Which Customers Should You Ask for Product Feedback?

Leslie Barrett is Senior Director of Customer Marketing and Evangelism at Sendoso and author of the ebook ‘Unlock Growth with ABCM’. 

She’s a pro at listening to her customers and creating experiences that engage, retain, and expand, while building trust. A pressing topic for marketers in 2023 as the cost of new customer acquisition continues to soar and marketers are challenged to ‘do more with less’. 

Leslie was one of the experts we interviewed for our guide How to Capture the Voice of your Customer with Video. Here she shares her extended, expert advice on which customer voices to capture, where to capture them and why she thinks they should be shared ‘everywhere’. 

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Each customer segment provides unique insights and value

Gathering all customer voices provides a holistic view of the customer journey and enables marketers to make these data driven decisions to improve the overall customer satisfaction. 

Old customers offer a wealth of knowledge and information about their experiences with your brand over time. They can provide awesome insights into areas of improvement and how to maintain strong relationships. 

New customers can bring a fresh perspective on first impressions. Their feedback is pretty critical to understanding the initial interactions customers have with your brand and the onboarding process. 

Feedback from unhappy customers, although challenging to hear, offers vital opportunities for improvement. By addressing their concerns and resolving their issues, you can really enhance customer experience, retain customers and prevent negative experiences for any of your other customers.

Then there’s happy customers, and if you don't know why we should capture happy customers, then I can't help you!

I have found five touch points to capture voice of the customer

1. I love surveys. I start with a closed one survey to ask them: “How is the sales experience”, then on to onboarding, and then NPS surveys. I get a lot of insights with those surveys.

2. In app feedback. You can always ask them: “How is this experience for you? How is the UI? I love that feedback because it's in real time.

3. Customer support interactions. I think that's often a missed opportunity. Typically customer marketers are too busy to dig into customer support questions, but I think there's like really valuable nuggets that you can find there. 

4. Online reviews. As customer marketers, we definitely pay attention to those and pro tip - always respond to positive and negative reviews, because people are watching!

5. Beta testers. Conduct beta testing sessions with a select group of customers and the product team. Their feedback will provide these qualitative insights and help identify the areas of friction or confusion that the rest of your customer base would have. So you can prevent that from happening again. 

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My top tip for customers new to voice of the customer analysis is to categorize your feedback

Create categories, or themes, based on common topics or issues mentioned by customers. It can be done manually, but I take the information (from our NPS, for example) and map out fields in Salesforce and tag them with an overall theme. So when we run those Salesforce reports, we're able to see: “There’s dissatisfaction in this area, but everybody loves this. So let's double down on that!” 

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Voice of the customer findings should be shared everywhere 

Everywhere you can think of! It should be shared both internally and externally, to optimize or maximize the voice of the customer's impact and drive improvements.  Share it with your executive team, your product team and your development teams. 

Educate marketing and sales teams too. This knowledge can really guide their messaging positioning and strategies. So share, share, share all day!

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If you’re new to voice of the customer, start small 

Begin by implementing a simple feedback mechanism, like a short survey or a feedback form at a key touch point. Then gradually expand your collection efforts to other touch points and channels over time.

Then start to leverage some technology and automation so it can do some of the work for you. That can really help streamline the process of gathering and analyzing the voice of the customer.

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For more expert tips on How to Capture the Voice of your Customer with Video, check out our free guide. As well as Leslie, there’s advice from Customer Advocacy experts like Ari Hoffman as well as marketing thought leaders like Devin Reed and Katelyn Bourgoin. Plus question and email templates you can steal to get your VoC program up and running sooner. 
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