How to Train Customer Teams to Get Really Useful Feedback

I don’t need to tell you how valuable customer and user feedback can be. As a Product Manager, it’s very much the lifeblood of your product strategy. It feeds your thinking and informs your plans. In short, you need it. Without it you are working blind. 

But getting it isn’t always easy. In fact, we’ve written about that very topic in our article 5 Ways to Get Customer Teams to Share User Feedback. However, even when you have convinced your Customer Teams of the importance of them sending feedback through to the Product Team, and you’ve got them consistently doing it, that doesn’t guarantee that what they send over is the right quality. 

And what do I mean by ‘quality’? 

I mean feedback that actually tells you what the customer is struggling with and what they are trying to achieve. That’s the core of what you need to know if you’re to use it to help inform your product planning. 

Listen, beggars can’t be choosers, I know. If you’ve really struggled to get your customer-facing colleagues to send feedback to you in the past and have finally managed to get a steady flow of something from them, then that is a great result. Well done you. Something is definitely better than nothing. But, what if I told you, I could help you eek out even more valuable insights from the customer-facing people in the organization?  

Sound good? You just need to give them some gentle coaching and guidance. That is what we’re going to cover today – how to train your customer teams to get really useful feedback. 

We will cover:

• Why it’s important to train them
• What does useful product feedback look like? 
• The challenges of getting good feedback from your customer team
• How to train your customer teams to speak to the roadmap 
• How to structure a training session
• How and when to deliver the training
• Examples of good product feedback to show them
• Don’t let them forget! 

You’ll also get a downloadable, editable, ready-made slide deck to use with your teams to deliver this training.

But first…

Why is it important to train your customer teams to get useful feedback?

Because it will make your job easier, faster and more successful. Simple as that.

If what your customer teams submit as feedback from users is the best it can be, it will significantly cut down the amount of time you have to spend deciphering, interpreting and extracting insight from each piece of feedback. 

It’ll require less follow-up questions from you, less digging and delving. If you’ve coached your customer team mates to ask the right questions and capture the right insight, then that is a job you don’t have to do. 

Nearly all the Product Managers we speak to have experienced the same problem at one point or another. A Support rep submits some user feedback to the Product Team which just reads “customer wants a calendar integration”. Sigh. Now you have to send the customer an email, or pick up the phone and ask them why. Why do they think they need a calendar integration? What is it that they think a calendar integration will do for them? Are they hoping to reduce the number of missed appointments? Are they just wanting to cut out the need to manually update their calendar? Or maybe they want everyone else in their family to know about the appointment? What is the problem they need to solve? 

Because it’s only once you know the fundamental problem they have, that you can evaluate the best way to solve it. And yes, that might end up being a calendar integration, but it might equally turn out to be a new push notification or an automated SMS. 

If you don’t uncover the problem to solve for each piece of user feedback, then you’ll end up in what Janna Bastow (our CEO and Co-Founder and inventor of the Now-Next-Later roadmap) calls The Agency Trap. If most of the pieces of feedback your Customer Teams send over are actually feature requests, then you can easily end up building to order. Functioning like a software agency rather than a product-led organization. 

So, to be truly effective as a product company, you’ll want to be finding out the problems your target customers have and solving them in the best possible way. And training your customer teams to get to the heart of the problem, is one of the important ways you can achieve that. 

What does useful product feedback look like?

Before we launch into how to go about this training, let’s decide what the end goal is. What exactly is useful feedback? What does it look like? 

Here are the core principles of useful product feedback.

• It’s clear who the user is and what type of customer they are  
• It explains what the customer is trying to achieve
• A problem or challenge has been articulated
• There’s an understanding of how often this problem is felt
• There’s an indication of how important solving this problem is for the customer
• The situation or context of the customer is noted
• The motivation for getting this task done has been identified

Now, I must caveat that list. That is the absolute dream. If every bit of feedback ticked all of those boxes you would be flat out winning at Product Management and Customer Experience. The reality won’t be quite so perfect… but this gives you something to aim for! 

What it boils down to is this… you want feedback to tell you the customer is trying to achieve, what problem they have encountered and how important solving that problem is to them.  

The challenges of getting ‘good’ feedback from your customer team

Over in our article 5 Ways to Get Customer Teams to Share User Feedback, we covered the reasons why it’s often hard to get any sort of feedback shared by your Customer Teams. But here we’re concerned with the quality of that feedback. 

So why is it hard to get the right kind of feedback from these colleagues? 

The customer is always right

You’ve heard this right? Customer Service or Support reps will have this mantra gently whispering away to them all day long. They’ll have grown up on this principle – it’s ingrained and underpins all their customer interactions. You don’t disagree with the customer, you don’t argue with them!

And, of course, we don’t want them to disagree with the customer! We just want them to delve a little deeper. We want them to help the customer really understand what is at the heart of their request. It’s about not just taking what they’ve said at face value and reporting it back to Product verbatim. 

But this isn’t easy and maybe it doesn’t come naturally to Customer Teams. They aren’t therapists after all. 

It takes longer

Customer-facing colleagues are often super busy (isn’t everyone 🤪), so taking the time to dig deeper can often be something they don’t have the time to do. 

It is far quicker to just make a note of what the customer has said and ping it over to Product. Done job. 

How to train your customer teams to speak to the roadmap 

This is another advantage of having your Customer Teams well versed in delving into the problems underlying their customers’ feedback. 

Let’s say a customer declares that they need a certain feature. Once your customer teammate has successfully taken that request back to the underlying problem they want to solve, now they should be able to talk to the different ways that problem is already being looked at by the Product Team (if it is). 

This is why it’s important to have your roadmap structured around problems to solve. It makes it super easy for a CSM to hear a problem, find said problem on the roadmap and advise the customer of where that sits in the priorities. And maybe even give them some sneaky previews into the different ideas that are being explored as a part of the initiative to solve that problem. 

They can even invite the customer to be part of the discovery or testing of the solution! That will go a long way to making them feel listened to, valued and invested in the product.  

They will have flipped a simple feature request into an exploration of the customer’s struggles or desires at the same time as giving them a window into the scientific workings of the Product discipline, tirelessly working to discover the best solutions. Trust me, the customer will walk away from this feeling impressed. It’s win/win. 

How to structure a training session

By now I think we’re clear on what useful feedback looks like and why it’s important to coach the Customer Teams to be able to deliver it. But how do you actually go about coaching this stuff? How should you explain it to them? What tips and advice can you give to help them coax out the most useful insights? 

Here’s how you should structure your training. 

1. Tell them why it matters
2. Explain what is in it for them
3. Be clear about what the most useful feedback looks like
4. Give them examples of great feedback
5. Outline the questions to ask
6. Show them examples of flipping feature requests into useful feedback

Tell them why it matters

When it comes to training your colleagues around this, the first job is to win their enthusiasm for the task. You need to convince them that working to delve deeper into customers’ feedback is worth their time and effort. So start by focusing on winning them over to actually being coached in the first place. If you fail to explain how important this is, in a way that means something to them, then they ain’t gonna be listening all that well. 

Explain what is in it for them

Which is why it’s worth giving them the overall benefits to the organization – providing you the right insights to ensure you can build the most valuable product for your customers and therefore increase retention and acquisition – but ALSO the more immediate benefits that will directly impact them and their job. 

Those might include:

• Better relationships with their customers (thanks to talking for longer, digging deeper and increasing their understanding), making communication easier and interactions happier.
• Being able to deliver more positive news more often – rather than saying ‘no we don’t have that feature’, they can say ‘we’re actually exploring how to solve that problem in a better way’.
• Having to deal with far fewer disappointed customers who expected a feature request to be actioned, but instead understand that their problem is going to be explored.

Be clear about what the most useful feedback looks like

Next, you’ll want to be explicit about what useful feedback looks like. So take the principles we’ve covered above and explain them to your trainee. But don’t just use the theory, make it crystal clear with some concrete examples. 

Give them examples of useful feedback 

Whether you actually find a great example from your real feedback inbox, or you make something up to illustrate the point, make it crystal clear by showing them something concrete. 

Outline the questions to ask

Now they’ve seen what the end goal is, take them through the best ways to get there. Here you need to arm them with a list of questions to help them dig deeper, help the customer unpick what it is they need, and get to the heart of the problem. 

Those questions could be:

• What do you think that feature would do for you?
• Why do you feel you need that particular functionality?
• What is the problem you believe that feature will solve?
• What are you trying to do?
• What is the outcome you want to achieve?

Show them examples of flipping feature requests into useful feedback

This is a top tip from our Head of Product here at ProdPad, Kirsty Kearney-Greig. She has done this with our Customer Teams to great effect. It involves picking out a real piece of feedback that they have submitted to the Product Team and flipping it from less useful feedback to some very valuable insight. 

Having the two interpretations side by side is extremely helpful when it comes to understanding the difference. 

Original piece of feedback:

“The customer wants access to the revenue fields via the API.”

Improved feedback after delving deeper and asking the right questions:

“The customer has a monthly report for the Board that requires them to add their revenue numbers per agent per week. Cutting and pasting them from the Rental Report in our product is taking about 2 hours of their time each month. This is time they don’t have to spare! They were wondering whether they could access the right revenue fields via the API and set up an integration that will automatically feed the data into the Board report. They need a solution that greatly reduces the time they have to spend on this task, if not remove it completely.”

How and when to deliver the training

You can’t just email this around and expect much to change. This is coaching that needs to be delivered face to face (well, face on a screen to face on a screen at least). You want to speak directly to your trainees and be able to see their reaction (so you can respond accordingly). 

Do it properly – use a slide deck

So I would urge you to deliver this training to them formally. By that I mean that you’re explicitly standing in front of them, with a slide deck, at a pre-planned time. Don’t worry, that’s as formal as it needs to get. I’m not suggesting everyone has to wear a suit and keep a straight face. The important thing is that this doesn’t come in the form of a passing comment or two. You need to get across the importance and therefore you should give this training the gravitas it deserves. It will help set the right tone and expectations with the team. 

If the thought of creating a slide deck for this fills you with dread, do not worry! We have you covered. We’ve knocking up a ready-made deck for you to download and use with your team. So all you need to do is book in the time with them.

Get a slot in their regular team meetings

In terms of when to deliver the training, there are a few pointers I can give here. If you can, try and deliver the training to multiple customer-facing colleagues at the same time. And try to ensure their managers and leaders are in the room. It’s a good idea to speak to the commercial leaders beforehand and stress the importance, asking for their support in encouraging their teams to work in this way. 

But, if your customer-facing teams are doing a good job, their calendars will be full with customer or prospect calls. So finding a time in the diaries can be extremely tricky. Therefore, it’s a good idea to get yourself a slot in their existing, regular team meetings – that way you know everyone will be there and you don’t have to struggle with finding a time. 

Or do a roadshow

If even that is proving hard, then you could consider taking your slide deck on the road. Yes this will take up more of your time, but I’m hoping you’re sold on the value this could bring! Slot yourself in with each team member for half an hour and run them through the training. 

Make it part of onboarding

Then, once you’ve gotten around everyone, you’ll need to think about new starters. Here I would suggest you speak to HR or the team leaders and ensure this training becomes a standard part of any new starter onboarding for any customer-facing role. 

Don’t let them forget! 

Once you’ve delivered the training to your customer-facing team mates, don’t dust your hands off and walk away. You need to keep reiterating this message if you stand any chance of it becoming a habit for your colleagues. 

This should be considered as ongoing coaching rather than just one-off training. So whenever you spot a piece of feedback coming from a team mate that falls into the ‘not as useful as it could be’ category, take it to them and give them that feedback in the moment. Work with them on how it could be delved into and the exploratory questions they could have asked.