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Good businesses talk to their customers. Great businesses listen to their customers. Exceptional businesses put their customers’ wants and needs at the centre of their operations. Let’s talk about how to do that.
I recently wrote about the Scalable Feedback Engine, which outlines how to build a set of systems and processes that you can use to collect customer feedback in a leveraged way as what you’re building grows.
In that post, I didn’t get too much into the how behind gathering that feedback from customers. This post is about that. Put the two pieces together, and you’ve got a bit of a blueprint for using customer insights to fuel sustainable innovation.
I also plan to create a guided tool to help builders create their own bespoke Scalable Feedback Engine, and that should drop sometime in August. Stay tuned.
For now, let’s talk about gathering feedback.
You’ll notice that at the bottom of each Substack post, I have a little blurb asking for feedback to help me improve The Journey, and a link to submit feedback anonymously. Thank you to the few dozen people who have taken a minute to tell me what you thought—I’m walking the walk, and many of the format changes to The Journey have been inspired by what you had to say. This is just one small part of my own Scalable Feedback Engine.
You need to start by asking questions, and giving your customers an opportunity to provide feedback in a way that’s low-friction. But, what questions should you ask?
That’s where many builders get stuck when they first start out with feedback collection. Answering the question gets a bit easier when you link it back to your purpose. “Purpose” itself is an extremely scalable word inside the context of building something, and I love that.
“Purpose” can mean organizational purpose—collectively, what are you trying to accomplish? What’s the organization’s reason for existing?
It can also mean the purpose of a divisional/team-based/administrative unit within an organization. Why does that group exist, and what is it in service to do?
And, “purpose” also has a personal context when building something. What’s your individual purpose, and what are you in service to when you’re building?
If this seems a bit fuzzy around the edges—it’s about to get clearer, I promise you.
Using Context-Based Purpose to Anchor Feedback
When you’re creating a feedback mechanism, consider who the feedback is for, and what their purpose is.
Is the stakeholder the leader of a team of delivery drivers? And is that leader’s purpose to help the team provide the best possible delivery experience for customers?
Is the stakeholder a product designer, and is their purpose to craft the most utilitarian kitchen countertop units that they can so that customers have a better tomato-dicing experience?
Is the stakeholder a sales leader, and is their purpose to align the value which their organization provides with how their people are managing the deal pipeline with prospects?
Each of these cases are very different on the surface, but all have this in common : there’s a stakeholder who has a purpose.
Stay Focused, Damnit.
When building surveys and similar inputs for the first time (or the fifteenth), many people prepare a collection of wide-ranging questions which aren’t that related and are broadly phrased. The thinking is to simplify the execution of the survey and cast a wide net—in the hopes that they figure out what they were looking for through the insightful answers they receive to their vague questions. One survey to rule them all.
It makes sense, but it’s also a recipe for failure.
People aren’t wired that way—it’s unlikely that they’ll completely engage with broad questions and reason through them using second-order thinking. Ultimately, you want to get to the good stuff, right?
You need to help your intended audience surface that good stuff, from their individual experiences. They’re already committing their time to respond to your questions, don’t make it harder for them to do that with overly broad, generic inquiry or a lack of direction.
Rather than create one generic survey and distribute it out through all of your touchpoints with customers, it’s often more effective to create different surveys with different stakeholder/purpose pairings in mind and distribute them through the most relevant touchpoints that you have. In this game, automation rules—build once, deploy once, analyze often.
Is the stakeholder the leader of a team of delivery drivers? And is that leader’s purpose to help the team provide the best possible delivery experience for customers?
DO THIS : Include a QR code or link to a survey about the delivery experience on the packing slip or invoice that accompanies the delivery.
NOT THAT : Ask a customer how the shopping experience was as one question of many in a generic marketing survey sent to an email list twice a year.
Is the stakeholder a product designer, and is their purpose to craft the most utilitarian kitchen countertop units that they can so that customers have a better tomato-dicing experience?
DO THIS : Go hit the sidewalk and ask twenty-five complete strangers what they love most about their own [piece of furniture which you’re designing] and what they hate most about it. I wrote about how to do this in The Customer-Centric Method.
NOT THAT : Ask a customer to describe their perfect [piece of furniture which you’re designing] in an email to a generic newsletter list.
Is the stakeholder a sales leader, and is their purpose to align the value which their organization provides with how their people are managing the deal pipeline with prospects?
DO THIS : Prepare an email survey for your ten longest-standing customers and your ten newest customers. Ask them to list the top three pain points that your organization solves for them (or the top three gain points it awards to them).
NOT THAT : Include a link to a Net Promoter Score survey in your email signature.
Each NOT THAT example describes a touchpoint and feedback mechanism that can work. However, there’s inherent misalignment with the purpose of the stakeholder and it ultimately won’t help them as much as it should have.
That’s the starting point for generating great insights—align the purpose of the stakeholder with the questions being asked, and the touchpoints being used to ask them.
Need some ideas on what to use as a touchpoint? Grab my Big Ol’ List of Feedback Touchpoints absolutely free. And no, you don’t need to put in an email address for access—it’s a Google Doc =)
Let’s Talk About Incentives
Your most loyal fans and customer advocates will put in the effort to give you feedback when you ask for it, because of the relationship that you’ve built with them and the alignment of their values with yours. Same goes for clients in service-based relationships.
This will only take you so far though—that goodwill isn’t infinite.
It’s also a bit insular, in that you’ll only get feedback from those closest to you. That can be like putting blinders on… you’ll be able to move forward, but you’ll miss things in your peripheral that might be important.
So, you need to find a way to motivate the customers and clients whom you don’t have a perfect 10 relationship with to also contribute to your efforts.
Cash transfers and gifts cards are commonplace, but that can get costly.
Ultimately, you want to offer something of value to encourage participation—and you have license to get creative with it.
Are you an indie game developer? Offer an exclusive skin for one of your characters, or an achievement badge for their Steam profile.
Do you run a coffee shop? Offer a complimentary fuel-up week—free cup of coffee for a week if they show you the survey confirmation email. Bonus points if the free cuppa is a new blend or supplier you’re piloting (2-for-1 feedback).*
Do you have an eCommerce business? Offer points for your loyalty or VIP program (if you don’t have one of those, this is one of many great reasons to start one).
… the point is that you don’t have to spend cash outright to incentivize folks to give good feedback. You’re in business, and you’re already convincing customers to trade their money for your value. Just extend that experience with a bit more value in exchange for what they think and feel about it.
Establishing a Heartbeat for Innovation
The most thoughtful, well-planned, well-executed survey program with the most amazing insights is completely devoid of value and meaning if the flow of information grinds to a halt in some report or dashboard that no one ever looks at.
Well, duh.
Perfectly obvious, right? You might be surprised by how normal this is though—one person in one team has a mandate to do this type of work, and their responsibility stops at creating a report or a deck. The challenge with that is that the accountability chain also breaks at the handoff of that report (or message, or email, or whatever).
It’s much more effective to have a champion for the voice of the customer embedded within the stakeholder group (for example, a marketing person within a marketing team doing marketing-focused customer research). But, that’s a luxury for larger organizations with significant resources.
For smaller organizations or ones that are cross-functional in nature (“flat”), an Innovation Heartbeat can bring in the same benefits with less overhead in staff time (and stronger accountability links).
Innovation Heartbeat?
A pulse for how things work with respect to gathering customer feedback. Just like the heartbeat of a living being, there are two pulses of energy :
An input, where the feedback is gathered from customers (the heart expands, pulling blood in through the diastole phase)
An output, where select feedback is distributed to key stakeholders in the organization (the heart contracts, sending blood throughout the body in the systole phase)
The beating of a heart works to keep the body healthy through a consistent rhythm of this process. An Innovation Heartbeat inside an organization works the same way.
Consistency and routine build strong habits, and align different stakeholders with the feedback (and insights generated from it).
And, it works for organizations of any size.
Three-person business? Meet as a full team every month (or more) to discuss the feedback that you’ve gathered. If there’s a lot of great stuff, take extra time or book a follow-up. If there’s not a lot of great stuff, run through the overview in five minutes and carry on.
Three-hundred person business? Same pattern, broken down into smaller groups of stakeholders. Identify the stakeholder(s) and purpose(s) that will benefit from the insights, and build a routine around that. Conduct surveying activities at routine intervals that line up with the meeting schedule you establish.
Connecting Insights to Innovation
Generating great new ideas to use to better serve your customers is exhausting work, when only your team is involved in the process. How much time do you devote to brainstorming new ways to improve what you offer? Many don’t devote any, especially once they get busy.
Another problem with relying solely on your internal people resources for innovation is that the burden of knowledge eventually starts to kick your ass. And, you know, you have a dayjob.
Using an Innovation Heartbeat within a Scalable Feedback Engine spreads the work around and opens up a pipeline of fresh ideas and inputs for you to augment the ideas of your team.
Final Thoughts
The sooner you start, the easier it will be to maintain habitual customer insight generation as you grow and evolve. The really important word of the last sentence is habitual. When the collection of feedback and generation of insights from it becomes habitual, it drives the process of innovation—fuel in the tank, so to speak.
Innovation makes you more competitive, and also combats the nasty cycle of commodification—the race to the pricing floor that cripples so many promising builders.
Good businesses talk to their customers. Great businesses listen to their customers. Exceptional businesses put their customers’ wants and needs at the centre of their operations.
Be in true service to your customers, present and future, and you’ll be rewarded.
* When my wife was listening to the podcast edition and the free drip coffee example came up, she told me that if you’re a coffee shop and have a bunch of folks come in for free coffee—make sure that your freshest, best-smelling baked goods that go well with coffee are sitting beside the register. Good thing she’s on my side.
Feedback
Improving The Journey is a journey in itself—and I’d love your help. Share your anonymous feedback here : https://6catalysts.ca/subscribe/the-journey-feedback/
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