Easy First Steps for ‘Voice of the Customer’
How to get started building your cheapest and most invaluable resource to date
👋 Heya! It’s Alicia. Welcome to Finding Customer Focus - a newsletter to help you accelerate growth by putting your customers at the heart of your business.
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Deeply understanding your customer can be a SaaS superpower. But in most organizations, customer research and feedback becomes siloed amongst support teams, product managers, or sales reps.
When companies break down these barriers and share this information, they become more customer focused. Democratizing customer insight means everyone in the business is empowered to represent the customer and prioritise their needs.
But this cultural change can't happen overnight. So, how should we begin?
Introducing: The ‘Voice of the Customer’ Report
‘Voice of the Customer’ reports are a tactical way of ensuring that you’re putting the customer top-of-mind across all teams and permeating through your culture. They foster clarity around your target audience and serve as a tool for disseminating customer focus through your teams - from product development through to marketing strategy, and all the sales/ops/support stuff in between.
These reports help you repeatedly broadcast out to entirely different internal audiences - a synthesized narrative around how you're actually doing in landing your value proposition with your customers (and prospects).
Building a Voice of the Customer report is an essential first step towards becoming a customer-centric company. And it doesn’t need to be difficult - here’s how to get started
Why you should make a ‘Voice of the Customer’ Report
In short, it’s an opportunity to win. A Price Intelligently survey found that 75% of SaaS founders do not send routine customer development surveys, less than 10% have qualified buyer personas, and only 50% do multivariate and A/B tests. And yet, these same founders still think their companies are getting customer development right.
That’s not to say that you need to do all this stuff right away, but investing in the foundations for keeping customers at the center of everything becomes a tremendous opportunity for long term differentiation as you grow.
Getting Started with your ‘Voice of the Customer’ Report
It doesn't need to be complex. It definitely doesn't need to be expensive. The main thing to remember is that you need to synthesize together a common language out of disparate data points. Let’s start with the basic components.
Marketing
Adopt social media monitoring - Try some cheap tools to listen to what people are saying about you - try these ones
Look at performance holistically - From Google Analytics to user engagement tools like Full Story or Wynter, what are your prospects/customers doing?
Scrape or screenshot user reviews - TripAdvisor, Capterra, G2, etc.
Competitor comparison - Include screenshots of your competitors’ websites and track their evolving positioning & messaging
Sales Funnel
Attracting the right people - How many marketing qualified leads (MQLs)? How many sales qualified leads (SQLs)?
Sales efficiency - How long’s your sales cycle? Are frontline teams using the right value messaging in their customer conversations?
Win their hearts and minds - How many customers converted, and why? How many did not - and what were their reasons?
Do they really love you? What does customer churn look like? And average Customer Lifetime Value? Did overall customer satisfaction take a hit? If you don’t measure satisfaction yet, you can research ‘Net Promoter Score’ (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT).
Product / Engineering
What caused pain? What bugs or product issues happened over the past month? How many customers were affected? Who were they?
What do customers want? What are the common feature requests? Or a better question, what value do they want you to create? Do any deserve a business case?
What are they missing? Did product engagement change? Where are the biggest adoption drop-off points?
The key is tying it all together. This report becomes a goldmine when you connect the dots. How do these siloed reports relate to each other? How do they depend on each other? Are all teams aware of that interdependence?
Back on my soapbox - The whole ‘cat and mouse’ game of commercial and tech teams lightly hating each other can--and must-- be overcome. I first fell in love with Product Marketing in 2013 as a Marketing Analyst for a B2B startup in San Francisco. We increased free trial conversion by 3% because I had lunch with a frontend engineer and a salesperson who had never spoken before. The company was 35 people total - all in one room. Silos are everywhere.
Tangible examples of connecting the dots:
Capture win/loss reasons from your sales cycle, and cross-reference them with the product roadmap or active bugs hurting the customer experience
Share quotes, case studies, and recordings of the weekly customer conversations you set up after reading last week’s post on feedback loops.
Contextualize those quotes/case studies with a profile of who they are - to which persona do they best align? Why? How much revenue/LTV are they bringing in? Where do they live? What problems are they trying to solve through your product?
Identify the folks loitering in your sales pipeline and figure out why they aren’t converting. Then put that side-by-side with the long term product roadmap.
Just below, download a free template that I built - similar to the one I built for Kayako. Then, read on to learn how the Voice of the Customer report played a pivotal role in turning a failed product launch into $2 million ARR in 18 months.
✨ Download Voice of the Customer report template✨
Horror story example: from failed product launch to $2M ARR
In February 2016, I moved to London to join a customer service software company called Kayako. After a decade of successfully selling an old school on-premise product, the small team were a few months away from relaunching a brand new SaaS-only version of Kayako. The new product was built to target a fundamentally different audience with dramatically different needs. We worked our butts off to build everything from scratch - the product, the Go-To-Market strategy, and the team itself. In summer of 2016, we were thrilled to get the new Kayako out there for the world to shower with shining praise.
A few months in, that confidence began to fade. Trial conversions were trickling in. Our product was buggy and teetering on the brink of stability. Negative feedback dominated our customer interviews and social monitoring channels. Revenue was falling. Accounts were cancelling quickly.
As my Kayako Product Marketing partner James put it, “We’d gone from adding thousands of dollars in new contracted monthly recurring revenue (CMRR) from the old product every month, to just hundreds. It was bad.”
We had to accept that this was not a blip. It was a problem, and we needed to face it head on.
Enter: the Voice of the Customer Report.
James and I went into emergency mode pulling together every signal and data point we could find. We worked across siloed teams to figure out what was happening, and how to fix it. We began to understand our critical product issues, and what customers thought of them. We started learning that customers (and prospects) were confused (at best) by our pricing, positioning, and onboarding. We came to terms with the fact that although internally we thought our product was beautiful and intuitive, we were just dumping qualified prospects into an empty MVP product with no idea where to start.
👉 Check out Building Momentum to find out how we turned that horror story into a $2M ARR business and successful acquisition. 👀
Harkening back to that Price Intelligently survey, the hard truth is that most companies will fail if they ignore the potential insights captured in a ‘Voice of the Customer’ report.
Break down barriers by sharing this information
This report only becomes powerful when you share it with everyone. Expect different perspectives from different departments. Listen to their feedback, compile it, organize it, and decide for yourself how to action it.
While customer feedback isn’t the only thing that should drive your product roadmap or business strategy, it is most certainly a key ingredient. Having customer development feedback loops in place takes effort, time, and buy-in from internal teams. Consistency is critical for your ‘Voice of the Customer’ report to influence the product roadmap, brand messaging, and tone of voice.
Go on - get started!
Now you know how important and empowering a simple Voice of the Customer report can be. For us at Kayako, it was literally make or break. Thankfully for us, it worked out. Kayako was successfully acquired by ESW Capital in Spring 2018.
Using the basic components I’ve outlined above, coupled with the free template, you have everything you need to begin pulling together your first Voice of the Customer report. Good luck - and always be listening! 🙏
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