At Scale Series: How do you know when to scale your SaaS product feedback process?

The warning signs that your manual process is hindering the growth of your SaaS organization

Hannah Chaplin
Product Coalition

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Most SaaS folk agree and understand the importance of product feedback but just how do you know when it’s time to ditch the giant Trello board, spreadsheets and post-it notes?

I recently listened to a podcast with Beekeeper’s Lisa Starita & our VP Customer Success, Aly Mahan, which briefly touched on this topic. Here’s our top learning from our own experiences and work with hundreds of scaling & Enterprise SaaS organizations:

Thanks to zolakoma, Flickr

tl;dr

The alarm bells to look out for are:

  • You want more product feedback but you can’t handle what you’ve got;
  • Feedback starts to slip through the cracks;
  • Customer feedback is disappearing into a blackhole;
  • It’s someone’s full time job to manage your product feedback;
  • The data you do have is stale and you don’t know who sent it to you or how important it actually is.

So what do you do about it?

  • Create a centralized place for product feedback
  • Invest in a scalable product feedback solution
  • Add communication & transparency to your process
  • Empower your Customer Success & product teams

Alarm bell #1: You want more feedback but can’t handle what you’ve got

Can’t handle that product feedback?

We hear this all. the. time! Product feedback is incredibly important for SaaS companies and most want more…much more….but there’s one huge problem…

They can see their feedback spreadsheets creaking under the strain so there’s no damn way they are going to add even more data.

If your product teams are scared to ask customers & teams for feedback, this is a huge warning sign.

Alarm bell #2: Feedback starts to slip through the cracks

Thanks to Christoph Luehr, Flickr

In the podcast episode, Lisa explained that Beekeeper knew they needed to scale the product feedback process when requests were slipping through the cracks both in the Customer Success and Product teams:

“The early warning signs we saw were things slipping through the cracks…am I getting feedback from customers, putting into the [spreadsheet] and then 3 weeks later, it’s been forgotten about? That’s very, very dangerous.”

Alarm bell #3: Customer feedback is disappearing into a blackhole

Thanks to NASA, Flickr

You can cause huge frustration in your customer base by not closing the feedback loop.

It’s all too easy to send stock answers back to your customers and never communicate back to them about the status of their feedback. Here’s some real responses we have received:

“Thanks for the feedback. We’ll put this in our feedback log. Have a nice day”

“This has been passed onto our product team but we don’t know when we’ll get an update. I’ll see what I can do though.”

These vague and generic answers are a SaaS business go to in a lot of cases and the process does not scale well either.

It leaves the customer feeling like you are happy to take feedback while simultaneously not hearing what they have to say; they cannot see how their feedback has (or hasn’t) been acting on and most importantly, they have no visibility into your product decisions.

This is hugely frustrating for Customer Success and Support too. They are often sandwiched between conversations with the customer and product teams where they are left to deal with the tension, politics and sporadic communications between the two parties.

If you start operating at scale and can no longer easily update your customers & teams, then it’s time to automate the process.

Alarm bell #4: Your spreadsheets, post-its and Trello boards are so out of date it’s not even funny (and managing them is a full time job)

Thanks to kermitfrosch, Flickr

As your customer and employees numbers scale up, look out for products managers or customer success folks getting sucked into manually updating logs of feedback. This is a huge waste of time and even when the spreadsheet is “up-to-date” you can guarantee that:

  • The customers priorities or requirements will have moved on; and
  • Product simply can’t keep everything bang up-to-date.

This creates problems for your teams and your customers. Even if you do have one reference point for your product feedback, it becomes too easy to pass on outdated information to customers.

Customer Success & Support can also waste time chasing product managers for updates — time consuming and annoying for everyone involved.

Lisa summed this up well:

“The business team would set expectations based on information from the product team but that information was actually outdated”

Enough of problems, give me solutions!

Thanks to Matthew Donovan, Flickr

Top tip #1: Create a centralized place for product feedback

Product feedback can end up spread all over the place. Support tickets, JIRA, customer success software, emails, chats… no-one can use the information or communicate back to customers effectively if it takes a day to pull all the information together.

One HUGE win is to centralize that product feedback. Have a “go to” place where all product feedback lives. In the early days, spreadsheets & Trello will do the job but if you are a large SaaS organization, it’s time to invest in a proper solution.

Top tip #2: Invest in a scalable product feedback solution

As mentioned above, this could be a software product but at a minimum, simple process changes between Customer Success and Product Teams can have a positive impact on efficiency when it comes to product feedback from your customer base.

Check out our webinar on this topic: How to proactively handle customer feedback for success

There we explore practical tips in more detail or you can check out my product — Receptive — which solves this problem for large B2B SaaS organizations.

Top tip #3: Add communication & transparency to your process

You need to get rid of the blackhole of product feedback; it’s a nasty experience for everyone. Here’s a few simple things you can do:

  • Communicate back to customers on the status of their requests. We automate this whole process but there’s a lot of ways you can do here (contact me if you want a chat about your specific situation);
  • When you’ve created a centralized place for your product feedback, ensure the product team reviews top requests frequently so you can communicate back to customers / teams interested. At scale you have to automate this communication loop…you can’t individually update hundreds of thousands of users;
  • Think about sharing a high-level roadmap. Giving your teams and customers visibility of where you are heading with your product helps keep the right customers around and sets expectations well. A lot of SaaS companies do this very successfully.

Top tip #4: Empower your Customer Success & product teams

Again, this comes back to process which is key in any large organization. You have to empower your teams by giving them a good process to follow when it comes to product feedback. Think about:

  • Customer experience — what is the product feedback experience like for your customers?
  • Internal teams — how do they share their owns ideas and requests from others?
  • How do you share and communicate product decisions effectively?
  • What level of transparency is right for your organization?
  • How will you use the feedback data you collect to build a product that really drives growth?

Summing it up

Thanks to Jeremy Mikkola, Flickr

Hope this article helps highlight when the time is right to think about when you need to put new processes and software in place to handle customer feedback at scale.

If you’d like to talk to me about this topic privately or as part of my podcast, just email hannah@receptive.io or follow me on Twitter.

Related articles / learn more

The One Thing Trello Can’t Do

Codementor: Feature Prioritization: Receptive.io CEO Hannah Chaplin on Letting Customers Prioritize Features

How Customer Feedback Impacts Your Entire SaaS Org with Lisa Starita, Beekeeper

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