The Founders Guide to Listening to Your Customers
The systems and strategies to help you build a truly customer-centric organization.
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Friends,
“If you don’t listen to your customer, someone else will.”
Those words, from Walmart founder and notorious customer obsessive Sam Walton, reflect one of the immutable laws of business: if you are to build a great company, you have to listen to the people paying you.
But as anyone who has sat next to a narcissist at a dinner party knows, there is listening, and there is listening. Though disguised as a passive act, listening is, in fact, an active skill—one that rewards preparation, interest, and connection. A good listener takes in what has been said, asks relevant questions, and finds little kinships or interesting disagreements.
While being a good listener is an essential quality for any self-respecting hominid, it is arguably even more important for corporations. The egomaniac hogging the burrata may miss out on the joys of human connection by interrupting every anecdote with a comment of their own, but a company with insufficiently open ear canals risks death.
So, how do startups listen to and learn from their customers? How do today’s CEOs ensure they’re following the Walton gospel, updated for the 21st century? What strategies and systems do they use? How do they align their organization to champion customer obsessiveness? How do they prioritize which pieces of feedback to address first?
Today’s Founders Guide answers these questions. To access all the insights, frameworks, and strategies shared by eight elite CEOs, make sure to subscribe to our premium newsletter, Generalist+. It’s designed to make you a better founder, investor, and thinker for just $22 per month.
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Tactical Lessons
Listen for the problem, not the solution. To build a great business, you have to develop genuine customer obsessiveness. But while listening to your users is essential, you shouldn’t expect them to have the perfect solution to their issue. Rather than implementing what a customer asks for directly, founders should think about addressing the root problem from first principles. By doing so, you’re likely to end up with a more powerful and valuable product.
Don’t be afraid to prioritize. Founders have limited resources, so you can’t build everything your customers ask for. Instead, you should prioritize the most important, high-leverage feedback. Make sure you maintain your focus rather than getting overwhelmed by dozens of different side quests.
Take it to text. Try to make it as easy as possible for customers to communicate with your company. That might involve kicking off a text thread, launching a private community, open-sourcing your roadmap, or proactively attending customer events. Not only does this ensure you’ll receive the feedback you need, you’ll also build rapport with your user base.
Involve the whole company. Listening to customers shouldn’t just be the province of your support team. If you want to build a customer-aligned organization, you must find ways for other teams to engage directly with users. Consider having new team members take a spin responding to customer requests as part of their onboarding or building a structured way for different colleagues to interact with user feedback.
Know your numbers. While a lot of user feedback is qualitative, it’s important to pay attention to data, too. Useful insights can be gleaned from even a small number of customers. Set up dashboards early in your company’s life and build the habit of using quantitative information as an input.
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“You don’t necessarily have to address everything you hear in feedback. The customer signal is always right, but an organization also needs to prioritize what they build based on where there will be the greatest impact.”
Pedro Franceschi, Co-founder and Co-CEO at Brex
One of our values at Brex is to “inspire customer love.” To build something that our customers love, we have to constantly listen to and learn from them. Customer research is a continuous process for us versus something we do at a point in time.
We have several tools in place to regularly request and receive meaningful feedback from customers, and our research approaches fall into the standard buckets.
First, we conduct qualitative research. We use interviews, focus groups, and customer panels to deepen our understanding of their needs and/or get their honest reaction to something, like a new user interface or feature. Shoutout to Great Question, which has been a particularly helpful tool for managing and automating parts of the qualitative research process.
Tip: Rotate your panels to get new voices, and be intentional about diversity of perspective when selecting individuals for interviews and focus groups.
Second, we run quantitative surveys. We use these to help us keep a pulse on how things like customer satisfaction and product usability are trending. These can be conducted in product or over email.
Tip: Even if you have a small customer base, it is still important to get in the habit of looking at stats, dashboards, and hard numbers and coupling those things with qualitative feedback. You don’t need billions of users to get meaningful quantitative data.
We use the DACI framework to guide decision-making at Brex, and we’ve amended our decision-making documents to include a section at the very top called “Start with the customer.” This section ensures that every strategic decision begins first with an understanding of the impact or value to our customers. We’ve spent a lot of time centralizing customer research in a hub so that we’re all working from the same insights across our organization.
That is our approach at a high level, but I want to spend a moment on some considerations:
Use customer research to define the problem you’re trying to solve, not the solution. By deeply understanding the problem, you develop a sense of empathy for your customers – and only after that has happened will the most innovative solutions arise.
To do effective customer research, you have to define your customer. This sounds easy, but consider this – at Brex, we’re not only thinking about who is buying our product (finance teams and founders) but also who is using our product (the employees in an organization). We’ve had to think through how to collect feedback from both, and where/how to prioritize if the feedback on the surface feels at odds with one another.
You don’t necessarily have to address everything you hear in feedback. The customer signal is always right, but an organization also needs to prioritize what they build based on where there will be the greatest impact. Don’t boil the ocean. Focus on the key themes that arise again and again that are in line with your strategy and competencies.
And finally, if a customer has given you feedback, remember to say thank you and close the loop with them. I speak very frequently with customers and make a point of following up with each of them so they understand that their input is deeply valued and being actioned.
“[B]y the time something becomes frustrating or annoying enough to a customer that they message you, it’s usually a signal that there are 10 more customers dealing with that same issue who haven’t messaged you yet.”
Immad Akhund, CEO and Co-founder at Mercury
Listening and changing your product for your customers is a fast way to turn them from users who like your product to users who love your product. Customers have a low expectation of being listened to, so when you do it, it can really move people and make them feel valued. So, I think listening to customer feedback is an important part of respecting your customer and building with them in mind, as well as turning your customers into real advocates.
Nearly everything we build at Mercury, big or small, is directly based on customer feedback. I’d say there are three modes of how we learn from our customers:
Customer support tickets. Generally speaking, by the time something becomes frustrating or annoying enough to a customer that they message you, it’s usually a signal that there are ten more customers dealing with that same issue who haven’t messaged you yet. So those tickets should be taken very seriously and seen as an important source of customer learning. At Mercury, we have a customer support product team and a customer support ops team, and both focus on looking for trends in customer support tickets. What are things people need help with often? This helps us come up with things that can resolve those issues in the product itself so that, next time, the customer doesn’t have to ask us.
Sourcing product feedback. This is a more proactive one that customer-facing teams like sales and relationship managers should be doing. Normally, this is happening when someone in sales is looking to close a deal, or maybe after a customer churned and so you’re actively talking to them to see what specific things influenced that decision. So we do all of that, and then we have a monthly voice of the customer (VoC) meeting, where we review all the feedback, collect it in a central place, categorize it according to themes/trends we’re seeing, and then, again, our product teams or other teams can take those learnings and use them to improve our product.
Product research. Similar to how our product marketers might do a bunch of user research before a product launch, our design and product teams typically do a lot of direct and proactive research with customers around specific products. This is a way for us to understand how current customers interact with the existing product and what problems they might have (even if it’s just small things that could be better or easier). It’s part of our process of consistently iterating and improving on the product, so the feedback from those research sessions can be directly incorporated into our product roadmap.
It’s also important for me to feel like I have a direct line to customers. So I’ll often try to talk to many of our bigger customers once a quarter, and then I make sure to be present at different events where our customers will be when I can. I’m also very active on social media and will often have customers tag me in a question or piece of feedback, so I’m always listening and responding there, as well as taking things back to the team often.
“[We run] a company-wide initiative where employees are selected round robin to respond to NPS feedback, regardless of if the customer is happy or not happy.”
Mathilde Collin, CEO and Co-founder at Front
Front is a modern customer service platform, and our customers differentiate by the level of service they deliver. So, we try to lead by example. Here are a few things we’ve implemented:
Doing customer support as part of new hire onboarding. This is a great way to familiarize new employees with our product in the context of our ideal use case (customer support) while also seeing the types of inbound requests we get from customers. In addition to onboarding, we have a program called “Hop in the Support Queue.” These are guided sessions throughout the year where non-support team members can volunteer to handle support requests, which is a great way to build customer empathy.
NPS rotation program. This is a company-wide initiative in which employees are selected round robin to respond to NPS feedback, regardless of whether the customer is happy or not. For any responses we receive that are less than 10 out of 10, we ask what steps we can take to improve their experience.
Sharing positive customer feedback. We have a Slack channel where employees share positive feedback sourced from a variety of channels (social media, CSAT responses, emails with customers, etc.) It’s a great way to remind everyone of our product's positive impact on our customers’ day-to-day operations.
Featuring customers at company-wide all-hands. These are fireside chat-style conversations where we speak directly with customers. We’ll get feedback on the things we’re doing well but also highlight areas for improvement, e.g. where we can further invest in our product, guiding our roadmap, how we can improve onboarding or clarify workflows, etc. We aim to have two to three of these per quarter.
Creating cross-functional feedback loops. We run a quarterly PTBS (problem to be solved) meeting where our Head of Solutions Engineering shares our customers’ most requested features with our Engineering, Product, and Design leaders.
Customer visits. This is one of the things I am most passionate about, and still make time to do! We have a monthly “top account” meeting where we discuss top accounts, and I always make myself available to meet with them.
Building more channels for customer feedback. In addition to our support inbox, we gather input from customers via our public roadmap. Users can submit ideas for feature requests and vote for their favorite submissions as well. We also launched Front Community, where customers can get answers from our team and other users about Front.
And, of course, everyone at Front uses Front, so it’s easy to get ourselves into the mindset of our users and see what people like/dislike.
“By the 30th time you've heard something, you'll know it's important, and you'll be sick of hearing it.”
Jack Altman, Co-founder and Executive Chairman at Lattice
Learning from customers is the most important thing a company can do. More important than fundraising, hiring, or really anything. It’s the absolute fundamental lifeblood of a company.