Tracking Customer Feedback from Account Reviews, Business Reviews, and other conversations

Anastasia Magnitskaia

Hi CS Community! 

Do you have any tips on best ways to track customer feedback from account reviews and overall conversations? 
I am currently conducting a ton of introductory calls and get a lot of feedback from customers on the platform. The comments range from what we do well, specifics on what could be done better, any integrations request and the list goes on. Eventually, I would love to compile the data and highlight  to product or other teams on features that more than 1 customer is asking for. I would also love to share wins across multiple accounts and share it with the team and company. I would love to have a living breathing document where I can track all this internally.  Yes, the goal would probably be getting that data in Salesforce or any other CS platform, but we are not there. 

I appreciate any insights here. Has anyone built this type of spreadsheet that they can share? 

Thank you all! 

Anastasia

Steve Bernstein

Hi Anastasia -- A #VoC (voice of customer) solution should provide this, and I would submit that the optimal way to get feedback is BEFORE the "account review" meetings so that you can get "deep and wide" feedback inside the account, prepare a draft "Joint Success Plan" (JSP) in advance of the business review, and then use the Business Review meeting time that you had schedule to look FORWARD at how you'll work together to address any gaps. Most "Business Reviews" are backward-looking, and trying to get an executive to pay attention and participate is tougher as execs want solutions, not discussions of problems. Also, by committing to being transparent in sharing the aggregated and anonymized feedback in the JSP you will be showing them what their team truly thinks is working well or not, which they clearly want to know.

With a good process that recruits customer participation into your feedback program you'll tend to get 80%+ response rates.  Imagine what you can do with all that trustworthy and representative feedback for your customers and across your company.  I've written extensively on this process in GGR and LinkedIn. 

We've been doing this work with our customers for years, so our blog is loaded with best-practice articles on several key "customer engagement and feedback" topics, including several on how to boost response rates at https://waypointgroup.org/resources/?search_phrase=participation

More targeted articles, depending on how deep you want to go:

1. Blog: https://waypointgroup.org/stop-chasing-renewals-heres-how-to-keep-customers-engaged-so-renewals-and-more-will-just-come/
2. Whitepaper: https://waypointgroup.org/whitepapers/silver-bullet-customer-health-scoring/
3. Book: https://www.amazon.com/Failure-Sucks-More-Your-Customers/dp/1500201227

BTW, here's a thread around VoC platforms: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6633386572358258688/
A good platform here will integrate with your Salesforce.Com system to drive the timing of the feedback requests to the right people so you can see customer sentiment at key "moments of truth" (e.g. after onboarding, at first "value" milestone, months before renewal, after a support interaction, etc.). A good platform needn't be expensive (~$25k or less) and would provide:
1. Account-based visualizations that shows sentiment -- INCLUDING NON-RESPONDERS! (which we know are generally far more toxic even than "detractors!") -- and the "why" behind it based on quantitative (ratings) and qualitative (free text) comments. You should be able to see tracking of the same contacts and accounts over time to be sure they are trending in the right direction.  You'll probably also want the system to have a rules engine that trigger follow-up activities for CSMs based on feedback responses.
2. "1:Many" aggregated reporting analytics (ideally linked to financials) that show which improvements will deliver the "best bang for the buck" across accounts, cohorts, segments.
3. Ability to see feedback directly in Salesforce while also leveraging expertly crafted visualizations that tell the story.

Hope this helps... happy to answer any questions and provide templates or other resources!
/Steve

Tim Gilhooly

Anastasia,
Trello is a pretty good tool to keep track of accounts without a CRM.
Some other tools integrate with Trello to provide reporting on your findings as well.

Harish Maiya

Anastasia,
I presume you collect customer feedback through text (emails, support tickets, surveys) and audio (zoom, calls). For organizing these data, self service tools would be suffice for short term, quick & easy way to get the job done. 

Basic toolset for this would be to use Airtable or G-sheet tables. Orgainise feedback as index categories - such as product features/support issues/pricing/performance/license/dates etc. And group them per account, team and company to have a matrix style table.
For audio feedback,  i believe you have corresponding text (manual/auto) transcript to make data entry possible.

You can use generic templates to help you and generate basic reports from table; per month/quarter or per tier or feedback type. You can add schedule and relation to different sheets as you need. These can be done with low/no added cost and technical expertise.    
To make this extensible, you can later think of adding integration (plug/play - Zapier) to CRM (Salesforce) or CS platform (Gainsight) and triggers for events.

Feel free to ping me if you need more info or help.

Thank you
Harish

Bob London

+1 on this, Steve:

"as execs want solutions, not discussions of problems."

Anastasia Magnitskaia

Hi Harish, 
Follow up question- what generic templates are you referring to specifically that could apply in this use case scenario? 

Thanks so much! 

Harish Maiya

Anastasia,

There are few good open source templates with queries for aggregation of spreadsheet/table data. Depending on sources used, type of data collected and level of complexity, I can suggest relevant ones to you.

Glad to assist you through it.

Thank you