s story has a happy ending. 

They are currently bossing the on-demand video streaming 

industry. Reports suggest a value of roughly $33 billion. 5 For 

context, the U.S. network CBS has a value of almost $31 

billion. 

Netflix has sailed straight through the storm of 2011 to beat 

the major networks at their own game. Impressive is an 

understatement. 

Now, you may be forgiven for wondering why we bothered 

warning you in the previous section. Sure, they had a blip, 

but Netflix came through in the end. What’s the problem? 

The issue is that a lot of companies wouldn’t be able to 

survive that sort of fall from grace. We guarantee that 99% of 

SaaS businesses would simply collapse in those 

circumstances. 

That’s the bad news. 

The good news is that you can avoid the mistake that Netflix 

made. 

Would you like to know how Netflix turned their fortunes 

around? How did they reach the shore with their ship still 

intact? 


The simple explanation is that they started listening to 

their customers. 6 

First on the to-do list: An apology. CEO Reed Hastings 

publicly apologized for the whole mess, confessing that he’d 

grown over-confident as a result of Netflix’s prior successes. 

This helped to defrost some of the animosity between Netflix 

and its customers. 

Next, they started improving the product, with the 

customers’ pain points in mind. Their core product offering 

started to improve and improve, with a wealth of new 

features added. The key to this process was listening to what 

customers wanted, seeing if it fitted into their strategy, and 

then building it. 


Perhaps, though, the biggest reason for the success that 

Netflix now enjoys is that they started producing original 

content. 

We’ve all heard of their flagship productions: House Of Cards, 

Orange Is The New Black, Stranger Things. 

What you might not have heard is how House Of Cards (and 

the shows which followed) were even conceived. 7 

Think of all the data Netflix collects from its customers. They 

can see everything we watch, how long we watch it for, the 

ratings we assign, and then split it up by a range of 

demographics such as age, gender and location. They know 

that if you like this one show, you’ll like this other show. 

They know a lot. 

And they decided that they could use this goldmine of 

information to figure out what their customers enjoyed 

watching the most, and, more importantly, what they would 

want to watch most in future. 

Netflix took a massive risk and decided to produce a whole 

television show that they figured their customers would 

enjoy, purely based on the data they’d gathered. 

They took the time to ‘listen’ to the data from their 

customers and they used that to inform their product - in 

this case an original TV production. 

You could argue that Netflix’s original content is the primary 

reason for their climb to the top. Their competitors can 

stream other films and other TV shows, and they have made 


inroads to producing their own content, but only Netflix have 

these much-loved shows. 

The moral of Netflix’s story is that there are huge rewards to 

be gained by collecting, measuring and understanding 

demand data from your customers. 

If you currently feel like you’re Netflix in 2011, the good news 

is that there’s still time to turn things around. 

And you start by listening to some guy from Ancient 

Greece… 



Part 2 

Two Ears, One Mouth 

How To Listen To Your Customers 

Those Greek philosophers were a pretty smart bunch. One 

such philosopher, Epictetus, was a stoic. 8 He believed that 

external events were out of our control, but that our internal 

actions could be guided by self-discipline. 

This seems to make a lot of sense but we probably wouldn’t 

invite him to our office party. 

Technically, we should credit Epictetus for the title of this 

book and, not at all coincidentally, the title of this part of the 

book. 

It was our favorite Greek philosopher who said: “We have two 

ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as 

we speak. 9 

This is a beautifully simple quote that perfectly illustrates 

what we’re trying to say with this book. 


“ 

We have two ears and one 

mouth so that we can listen 

twice as much as we speak. 

- Epictetus

Were he around today, Epictetus would be a kickass 

product manager because he realized the importance of 

listening. 

But before you delve into the depths of customer feedback, 

you need the tools to find your way. As we’ve mentioned 

previously, there are so many feedback channels available to 

your customers. This can make it incredibly difficult to gather 

it all in one place. 

Most companies will have a feedback form either on their 

website or built directly into their product. Other methods 

include sending out surveys or asking customers 

face-to-face. 

All of the above systems will work for collecting customer 

feedback. 

Have your feedback form ready to go and point customers to 

it when you feel they have valuable feedback to give. Make 

sure your customer-facing teams are always on the lookout 

for any useful feedback which they can submit on the 

customer’s behalf. 

As a SaaS organization, you have a great opportunity to give 

your customers an open channel so they can add and 

prioritize their requests whenever they like. Let’s face it - 

everyone changes their mind from time to time. 


The little niggles you can pick up through an open channel, 

that otherwise would go ignored, can be extremely helpful 

and lead to a lot of quick wins from the word “go”. 

Of course, taking in all this information is one thing, but 

storing and managing it is another thing entirely. In fact, 

storing customer feedback is one of the biggest challenges 

that SaaS companies face, and it’s best to make sure your 

system is in place before you’re inundated. 

If your feedback tools are your ears, then your storage 

system is your memory. 

Imagine if you had to spend your day listening to people 

without any memory devoted to what they say. Chances are 

you’d end up relatively confused. 

It’s the same with 

customer feedback. You 

need to collate your 

information in one easily 

accessible place. 

Where you keep it depends 

on your preference. Some 

companies will create a 

spreadsheet and log the 

feedback in there. Others 

create a Trello board with lists of potential features to build. 


Some use a system like Receptive where customers can add, 

vote for, and prioritize their requests ongoing. 

The main things to consider are how easy it is to update 

with new feedback, how easy it is to organize and 

manipulate the information, and how accessible it is to 

everyone in your company. 

If you can implement a system that scores highly on those 

criteria, then you’re good to go. 

And always, always, always, remember Epictetus and his 

sage advice. 

Lesson 1 - Centralize your data. Map all the places you 

gather demand from your customer base and ensure it’s 

flowing into a single system. Educate your teams so they 

know what to do when they receive a customer request. 

Lesson 2 - Consider opening a channel for customer 

requests within your SaaS product to capture the 

day-to-day annoyances that can collectively transform 

how your customers feel about your product. 



Who’s Responsible For Customer 

Feedback? 

The simple answer is: everyone. 

In the past, customer feedback has been the domain of 

customer support and account management teams. This 

makes a lot of sense; they’re the ones on the frontline after 

all. 

But where this falls flat is communication. The customer 

support team can’t do a thing with a customer’s feature 

request. So when it comes in, they then have to somehow 

pass on the message to the product teams. 

Unfortunately, a lot of the time things get lost in 

translation, or even just lost altogether. 

This is, of course, a huge problem because you’re missing out 

on data which will potentially transform your product 

roadmaps and your organization’s growth trajectory. 

It can lead to a lot of missed ideas and insights that could be 

extremely important when it comes to designing an effective 

product roadmap. Not to mention the fact that your 

customers will feel like they’re being ignored. As you should 

already know by now, that is a big no-no. 

There’s also another issue. 


Sometimes members of teams other than customer support 

will receive customer feedback in some form. If they don’t 

have access to the feedback system, then the information is 

essentially falling on deaf ears. 

They need to be able to input the feedback into the system 

themselves rather than pass it on to another team. 

The obvious solution here is to brief everyone in your 

company on customer feedback. Make sure they know 

the procedure you’ve put in place, how to receive 

feedback, how to submit it, how to act on it. 

You could even give them a copy of this book... (Nudge 

nudge, wink wink!) 

If you don’t have all of your internal teams on board with 

customer feedback, then it’s an uphill battle. 

Think about the lifecycle of a feature request. 

It starts with a customer inputting their feedback into your 

form. Next, that request needs to be processed and put into 

your system. The product teams then need to see whether 

it’s worth building or not and they need to review whether or 

not the request fits the organization’s strategy. Finally, you 

need to close the communication loop and make sure your 

customer is up to date with their feedback. 


Now think of all the gaps in that cycle that need to be 

plugged. At any stage, information can be lost or forgotten. 

Feature requests can be reworded or instantly rejected. 

There’s a lot that can go wrong. 

For the customer feedback cycle to work perfectly, you 

need to ensure everyone knows what their part is. They 

need to know the bigger picture. 

By involving your internal teams with all stages of the 

process, you can streamline and improve the efficiency. 

You’re able to gather multiple points of view on feature 

requests, ideas, feedback and general insights. 

Customer facing teams, such as Customer Success, Support 

and Sales, will be in the know about which features are in the 

process of being built and can communicate that to existing 

and potential customers too. 

To remove the problem of shoulder tapping - whereby other 

team members are constantly asking their product manager 

for the latest information - you can share a high-level 

roadmap and a release log which everyone in your 

organization has access to. 

It makes everything so much easier. 

When it comes to customer feedback, it’s best to get all 

hands on deck. 


Lesson 3 - Involve your teams. Adding transparency & 

communication to the process by having one accessible 

place where everyone can view the status of requests, 

understand what is on the roadmap and what has already 

been released will drive your efficiency through the roof. 

Go team! 



If You Ignore Your Customers, Then 

They’ll Ignore You 

POP QUIZ: Can you remember the stat given in the last part 

of this book? 

If you can then congratulations, you get a cookie. If you can’t, 

then let us remind you... 

25% of customers would cease all contact with a brand if 

they were ignored on social media. This figure really is worth 

repeating. 

Customers want to be heard. They demand to be heard. 

But this can be easy to forget when you receive a new idea, 

piece of feedback, or feature request. 

If you aren’t careful, you might receive the request and focus 

on getting that feature built and rolled out without so much 

as a thank you note to the kind customer who spent time 

giving their feedback. We call this the Black Hole. (Ooh! 

Scary!) 

The SaaS world is fast-moving, dynamic, constantly ebbing 

and flowing. You have the ability to roll out new features as 

quickly as you can make your engineering team work….but 

that doesn’t mean you should. 


And in the midst of this whirlwind, your poor little customer 

can be forgotten. 

Whether you choose to explore a customer request in more 

detail, go ahead and add a new feature, or simply decide it’s 

not right for your product, the tragedy of this story is that if 

the customer doesn’t realize you’ve reviewed their request, 

then they may pack up and head elsewhere. 

Sure, you might have shiny new features, but if you’ve lost a 

customer because you don’t communicate well then was it 

really worth it? (The answer is no, if you’re wondering.) 

So, what’s the solution? 


The key is communication. The second part of Epictetus’s 

wisdom involves speaking. We have two ears and one mouth. 

Yes, you should be listening twice as much as you’re 

speaking, but that doesn’t mean you should remain silent. 

You need to maintain an appropriate level of communication 

with any customer who has taken the time to contact you 

until the issue is no longer an open request. 

We call it “closing the feedback loop”, and it’s crucial if you 

want to keep your customers happy. And we’re sure you do. 

You aren’t monsters. 

Now, there are two ways you can go about closing the 

feedback loop: manually or automatically. 

If you do it manually, then you should assign one of your 

customer support team members (or anyone in the know) to 

be in contact with the customer when there is an update on 

one of their requests. 

We aren’t talking about waking up and sending a good 

morning text, that would be overkill. We just mean that 

whenever the status of their feedback changes that you 

should let them know. 

It could be you tell them that you’ve started work on their 

feature. It could be that you’ve fixed a bug they found. It 


could be a polite dismissal of their feature request once it’s 

been reviewed by your product teams. 

For larger, or scaling SaaS organizations it’s best to automate 

this process. When you work at scale it’s much harder to keep 

everyone in the loop. Knowing that updates are sent 

automatically as requests change status is a huge weight off 

your mind. 

Your product and customer-facing teams can act in 

confidence knowing that customers are kept informed every 

step of the way and you can even combine this with a 

personal call for that extra flourish at any time during the 

process. 

But regardless of method, or whether the news is good 

or bad, you need to tell them… they’ll thank you for it. 

Staying silent will damage your company far more than 

giving some bad news. Sure, you might expect a customer to 

be angry if you reject their feature or idea, but at least you’ve 

let them know. We’ve seen over & over again that if you add 

transparency and communication to your feedback process, 

customers don’t actually care if you don’t implement 

everything they’ve been asking for. 

When you were a kid and you made a big, long list for Santa, 

you weren’t disappointed when you woke up on Christmas 

Day and only had some of the toys that you’d asked for. You 


appreciated the fact that you had at least some of them to 

play with. 

The same feelings apply to feedback and feature requests, 

only with no awkward family gatherings or your drunk uncle 

telling borderline offensive jokes. 

A good process gives your customers something really 

valuable - a window into how your product is developing. If 

they can view the status of appropriate features and 

feedback, they are less likely to contact you for updates 

directly. They can understand that even if you aren’t building 

everything they request, you are making progress and 

actively developing your product. 

We’ve all had bad customer feedback experiences, where 

we’ve suggested some improvements or spotted an issue 

only to never hear back from the company. We know how 

that feels. 

The aim here is to avoid your customers ever having to feel 

that way. 

Avoid the Black Hole of Customer Feedback. Keep them 

in the loop. They deserve it. 

Lesson 4 - Put a process in place for keeping your 

customers updated on the status of their feedback. It’s a 

game changer. 



Part 3 

I’m An Actor, Darling 

Where Customer Feedback Goes To Die 

Walt Disney was an amazingly practical man. 10 If something 

needed doing, he’d just do it. Perhaps that’s why Disney are 

where they are today. 

They understand the importance of acting (pun most 

definitely intended). 

Walt once said, “The way to get started is to quit talking and 

begin doing.” 11 

SaaS companies understand this too. Here at Receptive, we 

aim to roll out new features, fixes and content as fast as 

possible. We call it GIFRO (Get It F***ing Rolled Out). 

We could talk and plan things out for ages, but where 

would that get us? Have a strategy, but make sure you 

execute. 


“ 

The way to get started 

is to quit talking and 

begin doing. 

- Walt Disney

The software industry moves fast, as we’ve already 

mentioned, and you need to stay ahead of the curve. 

This makes it all the more shocking when we hear of 

companies who have painstakingly collected feedback, only 

to leave it gathering dust on the shelf. 

Why? 

Why waste time listening if you aren’t going to act on it? 

Netflix’s near-death experience came about as a result of not 

acting. They listened to their customers. They went out and 

they researched the hell out of their proposed changes. But 

then they appeared to have forgotten all about the feedback 

they’d received. They put it on the shelf. 

And because they refused to act on the data, well, we all 

know what happened next. (Unless you’re reading these 

parts in the wrong order, in which case you need to head 

back to Part 1.) 

Netflix are definitely not the only ones guilty of letting 

customer feedback die. It happens all the time. 

There are a lot of reasons why this happens. 

Sometimes you receive feedback but you don’t understand 

it. The answer here is to communicate with the customer. 

Ask them to clarify or explain further. They won’t mind. 


Or maybe the issue is that you have so many feature 

requests scattered all over the place that you don’t know 

what to do with them. The solution is to centralize the data 

and prioritize. (We’ll have more on that later.) 

The final reason could be that you don’t trust your 

customers. You don’t believe that they really know what they 

want, or, on the flipside, you think that you know what they 

want more than they do. 

To that, we simply say to try and step into your customer’s 

shoes and see things from their perspective. (Again, we’ll go 

into more detail later.) 

For now, we want to really drive home the point that 

collecting all this data, from customers, internal teams, 

and the market, is a pointless activity if you aren’t going 

to act on it. 

Parts 1 and 2 of this book mean nothing if you won’t 

implement Part 3. 

Don’t let all of your hard work go to waste. Don’t leave your 

customer feedback to die a horrible death. Don’t hide behind 

the curtain. 

Get up on that stage and act! 


Lesson 5 - Actually go ahead and use all that glorious 

customer demand data, balancing it with demand from 

your internal teams and the market. 



Get Your Priorities Straight 

If you’ve ever been faced with a multitude of different tasks, 

all competing for space on your to-do list, then you’ve 

probably employed some form of system for prioritizing 

those tasks. 

You might rank them by deadline, or maybe the effort 

required, or perhaps the importance of them. 

Organizing things in this way helps you to deal with the 

tasks at hand. 

Likewise, when you’ve opened up your ears and listened to 

what your customers have to say, you’ll likely be left with a 

long list of feature requests, ideas and general feedback. 

Unless you have an army of developers, you can’t possibly 

everything. And even if you did have some sort of developer 

army, you really shouldn’t be building every feature that is 

requested. 

If only there was a way to organize all of these ideas, 

feedback and feature requests…. 

Well, you’re in luck, because there are two ways to do just 

that. 

First up: Prioritization. 


Chances are, your customers would happily want everything 

from your feature backlog, much like a kid in a candy shop. 

But if you ask them to prioritize, then it changes everything. 

(And you also spend a lot less on sweets.) 

If you put in place the opportunity for your customers to 

constantly prioritize features, and re-evaluate those 

priorities, then you have an up-to-date log of what your 

customers truly want. 

As for stakeholders, a lot of discussions aim to unearth some 

sort of miracle framework with which they can prioritize 

feature requests. 

Here’s our two cents… Your stakeholders shouldn’t be 

prioritizing. We know, it’s weird, but bear with us. 


Most of the frameworks heap all the work on one person. We 

know that a lot of Product Managers are superhuman but 

that’s beside the point. 

A Product Manager is one person. And one person can’t 

possibly balance all of the demands from different 

departments. Not to mention that each department will have 

a variety of different individuals, each with their own 

demands and perspectives. It’s exhausting just to write it. 

On top of that, priorities are always changing, sometimes on 

a daily basis. Using these old frameworks results in you 

working with outdated, and possibly irrelevant, data. 

But by allowing everyone (customers, internal teams, the 

market) to constantly update their priorities, you free up a lot 

of time. 

This allows Product Managers to focus on the strategy and 

decision making parts of their job. And we’re willing to bet 

they enjoy that more than burying their heads in boring old 

spreadsheets. 

This brings us onto the second method of organization: 

Segmentation. 

Like an orange, you should be breaking up your customers 

into chunks. Unlike an orange, you shouldn’t be eating them. 


Instead, you should be segmenting your data in order to 

glean insights into what different types of customer want, 

and then use that to work towards your goal. 

Imagine, if you will, that your big goal for the next quarter 

was to gain more Enterprise clients. You could then segment 

the data so that you can only see what you high-paying 

clients want. It follows that if your current Enterprise clients 

want certain features, then prospective Enterprise clients 

will want them too. 

Segmentation enables you to focus in on specific data which 

is relevant to your current goal or strategy. 

Using both prioritization and segmentation to organize 

your data means you can be sure you’re making the best 

decisions. 

Lesson 6 - Reader beware! Lists of feedback and votes for 

feature requests are dangerous. Unless you understand 

priorities, the data can do more harm than good. 

Lesson 7 - When you segment demand data from your 

customers, internal teams and the market you can 

understand what you are building, why you are building it 

and who you are building it for. 



The Guiding Light Of Customer 

Feedback 

When sailors are forced to navigate close to the shore in the 

dark of night, they rely on lighthouses to keep them oriented. 

Without those beacons of light they’d be lost. They might sail 

right by the land or, even worse, end up smashing into the 

jagged rocks. 

It wouldn’t be a pretty sight. 

But an even uglier sight as far as we’re concerned is when a 

company crashes and burns because they’ve failed to use 

customer feedback to the best of their ability. 

Even with the methods of prioritization we discussed in 

the previous section the path isn’t always clear. It can be 

full of hidden rocks waiting to sink your ship if you get too 

close. 

As our painful analogy should make clear, you need a guiding 

light, your own lighthouse, to help you reach the shore. 

But what is that light? How do you find it? 

The key lies with your product and company strategy. (We 

could write a whole separate book on this topic and maybe 

we will…) 


If you don’t have a strong strategy, you have no focus and 

those amazing customer insights you’ve gathered will be 

useless. 

Never forget that customer feedback is one of three inputs 

into your product roadmap. You also have internal demand 

and prospect demand. Any data which is relevant to you 

today may not be tomorrow. 

The underlying reason you make your product is to solve 

your customer's problems, right? They’re the reason you do 

all of this. To please them. 


Your customers are your lighthouse. Let them guide you 

within the framework of your strategy. 

Of course, if you’ve gathered enough customer feedback, 

then you’ve got a pretty good insight into exactly what your 

customers want. 

They’ve literally told you the problems they need to 

solve. 

Sure, some customers want certain features or 

improvements more than others. There won’t always be a 

consensus. But hoarding all of this data in one place enables 

you to easily spot any glaringly obvious pain points. 

You have your light source. Now you just need to focus it. 

And that’s where your judgement comes into play. Don’t 

worry, it’s not as scary a responsibility as it sounds. 

We suspect that most companies reading this will have an 

idea of their target customer. The ideal person who would 

buy your product. Some of you may even have gone all out 

and found a photo of this person. 

If you don’t have a target customer, then think about one of 

the customers you currently have instead. 


As long as you have someone relevant in mind for this 

process, then you’re good to go. 

The trick is to put yourself in their shoes. Become that 

person. And once their shoes fit you perfectly, then ask your 

new persona some questions. 

Why do you want 

that feature? What 

will it help you 

achieve? Which pain 

point does this 

solve? How often will 

I use it? 

Could I do without 

it? Are there other 

features which are more important? 

Seeing things from your ideal customer’s point of view 

will show you the route you need to take. It will focus that 

beam of light, enabling you to traverse those dangerous 

rocks. 

If you’re ever feeling lost, even with all your customer 

feedback, even with all your prioritization, then the solution 

lies with your customers. 

You need to act like your customers to see what they 

really want. 


If you’re ever feeling lost, even with all your customer 

feedback, even with all your prioritization, then the solution 

lies with your strategy. No strategy, no plan, no progress. 

Lesson 8 - Without a strong product and company 

strategy, customer feedback data isn’t very useful. You 

have to know where you are going and why so you know 

which data to explore. 



Part 4 

The Storm Is Clearing 

The end is near. And so we face the final curtain. Or 

something like that. 

Our time together has been short and sweet, and we hope 

you’ve learned a lot about how to utilize customer feedback 

to its maximum potential. 

This final section is going to summarize what you’ve learned 

using the rather obvious analogy of sailing a ship through a 

storm. 

We’ve tried our best not to go too overboard (apologies) with 

the analogy. But we may well have done, so we’re afraid 

you’ll have to live with it. 


Chart Your Course 

Before you set sail across the ocean of customer feedback, 

you need to know where you’re going. 

In this case, your map is your strategy. Once you have a 

strategy in place, you can think about the best method of 

gathering your feedback. 

Think about how you’re going to manage the various 

aspects of it. 

How will you collect the data? How will you store it and 

access it? How will you decide what to act on? How will you 

communicate back to the customer? How will your frontline 

handle customer requests? What is the feedback process 

between different teams? 

If you know the answers to all of these questions, then you’re 

good to go and the customer feedback ocean won’t seem 

half as scary. 

But steady on Captain, you aren’t quite ready to set sail just 

yet. 


Gather Your Crew 

For a ship as big as yours, and an ocean as dangerous as this, 

you need a strong crew. 

Remember that customer feedback is everybody’s 

responsibility. 

Every member of every team should realistically be able to 

access your customer feedback system, understand the 

processes involved, and be able to chip in where necessary. 

As a wise sea urchin once said, your ship is only as good as 

your crew. 

Once you get your internal teams on board, all hands on 

deck, then you’re finally ready to set off into the great 

unknown. 


Set Sail 

Okay, we’re finally here. The exciting bit. 

This is where you start collecting your customer 

feedback, acting on it, and communicating back to your 

customers. 

This is where you set sail. 

You’ll be standing at the wheel, watching as your crew man 

the sails. We’ll be stood at the harbor tearfully waving you 

goodbye. 

You know that you need to listen to what your customers 

have to say. You know that you need to prioritize your 

feedback and feature request lists. You know that you have 

to maintain open lines of communication at all times. 

You’ve got this. 

And so, as you sail off into the sunset, becoming a distant 

dot on the horizon, you’re ready to rock customer feedback 

like never before. 

Good luck on your journey, Columbus, and don’t forget to 

send us a postcard… 


Lesson 9 - Never stop learning. Head over to our 

Resources section to learn more about Product Demand 

Intelligence. 


Bibliography 

1: How long does one bad experience last in a customer’s mind? - 

http://bit.ly/2m8dvQR 

2: United Breaks Guitars - http://bit.ly/1p6Adjq 

3: Conversocial Study - http://bit.ly/2lyCQR1 

4: Netflix’s Lost Year - http://cnet.co/2mdbl2S 

5: Is Netflix Worth More Than CBS? - http://bit.ly/1OjtPC3 

6: How Netflix Rose From The Ashes - http://bit.ly/2lTgiNx 

7: How Netflix Uses Analytics - http://bit.ly/1f3HthQ 

8: Epictetus, Wikipedia Entry - http://bit.ly/2k9UmLn 

9: Epictetus Quote - http://bit.ly/2m80zub 

10: Walt Disney, Wikipedia Entry - http://bit.ly/1ha7YTE 

11: Walt Disney Quote - http://bit.ly/2mEEyBk 

A: Netflix Logo - http://bit.ly/2mnfjmz 

B: Reed Hastings Image - http://bit.ly/2miD7H8 

C: Epictetus Image - http://bit.ly/2nvQrZK 

D: Walt Disney Image - http://bit.ly/2nl9YwZ 


About Receptive 

Receptive are the leaders in Product Demand Intelligence 

enabling companies to make data-driven product decisions 

by translating demand from customers, internal teams and 

the market into actionable insights. 

If you're interested in finding out how you can use Receptive 

for your own business, then please get in touch to arrange a 

demo or start a trial. 

Head over to our website and get started right away! 

https://receptive.io/ 


About The Author 

Joe Daniels is the lead Content Strategist at Receptive, 

having joined the company in February 2017. 

This book is the first piece of long-form content he's created 

for Receptive so be nice. 

Joe regularly blogs on both Receptive's site and his own 

Medium profile. 

You can find him skulking around on Twitter (@receptivejoe) 

so feel free to follow him and tweet your thoughts on his first 

swim in the ocean of SaaS.

TWO EARS ONE MOUTH

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