How Startups Can Automate Customer Feedback

Here is a fast and effective way to create a continuous stream of customer feedback that helps you build a product they will love.

You must have direct contact with your customers from Day One — and there’s nothing like a failed venture to stress its importance. The ability to ask your customers good questions is what makes a great product manager, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s time-consuming.

I used to spend about 45 minutes on a customer interview, where I went deep into their existing behaviours, frustrations, and worldview. I listened for insights and wrote down direct quotes to save for later.

But after the first few months of product development, I found myself spending less time interacting with customers and more time building. Most of my customer feedback was second-hand information from my team.

I was looking for an easier way to have regular contact with customers in smaller chunks. That’s when I stumbled on Rahul Vohra’s blog post, How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit, where he shares a survey that he uses to quantify a product/market fit. However, what caught my attention wasn’t the quantitative metric, it was his use of open questions to automated direct feedback from customers.

Within 10 minutes of reading the essay, I had already implemented the first step of what has become a multi-step process that provides a stream of quotes and insights from my customers.

Over the last year, I’ve been working on a simple and effective system to automate customer insights. I focus on six key touchpoints:

Let’s look more closely at each of these. I’ll show you the questions I ask my customers, and explain what I’m trying to achieve.

As with most online products, when a customer signs up for my mailing list or product, they receive an automated welcome email that shares some extra information about the product. However, I send another email 24 hours after a user signs up, with a personal hello from the founder.

This email has one main objective: to start a conversation. I keep the email unstyled and ask an ice-breaking question that encourages people to respond.

Ice-breakers that I’ve used include:

In order to keep track of how people respond, I use CloudHQ to add their responses to a Google Sheet, identifying the email by its subject. This helps me quickly review and analyse them later on.

According to Sean Ellis, you’ve reached product/market fit when 40% of your customers would be ‘very disappointed’ if they couldn’t use your product.

Fifteen days after a user signs up, they receive a request to answer the following survey questions:

The first question requires the user to choose from a list of options:

All other questions are left intentionally open, to ensure I learn new things and capture my users’ natural way of expressing themselves.

Given the relatively small percentage of people who answer surveys, I’ve found it easy enough to manually categorise their answers to provide quantitative results — to find out which improvement ideas are most frequent, for example.

A quick note on NPS. I used to ask my users the Net Promoter Score question: ‘How likely are you to recommend

Getting inside your customers’ heads at the moment of purchase is incredibly insightful. So, an hour after they’ve made a purchase on the website, I send another survey to my users. Here’s my email template:

I’ve based my questions on an article by Andy Raskin: Why Great Pitches Come From Customers. They sound a little strange when you read them, but the answers to them have been incredibly interesting.

The output of this survey not only helps me understand the urgency and expectations around purchasing, it helps me craft better sales pitches and ad copy for my product.

It’s important to know why people decide to stop using your product, so I’ve incorporated a short feedback survey into the cancellation process. While I make answers optional, asking these questions before the cancellation is finalised has led to a higher response rate.

The questions I ask are:

Cancelling customers also receive a short ‘Sorry to see you go’ email, directly from me, in which I ask one more time for feedback on what we could have done better.

According to Sam Altman of YCombinator, ‘It’s better to build something that a small number of users love, than a large number of users like.’ I figured out a usage metric that identified our power users — for example, those visiting the website five times in ten days — and I use that to fire off a feedback email:

Again, my intention isn’t to ask loads of questions, it’s to start a conversation.

In the same way that I target heavy users to provide feedback, I do the same for people who stop using the website. After six weeks of inactivity, the following email is triggered:

Getting feedback from people that don’t use the website is interesting, but I take care to weight their feedback appropriately. You can’t please everyone all of the time — and listening to people that aren’t your target has the potential to lead you astray. Ask yourself: is this really a potential customer?

There are lots of ways to use the insights from automated user outreach data. Here are some of the highest-value uses:

To make the data easy to manage, I link all of the forms and Zaps into a single Google Sheets file which I can analyse easily. Here’s how my spreadsheet is structured, along with some charts.

Creating an automated feedback flow doesn’t take long if you’re using email tools like MailChimp, Sendgrid or Mailgun. But the benefits of continuous organic contact with your customers are hard to overstate.

Customer feedback will increase your understanding of their needs, help you learn how to attract new customers, and how to keep your existing ones happy — all critical if you want to reach product/market fit.

I’m Dave and I coach CEOs of Series A+ tech companies. Over the last 10 years, I’ve co-founded three VC-backed tech companies, invested in dozens of early-stage startups as a VC and Angel investor, and mentored hundreds of startups as a Lead Mentor for Google. For more info, visit Dave-Bailey.com.

How Startups Can Automate Customer Feedback

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