The SaaS Leader’s Guide to Customer Feedback
In the SaaS world, it’s imperative that you move fast to adapt and build new features. Unfortunately, it can often be difficult to know what you should be building.
This guide is for CEOs, founders, and leaders of SaaS organizations who want to learn how customer feedback can help them make those product decisions.
We’ll cover why feedback is so important and why you should be listening. We’ll explain how you can start gearing your organization up for listening. And we’ll show you how to start taking feedback seriously right away.
This is your chance to unlock serious growth. It starts with you opening your ears…
Why You Need to Listen to your Customers
For some reason, a lot of SaaS companies ignore their customers. They might not even realise they’re doing it.
If, for example, you tell customers that you want their feedback but then dump it all in a spreadsheet or Trello board, then you’re ignoring your customers.
If you collect feedback but don’t act on it, then you’re ignoring your customers.
If you collect feedback but don’t keep them in the loop with status changes, then you’re literally ignoring your customers.
This is puzzling.
There are actually 3 good reasons you should listen to your customers…
Firstly, they’re the ones who actually use your product. Anyone involved with your organization, but especially your product team, simply doesn’t have the same perspective that your customers do.
And because they use the product, they know better than anyone what works and what doesn’t. While they might not know the technical details of how to fix a problem, they can tell you better than anyone what the problem is.
Also, your customers know exactly what they want from your product.
Often, how you think your product should develop and how your customers need the product to develop aren’t the same.
I’m not saying you need to drop everything and do whatever your customers ask but surely it doesn’t hurt to at least hear what they want your product to do.
It’s a balancing act and so if you ignore your customers then you aren’t going to be balancing for very long.
Finally, it shows your customers that you care about them and value their opinions.
The most successful SaaS leaders are those who realize early on that customer retention is one of the most important aspects of their business.
By listening to your customers, you’re developing a close relationship that will ultimately govern whether they stay or leave.
Seeing as customers are less loyal than ever, doing everything you can to keep them is worth the time and effort. Listening to their ideas will ensure they stick around.
SaaS companies who are embracing customer feedback are the ones who are adapting their product to what the market wants. The SaaS world is always evolving and so it’s impossible to achieve product-market fit.
Instead, you have to listen to your customers and always be ready to adapt. In fact, adapting to the market is the one thing that all successful SaaS companies do.
The sooner you start listening, the better position you’ll be in to do that.
Here’s how…
How to Listen to Your Customers
One of the biggest problems SaaS leaders face is making sure their product team has the data they need to make the right decisions.
Gut feeling and guesswork aren’t the way forward. You need to analyze the data and identify your customers’ priorities. You can then use a combination of those priorities and your overall strategy to make a decision.
The trouble with this plan is that without the data you’re left struggling.
So, it falls upon you, the person in charge, to make sure your product team is getting the data it needs.
Luckily for you, it couldn’t be simpler.
Step 1: The Feedback Channel
To state the obvious, if you want to collect feedback, then you’re going to need some way of collecting it.
But chances are your problem isn’t a lack of feedback channels, it’s having too many of them. Social media, support tickets, emails, sales discussions — all of these offer different ways of collecting feedback.
But it’s nearly impossible to keep track of feedback across so many channels. The solution? Just use one.
It could be a dedicated email address, or a spreadsheet that everyone can access. It could be a Trello board, or it could be software like Receptive.
The idea is to provide a link between customers and your product team, so that the product team can analyze and organize the feedback effectively.
This makes it so much easier for them to get the data they need.
And if you are worried about opening a feedback channel to customers, just remember that your organization will be receiving this data already.
A little process fixes all of the issues and frustrations your customers and teams will feel when it comes to product feedback. You can either give customers a channel to give feedback or allow Customer Success or Support to get the information on their behalf.
The process is the same though — set expectations and have a single channel for product feedback so your product teams use the channel as the one source of truth.
Step 2: Getting Everyone on Board
The only way to make this work is to ensure that everyone in your organization knows what’s happening and why it’s important.
If your Success team is putting feedback into a spreadsheet and your Sales team is putting it on a Trello board, then your Product team haven’t got a chance.
It’s the leader’s responsibility to make sure everyone is on the same page.
The easiest way to do this is by writing a Product Feedback Policy.
A PFP is a document that outlines your organization’s approach to product feedback. It tells your customers that you take their ideas seriously, and it helps your employees understand the process that you’ve put in place.
Here’s our own PFP for you to use as a template.
Step 3: Spread the Word
As CEO, part of your job is to act as the company’s mouthpiece. That means you have the power and reach to tell everyone that you want their feedback.
Simply setting up your feedback channel and sitting back won’t yield any results. You’ve got to go out and spread the word.
If you have a blog, then put out a post explaining that feedback is important to you.
Send out an email to your customers explaining how they can submit feedback.
Create a short video of you reiterating your organization’s approach to feedback. (In fact, this personal touch has worked wonders for some of our Receptive users.)
Follow those three steps and you’ll be well on your way. Just make sure you don’t keep putting it off…
You Need to Start Now
A lot of CEOs bury their heads in the sand. They believe that feedback isn’t a priority or that it might end up taking too much time and effort.
If you’re reading this and thinking the same thing, then you aren’t alone. But you’re making a big mistake if you think you can put this off.
There are quite a few myths and false beliefs that CEOs hold true when it comes to feedback. We’ve actually dispelled some of the myths here.
For the purposes of this guide, the most pertinent one is this:
“The current feedback process we have works so we aren’t in a hurry.”
This is a common but dangerous way of thinking. Let me debunk this myth for you.
I’m willing to bet that your current system of feedback is virtually non-existent. You may be half-heartedly collecting it, but are you using it to inform your decisions? Are you keeping customers in the loop?
I’m guessing you’re only doing part of the process. And the parts of the process that you are doing you’ll be doing in a way that won’t scale as your organization grows.
Here’s an example: Let’s imagine you currently have a spreadsheet where you put your feedback. Generally, your Support team will receive tickets with feedback on and they’ll stick them on this spreadsheet.
This is a common scenario at SaaS companies who come to us complaining that it’s not working.
Here’s why this example won’t work…
For starters, your Support team shouldn’t have to manually transfer feedback tickets to another platform. As you scale, that’s going to eat up more and more of their precious time. That’s time you have pay for.
Instead, your customers should be able to access the feedback channel themselves, as and when they have something to say.
Next up, how up-to-date do you think the data in your spreadsheet will be? Probably not very up-to-date at all, right? In fact, it’s probably so old and stale that it’s no use to anyone.
Your product team needs the latest feedback. Make sure you’re giving it to them.
Finally, are you capturing your customers’ priorities? Do you know which features are deal-breakers or which ones are just nice-to-haves? If your customers could choose just one feature to build do you know which one they’d choose?
Your spreadsheet will likely be a long list of feature requests. Product teams call it a product backlog and they hate it. They have no context, no sense of urgency, and no idea what is needed the most.
So when CEOs say that their current system is perfectly fine and there’s no rush, this is why they’re wrong.
The longer you leave it, the more information you’ll miss out on, the shorter the head start you’ll have over your competitors, and the harder it will be to succeed.
You have to start now.
The Next Steps
Hopefully now you realize just how important feedback is to any SaaS organization.
Hopefully now you understand the steps you can take to start taking feedback seriously.
Hopefully now you can see why you need to do this sooner rather than later.
Your next steps should be to plan and put together your process. Work out the tools you’ll use, which employees will be responsible, and put together a Product Feedback Strategy.
Then, start listening. It’s as simple as that.
