How to share customer feedback with your employees

Sarah Sheikh

Sarah Sheikh,

Head of Customer Success at Front

17 April 20200 min read

Everyone in your company can benefit from hearing what your customers have to say. Here’s how you can share customer feedback with your entire team.

When it comes to customer feedback, our friends at CustomerSure said it well: “If the first mistake is to ask for feedback and do nothing about it, the second mistake is to get valuable customer comments but only let a few people see them.”

I’d argue there’s a third mistake, too: presenting your team summarized customer feedback, without context around who the customer is, why they feel that way, and what level of urgency they have around it.

No matter what team you’re on or how often you work directly with customers, every team in your company can benefit from reading customer feedback directly:

  • Product teams can easily see what’s working and what’s not, so they use it to influence their product roadmap.

  • Sales and marketing teams can get a better idea of what customers love, find customers to reach out to for testimonials or case study interviews.

  • Executive teams can quickly zoom in and feel closer to customer needs, even if they’re not directly in conversation with them on a daily basis.

Here’s how you can present customer feedback throughout your company, so employees from any team — like product, marketing, or sales — have the context they need to understand and build great experiences for your customers.

1. Establish a few outlets to present customer feedback to your team

First things first: you need to establish several processes to get messages in front of everyone’s eyes. I say “several” because that’ll give you a better chance of reaching your whole team. This part can be fun — you get to experiment and see what methods your team likes best.

  • Customer feedback shared inbox: At Front, we have a shared inbox in Front for all our customer NPS surveys, emails to [email protected], and responses on our app from review sites, like Google Play. That way anytime someone submits a survey, sends an email or leaves us a review, we can see it all in one place. Every teammate at Front has access to this inbox, so anyone can see the messages and read what customers have to say.

Having a shared inbox for customer feedback is ideal because it allows everyone to view feedback automatically. As new customer feedback comes in, everyone can see it automatically. When a new teammate joins, all we have to do is give them access to the shared inbox in Front, and they can browse through and read the historical messages, too.

  • Slack channel: Make a #customer-feedback Slack channel where anyone on your team can post messages they’ve gotten from customers. That way, everyone gets in the habit of sharing what customers are saying. When feedback is positive, sharing it encourages people to interact and congratulate each other. When it’s negative, sharing it stimulates internal dialogue around changes that need to be made.

If you’re using Front to manage your email, you can easily send an email to Slack. That way, if you get a really nice message from a customer that you want the rest of the team to see, you can post it to your feedback channel without ever leaving your inbox.

  • Physically post it around the office: Make a bulletin board or a dashboard monitor with top feedback from the week, month, or quarter. Make sure you place it in a heavily trafficked place, like your common room or kitchen, where the whole company can see it. Don’t forget to include space for both praise and criticism — they’re equally important.

  • Your internal wiki or knowledge base: At Front, we use Guru to share internal product and company knowledge with the whole team. When we get a quote from a customer that we have permission to reuse, like “Front saves us all 10 hours a week per person!” then we can post it in Guru for the team to revisit later — in conversations with prospects or marketing collateral, for example.

  • Customer spotlight: Get everyone involved with a customer spotlight! At our weekly All-hands meeting, a teammate on our Customer Success team volunteers to share a story about a customer — it can be one who’s particularly happy, a customer with a new, interesting use case, or even a customer who’s churned. (It’s just as important to learn why it wasn’t the right fit!) This is an easy way to share customer feedback and remind everyone of the people we’re working to help with our product.

2. Organize customer feedback so it’s easy to understand

Next you need to keep your customer feedback organized for your team, so it’s not overwhelming to look through. How you choose to segment your feedback is up to you. If you’re using Outlook or Gmail, you can create labels to do this. We use tags in Front. Here are a few ways we categorize customer messages so that it’s easy to find what we need:

  • Sentiment: You want to group all the happy customers, and all the not-so-happy customers. When someone submits a survey or review, we tag the feedback depending on if it’s positive, negative, or neutral. This makes it easy to see how customers are feeling on any given day at-a-glance.

  • Comments: If the customer left a comment along with their survey score, we apply the “Comments” tag so we know where there are comments to read when we’re in the Customer Feedback inbox.

  • Customer testimonials: If a customer is really happy and provided a testimonial that we might be interested in using in our marketing materials, we can add the tag “Customer stories” or “Customer Quotes”. Our Marketing team has a folder for those tags, so they can browse through easily to find happy customers to speak with.

  • Feature request: If a customer mentions a feature they’d like to see or a bug they need fixed, we can add the tag “Feature request”. Our Product team has a folder of all the messages with this tag, so they can easily see all the requests from any channel in one place. Then they can go in an ask customers for more detail if they need it.

3. Automate the process so it runs on its own

Sharing customer feedback with your team should take minimal effort — the easier, the better. That way, your team doesn’t have to hunt around to find what customers are feeling. To keep everything organized in our customer feedback inbox, we set up rules in Front to automatically tag messages. For example, we add the tags 😎 Delighted Promoter, 😐 Delighted Passive, or 😥 Delighted Detractor, depending on the NPS score a customer gives us. No one has to manually tag new feedback when we receive it. It’s already done for us.

If you’re looking to add another layer of automation to your customer feedback, you can use MonkeyLearn. If you’re using Front, you can connect MonkeyLearn to use machine learning models to instantly tag messages based on advanced triggers like urgency or sentiment.

Why share customer feedback with your whole team?

The impacts of sharing customer feedback with your team are priceless:

  • Customer feedback brings everyone together: When you all feel in touch with the impact you have on customers, you stay united behind a common cause.

  • Customer feedback provides encouragement: It reminds your team of the impact you’re making, and it inspires everyone to keep doing a great job 🙂

Written by Sarah Sheikh

Originally Published: 17 April 2020

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