5 Ways to Get Customer Teams to Share User Feedback [with free template]

Whether you’re a Product Manager happily working within an established and thriving product culture, or you’re desperately trying to drag your organization towards a product-led, growth mindset (or you’re somewhere in between), I would bet my bottom dollar that you still struggle to get your internal stakeholders and teammates to share the product feedback they hear from customers in an organized way, if at all!

And if you’re losing some of that precious insight from your users, you’re reducing your chances of building a product that meets their needs. Quite literally, you need this feedback from your stakeholders so you can do your job well! 

So, it is super important that you combat this problem of stakeholders not sharing the feedback they’re getting. Luckily, we can help you.

You see, since ProdPad is a tool to (amongst other things) help Product teams easily gather feedback from multiple sources and analyze it to feed the product roadmap, we’ve given this problem A LOT of consideration. One of the fundamental problems we set out to solve here at ProdPad, is how to consistently get feedback from your internal stakeholders and customer teams in an organized way. 

In our endeavors to solve this problem, we’ve spoken to thousands upon thousands of Product Managers over the years. We’ve listened to all the different ways Product teams are successfully getting feedback from their internal stakeholders and we’ve developed a good few tactics ourselves. 

So, we’ve got you. Let me outline our tried and tested tactics for establishing a super smooth flow of feedback from all your internal stakeholders and customer-facing team members. 

Why is it important to get internal stakeholders to share product feedback?

But first, why do you need to bother with this? You speak to your customers and users right? Isn’t that enough? Why do you need to struggle away trying to extract insight from other people in the organization?

Because, wonderful as you are, you can’t possibly gather ALL the feedback yourself. A big part of your role as a Product Manager is to speak directly with the users of your product, listen to their feedback and explore their problems. But you have customer-facing team members in the organization who are engaging with multiple individual users all day, every day. If you’re not tapping into that, you have a big hole. 

As Kirsty Kearney-Greig, our Head of Product here at ProdPad says…

For Kirsty here at ProdPad, it’s especially important that her and her team hear all the feedback coming in from customers, because, without it, there’s a risk that she could become blinded by her own experiences. 

I’ll let her explain…

Without a broad range of customer feedback, from as many different flavors of your user base as possible, you’ll fail to understand the whole gambit of experiences and needs and, as a result, fail to take them into account when you’re prioritizing your roadmap, assessing product ideas and deciding what you build and when.  

The challenges of getting stakeholders to share customer feedback 

Getting your hands on all that great insight your customers are sharing with other colleagues is easier said than done. And that is for a number of reasons. 

1. Everyone is busy

Tell me the last time you managed to get through every single thing on your to-do list, exactly in the order you initially planned it. It doesn’t happen right? And especially if you’re in a reactive, customer-facing role. Hopping from one customer or sales call to another all day long. It’s hard to fit in requests from other colleagues. They will certainly get pushed down the priority list as urgent issues come in from customers or revenue-generating activities need to happen.

You tend to get a lot of “oh, I’ll log that feedback later” – with people planning to come back to it at the end of the day and add all the feedback they’ve heard. That’s high-risk for you as a Product Manager. If ‘share feedback’ becomes an item on a to-do list instead of happening in the moment, then there’s a high chance it gets bumped down the list and might not even happen at all. 

2. It’s your job, not theirs

This sounds harsh, but it’s real life. When customer-facing teams are measured on call volume, response time, resolution time and revenue, they are always going to prioritize the tasks that most immediately impact those metrics. This is another reason that sharing feedback can, all too often, slide down the to-do list, in favor of those activities that relate directly to their own KPIs. 

Obviously, longer term, sharing customer feedback and having that impact the decision-making in Product will ensure the product develops in line with customer needs. That will lead to improved customer satisfaction, fewer sales objections and more revenue. But there’s a longer tail to realizing that benefit, and when you have immediate KPIs to hit, it’s not always front-of-mind. 

Even when you do manage to convince your colleagues to send through feedback to you in the Product team, there are challenges around how that is delivered to you and the format it arrives in. 

3. You’re getting feature requests and product ideas rather than feedback

Does this sound familiar to you? A colleague has spoken to a customer and sends you a message (in whatever format that comes) to tell you ‘the customer wants X feature’. End of message. 

How useful is that to you? Not very. Why do they think they need that feature? What do they think that feature will do for them? What is the problem they are trying to solve? THAT is what you need to know. Because maybe X feature isn’t the best way to solve that problem. Maybe you have a better way of solving the problem already on the roadmap. If not that, then you can at least take that problem and run it through discovery to explore a bunch of possible solutions to find the best and most efficient one. 

If you’re just taking feature requests and building to order, then you are falling into what our Co-Founder and CEO Janna Bastow calls ‘The Agency Trap’. 

If your Customer teams are taking feature requests and telling the customer that they will submit it to the Product team, they are setting the expectation that that exact feature will be considered. This can set everyone up for a fall. It’s much better to delve into the route of the problem, listen to the frustration or need the customer has, and have them feel heard and that a solution will be thought about. But we’ll come to how you help your customer teams flip feature requests into genuine feedback in a moment. 

First let’s talk about the challenge of format….

4. The format is all over the place

If you don’t have an organized and communicated way of submitting feedback to the Product team (and sometimes, even if you do), then you’re no doubt getting it in all sorts of shapes and sizes. 

Ultimately, we would always say that some form of feedback submission is better than none at all. So, at least you’re getting something here. But still, there’s room for improvement if feedback is flying in at you from all angles and in a variety of different states. 

One CSM tends to ping you a message on Slack, another fires off an email to you, a third person always forwards you entire recordings of hour-long customer calls, another mumbles a few sentences at you during a meeting. That creates a lot of work for you to collate it all, turn it into something useful and consistent, before you can even start to analyze what you have. Not ideal. 

5. They’re always asking for progress updates

It is absolutely reasonable that your stakeholders request updates on progress when they share feedback with the Product team. They need to keep their customers informed. But there are ways to make this less of a time drain for you as the Product Manager (and we’ll come to those ‘ways’ a little later on). 

Otherwise you will spend far too much of your time fielding questions and digging around for answers. If every time a CSM has a customer call, they come to you asking for updates on all the feedback that customer has given… and you have to do that for every CSM and every call they have… well, you won’t have a lot of time to do much else! 

Yes, those are the challenges, but how do I overcome them, I hear you shout. 

Fair enough. Let’s get to the solutions…

How to get your internal stakeholders to share feedback with the Product team 

1. Make it super easy to submit

Like we’ve said, everyone is busy, focused on their day job and their primary KPIs. They are all working in their own context and have their own work to do. So, if you want your colleagues from other teams to regularly and routinely share their customer feedback with you, you need to make it fast and convenient to do so. 

Let’s face facts, if you require them to log into a different tool which isn’t their own – not one of the tools they already use day-in, day-out – it ain’t gonna happen. Or at least not as often as you’d like. 

If your Customer teams have to leave their context to share feedback with you, then it’ll almost certainly end up as a to-do list item that they plan to come back to at the end of the day – log in once and get it all done in bulk. We’ve already talked about how infrequently those good intentions actually happen. You don’t want this. 

To get the most feedback from other people in your organization, you want them to quickly and easily fire it over to you in the moment (or, at least, immediately after the moment). If you stand any chance of making that happen, you need to give them fast ways to do so without leaving where they are. 

As Kirsty says,

Luckily we can help you with this. If you use ProdPad as your tool, as the central repository for all your feedback from multiple sources, then you can give your internal stakeholders a veritable plethora of fast and easy ways to share their Feedback with you. 

Those ways include:

• A browser extension
• An email drop box
• Through Slack or MS Teams
• Via an unlimited number of customizable Feedback Portals which can be embedded wherever you need 
• Directly from your CRM (like Salesforce)
• Straight from Support tools (like Intercom or Zendesk)

None of these routes require your stakeholders to log into ProdPad. They can simply send the Feedback in with a quick email or a click on the browser extension, or, with the CRM and Support tool integrations, they don’t need to do anything at all. They can just record the customer interaction as they usually would in their own tool and you can have that automatically route into ProdPad as Feedback. 

2. Let them see it makes a difference

It’s important to show your internal stakeholders that the Feedback they share with you actually contributes to the product planning. Otherwise you risk them thinking it’s a pointless exercise and ceasing to do it! I’ve heard Salespeople (in other companies – obviously not ProdPad!) saying “There’s no point telling Product. They just ignore it.” Don’t let that happen in your organization!

Being open and transparent about your product process. Giving everyone full visibility on your flow and prioritization is the best way to ensure you don’t fall foul of this with your Sales or Customer teams. 

If you currently have all your product planning hiding away in spreadsheets or slide decks you need to speak to us here at ProdPad! Having an easily accessible, always up-to-date home for all your product planning is the best way to ensure full transparency into the process. This will mean everyone in your organization understands how Product work and exactly how Feedback feeds into product ideas and prioritization decisions. 

You can also ensure that your internal stakeholders and Feedback submitters see the specific progress relating to particular pieces of Feedback when you use ProdPad. This is the powerful proof they might need to feel assured that their Feedback does impact the product strategy. 

For example, let’s say Customer Success Sally sent some Feedback in through Slack, advising that her customer was frustrated that she’s not spending as much time using the product as she’d like because she’s traveling a lot at the moment. As a Product Manager, analyzing your Feedback, you spot that ‘use when traveling’ is a theme across a number of customers (because ProdPad’s AI Signals tool has highlighted that for you 😜). So you create a Roadmap Initiative to address this problem – ‘How can we help our customers use our product on the move?’. You come up with a bunch of different Ideas in ProdPad and your AI Assistant automatically links all the related Feedback (including the piece sent in by Customer Success Sally) to the Ideas. 

Next time Sally has a call booked with that customer, she can hop into ProdPad and see a list of all the Feedback she’s submitted. She simply finds this piece and gets an instant update on the workflow stage of the related Idea. She knows, with one click, that you explored three different Ideas, validated a mobile app as the best solution and that mobile app is now in QA testing. What a wonderful update for Sally to deliver to her customer! 

I tell you what, Sally is convinced of the value of sharing Feedback with the Product team. You’ll be enjoying a steady flow of user insight from Sally forever more. 

You might not always be able to show that an individual piece of Feedback has resulted in a corresponding product Idea that hits the roadmap, but you can and should reassure your internal stakeholders that their Feedback contributes to a critical mass of Feedback which feeds the theme analysis. 

Kirsty, our Head of Product, has another top tip to help you convince your stakeholders that their Feedback submissions are important…

3. Make it easy for them to track progress 

We’ve talked about how time draining it can be for you to be constantly dishing out updates to all your customer-facing colleagues. So let’s explore how you can empower them to self-serve this information. 

Because, if they can quickly and easily check up on the Feedback they send through then they’ll be encouraged to keep sending it!

We’re not saying that there shouldn’t be an onus on you as PM to provide these updates, but the right tool can take the weight of this from your shoulders. You then just need to acknowledge receipt of the Feedback and give an indication of what you might do with it, and let the tool help you in terms of smaller incremental updates.

Take the earlier example of Customer Success Sally and the updates she was able to see about the mobile app in QA testing that was linked to her Feedback about using the product while traveling. Sally was able to go into ProdPad, look at her Feedback list and quickly see the workflow stage of the linked Ideas. It looks like this 👇

With ProdPad, you can show all your customer-facing team mates how to set up their Feedback view, customize it to show the information they most care about, and let them hop in here whenever they need an update. You’ve just saved yourself a bunch of time. 

As Kirsty says,

4. Give them clear guidance on what to submit and how

Sometimes people don’t do things because they’re not quite sure how. That’s human nature. So remove all doubt from your colleague’s minds and be crystal clear about what and how to submit Feedback to you. 

We’ve already talked about the propensity to have product Ideas submitted when, in fact, they should have been framed as Feedback, having identified the problem to solve. So, step one here is to give everyone clear guidelines on what is an Idea and what is Feedback. 

Publish, share and socialize those clear guidelines and make sure it’s easily accessible for all your colleagues. Make sure you put it where your Customer teams spend time so they don’t have to hunt around for it.

Consider spreading the word in the following ways:

• Join a Sales meeting and present the guidelines to the team
• Do the same in other customer-facing team meetings
• Post the document on your intranet
• Pin it in relevant Slack or Teams channels (or whatever communication tool you use)
• Email it around
• Find out how to flag it in a prominent place in the CRM, Support tool or whatever tool your customer-facing colleagues use every day

Make sure they are always on hand, so your stakeholders don’t have to hunt around to find it. Because, let’s face it, they won’t. 

What should those guidelines look like? 

Well, we’ve gone ahead and created a template document with a ready-made distinction that you can download and distribute to your team. It’s based on the definitions we use here at ProdPad for our own customer Feedback and product Ideas. We hope you find it useful!

In essence, the distinction looks something like this:

Submit product Feedback if it is about:

1. Improvements on existing features
2. Bugs and issues
3. User experience (UX) enhancements
4. Performance
5. Aesthetics and design

Submit a new product Idea if it is about:

1. A new problem space
2. New markets or use cases
3. Innovative idea
4. Complementary products

Remember, any format is better than nothing at all. But if you can give them easy frameworks to submit their feedback it will reduce the time you spend, as the PM, interpreting what they’ve sent. 

You have to strike a balance between making it easy for them to submit feedback versus helping them to craft it into the most meaningful thing it could be. We think we’ve struck that balance here at ProdPad with our own Feedback processes, so download our template (as soon as it’s ready) and see how it works for you. 

5. Train the team

Our final piece of advice to maximize the amount and the quality of the Feedback you get from your internal customer-facing colleagues, is to spend some time coaching and training them. 

Be gentle obviously. You don’t want to bowl in and start telling them how to do their jobs. But you do need to give them some practical ways to extract the most valuable insights from their customers, in terms of product experience. 

Help them understand how to delve deeper into customer requests or comments, to get to the heart of the problem they need solving. You want this to become a habit for them, so every time a customer says “I need your product to have this feature”, they pause, reflect, then ask the right questions to flip the feature request into a problem to solve. 

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?

Another top tip from Kirsty:

For example, if a customer is asking about API capabilities, you don’t just want your Customer Support people to simply list off what capabilities are and are not available. You want them to delve deeper and ask the customer why they want to know about the API – what do they need to use the API for? What are they trying to do via the API? What is the outcome they want? What problem are they trying to solve

When that has been answered, bang, there’s your Feedback. 

Another of Kirsty’s top tips is to make an appearance at the customer team meetings and deliver this coaching en masse. Rock up to a Sales meeting with the examples on slides, join a CS meeting and take everyone through this training. Then make sure you’re consistently reinforcing this training. Give feedback on the Feedback – not only is this great for acknowledging receipt, but it will also help make this extra level of analysis a habit for your Customer teams. 

How are you going to manage all this Feedback??

If you implement all our suggestions here you’ll be enjoying a consistent flow of useful Feedback from all of your customer and prospect facing team members. So, you better make sure you’re using the right tools to help you manage all that insight. Come speak to one of our Product Management experts here at ProdPad and we can show you all the tools you’ll ever need to gather, analyze, prioritize and action all this customer feedback.