Panel Round-up: Making Feedback Loops Exceptional

Feedback loops are a competitive advantage for any company, regardless of product, industry, or size. Effective feedback loops inform immediate product changes but also inform long-term strategy and roadmap. Executing this requires a culture that values and utilizes feedback, viewing it as a cornerstone for growth and adaptation rather than a box-checking exercise; more about our stance on this topic in the Voice of Customer Maturity model.

At the Support Drive Conference in San Diego, our CEO Varun Sharma had the opportunity to  moderate a panel on building effective feedback loops featuring industry leaders:

• Andrea Silas, VP of Technical Support at Dreamhost
• Desiree Gregory, Director of Global Support at DroneDeploy
• Michael Nguyen, Head of Voice of Customer at Figma

The panel discussion covered how these three experts have mastered the art of feedback loops:

1. Collecting and responding to feedback from various channels
2. Closing the loop internally and with customers
3. Emergence of AI and it’s impact on feedback loops

Watch the full panel here: https://youtu.be/-Ps2DJ5Bgxc

Collecting and Responding to Feedback from Various Channels

Scaling Feedback from Noise to Signal

Andrea’s journey at Dreamhost highlights the shift from rudimentary to sophisticated and actionable insights as a company scales. Initially, customer suggestions were gathered on a basic page, which was fine in the beginning. However, as the company scaled, it became a mess of unstructured noise. Andrea shared,

"Customers want to be part of the decision making. If we don't actively listen and respond, customers feel ignored and might look to your competition."

Dreamhost started implementing structured feedback channels to capture customer input and ensure it's actionable and impactful. The result happier customers who also go out and tell others about the product.

Aligning Feedback with Business Strategy

Desiree Gregory spoke about the delicate balance between catering to customer demands and steering the product vision forward. At DroneDeploy, feedback can sometimes be a double-edged sword, potentially blocking renewals if not addressed or skewing product development in response to a vocal minority. Desiree’s approach is strategic:

"It's crucial to align feedback with overall business direction. It's important to understand whether the feedback that is being requested is something that, one, is that one customer worth us pausing and working on that particular functionality or two, is it something that more of our customers are going to find valuable?"

Building a Culture of Feedback: Integration and Adaptation

Michael highlighted the importance of considering the product-building culture as part of building feedback loops, citing his two experiences at two hypergrowth companies, Asana and Figma. At Asana, the focus was on using customer insights to inform the product roadmap over a longer planning cycle. In contrast, at Figma, the emphasis was on faster feedback loops to maintain constant awareness of customer needs and fuel customer empathy and intuition among product teams. Michael noted,

"You’ve got to understand what the product-building culture is like and tailor the feedback loops to serve that. This means creating systems that provide real-time feedback to product teams, enabling swift actions and decisions that reflect the current needs and experiences of users."

Closing the Loop Internally and with Customers

Conveying Insights Effectively to Internal Teams

Desiree acknowledged the challenges in closing the feedback loop, especially when managing open tickets over several months can hinder performance metrics. Despite their strong marketing engine that promotes new features via emails and podcasts, it can be a struggle to provide updates on specific issues or bugs that affect a subset of customers. While the customer success team manages larger clients' feature requests or bugs, the support team tends to focus on new tasks, making it harder to maintain consistent communication.

"Develop clear channels and protocols for feedback dissemination ensures that valuable customer insights are not lost. For instance, creating cross-functional teams or assigning specific roles for managing feedback can help bridge gaps between customer expectations and product development."

Closing the Loop with Customers

Michael shared his perspectives on the importance of closing the loop with customers because it fulfills the need customers have to be heard and involved. His advice is to try personalized outreach and prove to customers that their voices matter. Michael's team does this by collecting customer emails and user IDs linked to feedback, allowing them to tailor relevant updates to specific users. This data is then shared with product marketing teams, who can send personalized emails saying, "Thank you, we've built what you've asked for," creating stronger relationships and reigniting interest in dormant prospects and builds champions that are willing to invest significant time and energy in your product without compensation."

"Everyone should be personalized email campaigns to close the loop. Investing in this is how you turn customers into champions of your product within their organization."

Integrating Feedback with Product Development

Michael also emphasized the need for traceability from the initial complaint or request to the feature's eventual appearance on the roadmap to close the loop internally. Connecting these dots involves collaboration between product and marketing teams but ultimately enables targeted, personalized communication. Going through the practice of closing the loop with customers yields benefits for internal teams. Michael says start with one release and find a way personalized follow-up no matter how scrappy you need to get. You'll see that this experiment will result in tremendous customer trust and helps drive change with internal expectations for the product team. This is what will help motivate internal teams to invest resources to make closing the loop a new and scalable standard.

Leveraging AI: Impact on Customer Feedback and Feedback Loops

The panel discussion concluded with the hot topic on everyone’s mind, AI. We're at a pivotal moment, where artificial intelligence is poised to revolutionize how companies handle customer feedback. Here’s how each of the panelists are thinking about AI at their orgs.

Utilizing AI to extract Meaningful Data

At Dreamhost, Andrea shared that AI allows support teams to extract meaningful data from various sources and identify trends that aren't immediately apparent in explicit customer requests. By processing over 11,000 customer interactions weekly, Dreamhost uses AI to uncover implicit issues and reduce ticket volumes. This ultimately results in more reliable infrastructure and improved products, ensuring the development process is customer-focused.

Testing Co-pilots to Understand Feedback Quickly

Desiree shared that at DroneDeploy her team is experimenting with AI in multiple ways. One approach integrates an AI-based co-pilot into their product to analyze customer data and provide a feedback platform. They're also using AI to process Jira ticket data and detect patterns in engineering escalations. Further, senior product managers listen to pre-sales call recordings, supported by AI analysis, to directly identify customer pain points.

Creating a "push, pull, and platform" strategy

At Figma Michael uses AI to empower his team to refine feedback loops using a "push, pull, and platform" strategy. By translating raw customer input into digestible statements and user stories, product teams receive insights they can immediately act upon. Nguyen also noted that AI enriches automated alerts, weekly summaries, and segmentation by product team to infer which feedback requires their attention. This approach creates an "ambient awareness" of user needs, allowing Figma to align its roadmap more effectively. Get a deep dive into how Figma is using Enterpret to scale its product feedback loops in this customer story.

Feedback Loops are an art and a science

The key takeaway for the panel is that effective feedback loops are both an art and a science. They require a careful blend of empathy—to truly understand customer needs—and strategic acumen—to integrate these needs into the product lifecycle without compromising the company's vision and trajectory.

Refining the approach to customer feedback is not just about keeping customers satisfied; it's about continuously creating products that resonate with users and stand the test of time. As we move forward, the mastery of these feedback loops will undoubtedly be a defining factor in the success of technology-driven companies.

If you want help building out feedback loops and using feedback as a strategic lever, Enterpret can help! Get in touch with our team.