How Customer Feedback Loops Benefit your Bottom Line and How to Implement Them

[00:00:00] Matt Cromwell: Hey everyone. This is WP Product Talk, the place where every single week we interview an experienced WordPress product owner on the strategies and tips and experiences, failures, even successes of running successful WordPress product businesses. I'm Matt Cromwell, co-founder of Give WP, and, uh, senior Director of Customer Experience at Stellar wp.

[00:01:11] Amber Hinds: And I'm Amber Hines. I'm the CEO of Equalize Digital and the maker of the WordPress Accessibility Checker plugin.

[00:01:18] Matt Cromwell: And today's topic is how customer feedback loops benefit your bottom line and how to implement them.

[00:01:25] Amber Hinds: I am very excited about this topic, Matt, lemme tell you, because I, a lot of product owners, myself included, I'm gonna put myself in this list, probably don't listen to our customers enough.

[00:01:36] Um, or we don't know how to get feedback, or we're too busy building the features that we think we need without, you know, asking customers. So I think that this is gonna be a great show today.

[00:01:47] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Uh, when I reached out to our guest about this one, um, it was her suggestion and I was like, yes. Uh, I'm excited myself too.

[00:01:56] And our guest, uh, is somebody who I've recently gotten to know a little bit better and excited to have here, Miriam Schwab. Miriam, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Can you tell the world a little bit about who you are, what you do?

[00:02:12] Miriam Schwab: Okay. So, uh, I'm Miriam Schwab. I am head of WordPress relations at Elementor.

[00:02:18] Prior to that, I was the co-founder and CEO of, uh, new way of hosting WordPress sites called Stratec. Uh, we were acquired by Elementor a bit over a year ago. And, um, yeah, previous to that I had a WordPress development agency for many years, like 13 years. Um. That's me.

[00:02:38] Matt Cromwell: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here.

[00:02:39] Welcome.

[00:02:41] Amber Hinds: So everyone, before we get started, I want to just remind you to use the chat to ask your questions. Uh, we will, if we get some, pop them in here into the video and answer them as we go. So feel free to do that. Uh, I do. We always like to start off a little bit with a conversation about. Why this is important.

[00:03:06] Uh, and I do want to throw it over first to you, Miriam, because you suggested that we should talk about customer feedback loops. And I'm wondering if you could start a little bit with what you mean by that for product owners maybe who aren't familiar and why you think they're important.

[00:03:23] Miriam Schwab: Okay. So I'm actually quite passionate about this aspect of product development and that's, I guess why I suggested it.

[00:03:30] Um. All of us who have created a product, we created it first to solve our own needs, right? And we probably were experiencing some kind of pain, pain points. Usually this is a story, uh, for ourselves, maybe within whatever position we were holding or for our own clients. And we felt like the market needed a solution.

[00:03:50] So we started working on something, a product for me that was static. So at first, what drives our product development is a lot of our own experience. But in the end, we are not our customer. It's hard to separate ourselves from that, but we are not creating the product for ourselves. We are creating it for many people who might be like us and might have a lot of overlap in terms of their needs or the pain points they're experiencing.

[00:04:17] But in the end, we're creating it to add value to other people. So. In the beginning it's okay to, well, this is all my opinion. Yes, obviously everyone is free to disagree with me, but in be from my, in my opinion, it's, uh, in the beginning it, um, is very legitimate to plan the initial stage of the product based on your own experience and your own needs.

[00:04:38] But pretty quickly, you, and especially once customers start coming in the door, and that's a very important milestone in a product development when people will actually use your product and then even more significantly when they'll actually open up their wallets and pay you for your product. That's when you really need to start listening to them and asking them good questions about why are they using your product?

[00:05:01] Why aren't they using something else? What pain points are they coming to solve? Things like that. So that's, that's in the beginning. And then as you go along, you start asking different types of questions, but by having them in this type of feedback loop. It helps ensure that you're creating a product that adds value, not not just to that particular customer, but to many customers and also that you're prioritizing well.

[00:05:23] So that's, that's how I see it. I

[00:05:25] Matt Cromwell: love it. Absolutely. That's good feedback. And I love, I love personally hearing folks who are really passionate about anything related to customers. Um, that's kind of been my, uh, thing for a long time as well. And, uh, I'm excited to talk about it today too. Um, I'll, I'll jump in real quick, uh, in terms of like, why I see it as super important, uh, personally.

[00:05:47] I really feel like, um, the best way to, uh, enhance your product is always based on customer feedback. Um, and I I do think that we as product owners, we have really good intuition, um, and we usually are building out of a pain point that we personally have experienced. Um, but lots of people experience these prob problems or these.

[00:06:10] These pain points, and everyone has their own unique perspective on it. So there's not always one way to solve a problem. Um, and sometimes if you solve it in a certain way, it's based on your, your bias or your perspective, uh, more than, um, uh, a representative aspect of of everyone who is experiencing that same pain point.

[00:06:30] Um, and generally speaking, I also find that, that it's not only, um, oh my goodness.

[00:06:41] That has never happened. The joys of laughing. It has never happened Live on the show before. Hello.

[00:06:48] Amber Hinds: Someone is calling to give you feedback right now. Yeah, it's

[00:06:50] Matt Cromwell: probably a customer and I'm just like, ignore. Um, um, yeah, I just, I, I, I. In terms of it, I totally lost my thought, my train of thought. I think customers are great.

[00:07:03] No, no, no, I got it. Um, in terms of feedback, it's of course a great way to in impact the product, but I actually really firmly believe that everything about a WordPress product business has to be customer centric, has to be oriented. Specifically around the needs of the customers, uh, as much as humanly possible.

[00:07:22] Not just your roadmap, not just your product development, uh, but the way in which you do account services, the way in which you do all of your marketing. Um, the whole concept of like they are the hero of the story, not you and your product, all that kind of mentality of things. Um, I think it's really important, significant so, and truthfully, honestly, in the WordPress space.

[00:07:44] I think there's some growing to do on that department in terms of being truly. Perfectly more customer centric. Um, I got challenged just the other day internally, like I've been talking about refund policies and I'm like, I'd really like to make it like a, like we don't do like pull as a policy. We don't do refunds on, on renewals.

[00:08:03] Like, we're giving you a heads up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This was my pitch. And folks were like, that's not very customer centric. I was like, Ooh. Ouch. Hmm. You might be right. Um, so, um, I think we all have a little bit of growth to do on this front. So,

[00:08:16] Amber Hinds: yeah,

[00:08:17] Matt Cromwell: that's me. Amber, what about you? No,

[00:08:18] Amber Hinds: I, yeah, I think, I think your point about it's sometimes more about product features is a really good one that we don't think about as much.

[00:08:27] I know when we did some customer interviews maybe a year and a half ago. There were customers that mentioned they really liked Inaccessibility Checker, that the data didn't go anywhere, and they were like, it's a security feature. And like, I didn't even think about that. Mm-hmm. Right. And now we, we, like so many people mentioned that as a reason why they like it.

[00:08:49] Mm.

[00:08:49] Then now we talk about it in our marketing.

[00:08:51] Mm.

[00:08:52] And so it, and, and we're like, oh, this could be something we could use to sell. But if I hadn't done customer interviews or talked to customers about What do you like, what do you don't like, I would never know that. And then it's possible that. I wouldn't ever promote that d as a differentiator or a benefit.

[00:09:08] So I think, um, there's a lot that when you start talking to your customers and, and actioning upon the things they tell you that you didn't really realize beyond just what features should we add. Totally.

[00:09:21] Miriam Schwab: I would love to add to that. Um, so first of all, yes, customer interviews give you ideas for product development, new features and things like that.

[00:09:29] We literally would quote, take quotes from our customers and use them in marketing. They would often say something about our product in a way that was way better than the way that we were expressing it. And we'd be like, that's beautiful. That's amazing. It's okay if we just quote that, like, we didn't put their name on it, but we, we would then use the way that sentence that they said as part of our marketing material because we end up being, you know, embedded so much that we see our product from our perspective.

[00:09:54] And then speaking to customers really can give you amazing. Also just show you different value add that, um, it's bringing, I'll give an example from Strat. So the way that Strat is structured is that your WordPress site is in a kind of contained environment that only people with permission can access and they can spin up the site and edit it.

[00:10:15] Um, and then we also added certain layers of permissions in terms of who can publish to the static site. So. On static. Everyone had two static sites, has two static sites, a staging site and a production site. And so let's say a lower level of permission can only publish this, the staging and a higher level to the production.

[00:10:34] And what we found with like large organizations was that they, they loved the. Greater control that that gave their teams in terms of content management and deployment of content, so that accidentally someone wouldn't, you know, push to production something that didn't pass the review of some kind of manager.

[00:10:51] We even had customers who used that around compliance, like creating pages, showing it to. People on the staging static and then pushing into production. So there was like a whole workflow thing that was created with Static, which we created not for that purpose, which ended up really helping larger organizations in terms of workflow management around content.

[00:11:11] So we wouldn't have known that Also, if we hadn't been talking to customers they'd like, by the way, we really love that. Um. So you can help your customers by talking to 'em, by taking their feedback, and then potentially creating new features, but also they can help you totally by giving you ideas on how to further explain the value around your product.

[00:11:31] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Yeah. A actually we have a co-host in the wings here. Uh, Zach Katz is commenting over here. This is a good one, which speaks a little bit to what you were saying. Um, the, the way customers ask questions and give feedback is also perfect for SEO. It's, it's like, it's how do they articulate the.

[00:11:50] The thing that you are solving, um, because that's what they're gonna be looking for on Google. Um, you know, we are always like, we wanna make sure that, um, we always rank for on give wp we say we wanna rank for how do I accept donations in WordPress? Um, like that, that's a really big one for us. Um, but other folks say, how do I fund.

[00:12:10] Um, and so over the years we've had to start adjusting some things. Also, in the US it's always like nonprofits, but in the UK it's always charities. So there's lots of different, um, ways in which folks articulate what they want or what they need or what their problem is. That should definitely impact the way you do your marketing as well.

[00:12:30] Um, yeah, it's a good one, Zach. Yeah,

[00:12:34] Amber Hinds: I I, I'm curious on a follow up on that, if you, um, are. Asking people, Miriam, when you said like you're taking exact quotes Yeah. Are you just kind of like putting, putting that in like anonymously and Because it's one thing to write like a, a article or a blog post about it.

[00:12:53] Right. And it's another thing to be like, we're gonna use this to actually. Create a, a testimonial almost.

[00:13:01] Miriam Schwab: So actually I didn't mean as a testimonial, I meant just as marketing messaging. So like, you know, how do we explain the security value? Let's say we had a conversation with a CISO from a FinTech company and they would, you know, articulate it in a way because secure, so let's say at Strat, we're very aware of the security benefits of running a fully static site and we tried to articulate it as well as possible.

[00:13:24] But here, having a security professional from a. Company where the security is like critical for them. Say it to us, you know, we didn't like necessarily literally quote it, but we would take the spirit of what they said, or, or sometimes even like, parts of what they said and then use it in our messaging and say, you know, our security is blah, blah, blah, because, you know, that kind of thing.

[00:13:44] So, um, so that's, that's what I mean. I mean, we also did a lot of case studies, which by the way, totally. Worth investing in. Um, and we made sure with their permission to record, we would, we would have a, like an in-depth interview with the customer, record it not for publication, for internal use. It's really good also for your own team to hear how customers talk about your product.

[00:14:08] So we would encourage, encourage even our developers to watch these interviews and hear what our customers were saying. 'cause sometimes developers are disconnected from the, um. Not, not because the company necessarily structures it like this, but you know, developers are kind of like in the weeds and like, oh, we are creating this feature, not necessarily involved in the context.

[00:14:27] And hearing the customer talk about the value and um, you know, why it helps them so much, then that can also be motivating for your team and also, uh, can help them understand why they're doing what they're doing and also actually help the team come up with ideas about how to solve that. Right. So an an engineer's head.

[00:14:44] Or way of thinking is, is different than let's say a marketer or someone, let's say more involved in strategy. And so hearing that can help them say, well, you know what, there's actually this AWS functionality that we can add pretty easily that will solve, you know, that also. And then that's like win-win all around.

[00:15:01] So, so we would record that and then we would write a case study, uh, based on that. Always obviously running it by the customer for their approval. I highly, highly recommend doing that as much as you can. We put together a nice pool of case studies, uh, around that activity.

[00:15:16] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. Case studies are marketing gold for sure.

[00:15:20] Yeah,

[00:15:20] Miriam Schwab: totally.

[00:15:21] Matt Cromwell: Awesome. Um, I'd love to jump into story time if we can. Um, nice personal experiences. We keep calling these different things. Story time is kind of cutesy. Personal experiences is kind of like we're professionals. We got professional experience. Um, you, the bottom line is, and we'll edit it, live our professional expertise in this.

[00:15:46] Specific area. Um, bottom line is like, I'd love to hear some, some specific details of like, when did you implement a customer feedback loop? Um, what was the, the, the pain point that started it, or what was the thing that initiated it? Um, as much detail we can get. I, I mean, not like elaborate, but like a specific story, uh, is what we're looking for.

[00:16:09] Um, so, uh, who's first, who's up?

[00:16:13] Miriam Schwab: I can go,

[00:16:16] Matt Cromwell: go, go, go. Okay.

[00:16:18] Miriam Schwab: Okay. Um, so to get, uh, good feedback that you can implement, generally, you don't wanna ask direct questions, just, I'm, I'm just gonna preface it with that. You don't wanna say, would this feature help you? Right. You want to really delve into what the customer is experiencing, you know, and where they, they think the product could be improved in general, but like, not feeding them.

[00:16:41] Um, so, so that's, I just wanna say that, but aside from that, so something that we implemented pretty early on, um, is data driven customer feedback loop. So we set types of activation goals with the product to track how customers are using the product to try to encourage 'em to move along kind of a process.

[00:17:03] Um. That's less interactive feedback loop in terms of like talking to the customer, but it's, it's tracking how customers are using your product. So, um, in the case of Strat, for example, would be, okay, how many people actually like opened an account? How many people then installed their first WordPress site?

[00:17:22] How many people published their first WordPress sites is static, it doesn't matter what stage. Things like that. And once we could see that type of, uh, funnel. We could also see where customers were dropping off and not continuing to the next stage. And obviously the farther along customer gets in their journey, the higher level of success, uh, for them and for you in terms of converting them to an actual paid customer.

[00:17:47] Like for us, I'm talking about in the free trial stage. Um, and so then that's the point where you want to get more involved with customers on that particular stage. So it can be. Also through calls and interviews, um, even just chat and saying like, Hey, so we had some automation around this. We would, so, and this actually helped improve the, the them move, getting them to move to the next stage.

[00:18:13] We, you know, if someone didn't do X within let's say three days, we would send them an email that says, Hey, you know, we see you didn't do this yet. So by the way, this is how you can do it and here's why it's good for you to do that. And playing with the text on that email. But, um, and we used Intercom, um, a lot intercom's, amazing, expensive, but, uh, amazing in terms of kind of ongoing communication with a customer and also being triggered based on certain activities, like, uh, did they log in again?

[00:18:46] It's just, it, it was so easy to set up. It didn't demand a lot of developer interaction, like time or resources. So I fy I just, I recommend it a lot, but it is expensive.

[00:18:56] Amber Hinds: For people who aren't familiar, Intercom is like live chat, right?

[00:19:00] Miriam Schwab: So it's live chat, but it's so much more. It's super powerful. Yeah.

[00:19:04] Amber Hinds: It's

[00:19:04] Miriam Schwab: so much more once you have it in your platform, so we had it in our platform and, and on the site, then you can really understand where a user is in their journey and you can trigger conversations with them or share information with them based on certain things they did or did not do.

[00:19:21] It's amazing. I'm totally in love with Intercom. If I could hug it, I'll say

[00:19:25] Matt Cromwell: it's, it's a little, it, it is specifically designed for SaaS platforms. It is, uh, I will say that, but I have seen a couple of WordPress products play with it and Giv has been like, almost like almost wanting to do it of a hundred times.

[00:19:38] 'cause it is really powerful.

[00:19:39] Miriam Schwab: Oh my gosh. It's so powerful. It gave us, it just, it really helped us understand our customers more, communicate with them better and help move them along in their journey. I, uh. I think it's an amazing product. Um, so that was another way that we also were getting a kind of feedback loop because then we can also engage with them, see how they're engaging back with us.

[00:19:58] Intercom even gives you reports about customers that are slipping away. Now we use HubSpot as well, so you can get some of that information. Yeah. It is so expensive. At a certain point it gets like almost prohibitively expensive. You can keep the cost down to a certain extent. Um, but, but the value for us as a team, it saved us on developer time.

[00:20:16] And it also helped us, uh, you know, con increase conversion rates, so, you know, cost benefit. But yes, it's very expensive.

[00:20:24] Amber Hinds: Have, have you ever done, um, customer. I think you talked about that a little bit. Yes. And I'm curious how you initiated those. I know when we get to my, my turn to do some story time, I'll probably talk about how we did ours, but I'm curious, how did you find customers to interview and um, how did you decide what questions to ask your customers?

[00:20:47] Miriam Schwab: So we have. Always had a really good relationship with our customers. Um, a lot of our customers were larger, so they were higher touch, so we actually had relationships with them, um, and they tended to love us.

[00:21:02] Amber Hinds: Meaning they have like account managers?

[00:21:05] Miriam Schwab: Yeah. Like we were in touch with them and especially during onboarding, often there was like an onboarding process and, you know, we would wow them with that process.

[00:21:13] And, uh, you, they loved us and they would tell us that. We would basically be like, okay, so that went really well and you seem really happy. Can we do a case study with you or can we do an interview with you? What I've learned along the way in general is that, uh, it's always worth asking people for something, whether it's your customer or someone you want to get some feedback from or some insights from, like, not necessarily your customer or even someone on your team.

[00:21:40] Um, a lot, like most of the time people say yes, they're happy to help, and especially if they're a customer and they like your product. Um, they want to share that with you, and they also want to try to ensure that they're helping you stay around and continue to provide value for them. Especially you're an early stage company, so it's always been fine.

[00:21:58] We're always like, yeah, can we do it? And they're like, no problem. They would give us an hour of their time and we, like I said, we would record it. Um, and, uh, it was always fine.

[00:22:10] Amber Hinds: Yeah. So I feel like we're, we're definitely earlier in the journey than both of you. Uh, we're sitting at 2000 plus, but I keep crossing my fingers any day now that maybe we'll go 3000 plus on our free installs.

[00:22:24] That's amazing.

[00:22:25] Miriam Schwab: That's really amazing. So,

[00:22:27] Amber Hinds: yeah, we'll see. Much

[00:22:27] Miriam Schwab: applause for you.

[00:22:28] Amber Hinds: So thank you. We'll see. It's hard to know. We don't have those numbers anymore.

[00:22:34] Oh, but, uh,

[00:22:36] whole nother rabbit hole we could go down. Oh, yes. But, um, but so we've still been trying to figure out, you know, what, what does that look like?

[00:22:44] Like building customer feedbacks in, um, we, I. We, uh, we have one thing that is ongoing and consistent, which is that, um, if someone, so we also have the free plugin available on our website and we use easy digital downloads to get that as well. I mean, it pulls off the repo. We're not hosting it, but, um, but then if they download it that way, we get their information.

[00:23:10] So we have a whole, um, thing where we've set up. When they just download free, there's an automated email sequence, right, that goes out with the goal of one, getting them using it, knowing how to use it, and then also hopefully try and get them to upgrade. But then we have for both the free and the. Paid users.

[00:23:31] We have like six months, I think it's around six months after they download, they get an automated email, which I get responses to. So I don't, I think it's good enough that it doesn't look automated. That looks like it comes from me. That's asking them to either a review or if they wouldn't give it five stars, tell us why.

[00:23:50] Like, reply back and let me know why, like what would you want? So that's an initial way that we've set up to kind of automate gathering. Some feedback on a regular basis. Um, and then the one bigger initiative that we did, it was, it was about a year and a half ago, so it was about a, when plugin was about a year old, we sent out just to our whole email list and a survey.

[00:24:14] And it wasn't necessarily everyone who was using the plugin. 'cause at that time, like we had a very small user base, so we asked a whole bunch of questions about. Other like accessibility testing tools and software. Trying to figure out what do people use that are on our email list, what features do they like, what features they don't like.

[00:24:31] And then they could say if they did use our accessibility checker, and then we asked them some other questions and then we had like a checkbox, which is like, would you be willing to have a call with us? Um, and I think out of that, I feel like we got like maybe. 150 survey responses. Now we, we incentivized it.

[00:24:52] We said we're gonna do a random drawing and give someone a hundred dollars Amazon gift card. Okay. So I think that might've motivated people to take the survey, but I was like, okay. Um, but then out of that, I think we ended up having like, not quite 20, but almost 20 phone calls with people for like an hour where they just like.

[00:25:11] Gave us feedback. Um, and they weren't all, like, some of them were like, oh, they, they weren't using our plugin, but they agreed to do a call. So then they like tried it right before, so they aren't technically customers in the same way. But because we had, you know, we're so new when we did it. We were just like, we wanna have as many conversations as we can have.

[00:25:31] Yeah. Um, and some of them were customers and I do think we, like, we used that to shape, as I mentioned before, some of our marketing. And then we used it to shape some of our, like how we were gonna do products. I think now we're having more customer conversations. My partner, Chris, does most of those and, and that is definitely shaping our, like we had a whole conversation about how we were gonna prioritize features.

[00:25:57] Based on what we think, what we want, what we think people will pay for, and also what Chris is hearing about, asked about the most, either via support requests or, um, just like a sales conversation.

[00:26:11] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:26:12] Amber Hinds: So, so that's kind of been our approach, but it's, it's a little harder I feel like when you don't have a huge customer base.

[00:26:19] But I do think there are things you can do. Um, even if, so, I don't want a product owner, you know, to listen to you talking Miriam or you, Matt, from seller and think, oh, well, if I don't have thousands and thousands of customers, I can't do this. No. 'cause I do think we have

[00:26:33] Miriam Schwab: thousands, by the way, because our customers were bigger.

[00:26:36] We did not, we're talking about less than that. And that's okay. I think that is an important message. Yeah. There's a, there's an issue here, or it's kind of like finding the balance between. Individual customer attention and scale, right? So you have a larger user base and you have to try to kind of gather information across, you know, a broader scale and try to gain insights from it.

[00:27:01] But at the same time, it's continuously important to talk to the individuals. So, um, both are important and it doesn't matter how, it almost doesn't matter how big your user base is, even if you have a hundred customers. You wanna talk to five or 10 of them because those five or 10 will give you insights or help you see problems that you maybe you're not aware of, that will improve the product and help you get your next hundred.

[00:27:24] You know what I mean? At, especially in the beginning. Mm-hmm. Every, every 10 5,000 matters. And then, you know, it's hundreds and then it's thousands, but. Can I just give you some feedback on that process that you shared?

[00:27:36] Amber Hinds: Yeah. Oh, love it. Okay.

[00:27:37] Miriam Schwab: So, so yes, I love

[00:27:40] Amber Hinds: feedback.

[00:27:41] Miriam Schwab: So first of all, I, I wouldn't wait six months.

[00:27:43] Um, you people at that point may have changed their email or they might mark it a spam 'cause they might not even have remembered that they were touched with you. So I would recommend like, making that closer to when they first installed it. It could even be within a month. It gives 'em enough time to have tested it.

[00:27:58] Okay. But it's also enough time for 'em to remember who you are.

[00:28:01] Amber Hinds: So they are still getting emails. 'cause I think they get a seven email sequence and they get one a week.

[00:28:07] Miriam Schwab: Oh, okay. So would you

[00:28:08] Amber Hinds: move the ask for review earlier in the sequence, is what you're saying or?

[00:28:12] Miriam Schwab: So first of all, one we wouldn't, or should I be

[00:28:13] Amber Hinds: like, okay, make that my eight week email as opposed to waiting.

[00:28:17] And we had a

[00:28:18] Miriam Schwab: really long sequence going on as well and we learned that that was not great. So, so I would make it shorter. Mm-hmm. And like very, um, like, uh, functional meaning. Uh, let's say three, four emails that give, tells 'em about something that they might not have noticed that like, is really cool that you guys do whatever.

[00:28:36] Mm-hmm. Or by the way, you can do this, by the way. You can do that. And then, um, at the fourth, ask them how it's going. And something like, you could even, it could come from you supposedly, but it can look like that. Mm-hmm. And you can say, you know, I'm the founder and I would love to hear how it's going with you.

[00:28:53] If you wanna have a call, please schedule with me here. Mm-hmm. Um. And if they respond in anyway, either schedule with them or send them a survey. But like, you'll hopefully get responses from that and it will, again, it'll be closer to the time when they first signed up that they'll remember who you are.

[00:29:07] It's just there is a concern that six months down they, they don't remember. Yeah, we had that. Yeah, they have, they're not

[00:29:12] Amber Hinds: using the employee in anymore.

[00:29:15] Miriam Schwab: Yeah. Like they, yeah, they're plug, they're, you know, they're not using it or they think you're spamming them and then that can be a problem, uh, for your email send ability, so.

[00:29:23] That's another reason to, you know,

[00:29:25] Matt Cromwell: yeah. Avoid that. That's really good feedback. I appreciate that. Really actionable. Yeah.

[00:29:30] Amber Hinds: Yeah. Matt, what's your, what's your personal story?

[00:29:34] Matt Cromwell: Um. Um, I, I'll go really, really brass tacks actually, Zach, also in the wings here, uh, asked, uh, the question, um, which is, how do you take feedback from support tickets and convert them into actionable items, especially when the feedback is implicitly stated, not explicitly requested.

[00:29:53] That's basically exactly what, what we have been honing for a long period of time. So for a lot of folks who, um, are building product and. Doing that for a long time, you'll have conversations where it's like, let's prepare our next release. Okay. What are folks, uh, worried about the most right now? Or what are folks not liking the most?

[00:30:11] Or what are the folks needing the most? You ask your support team and they're like, um, I think it's like they want to do more on the front end. They wanna do, they wanna make the form look nicer. Um, and that's just, it becomes anecdotal. Um, or it's like, oh, every single day I get a ticket about x. Do you really get a ticket like that every single day?

[00:30:33] Like you might, or you might be getting 10 a day and you're thinking about it just like as daily. Um, the thing is, you can take all of that information and make it, make it actually quantifiable. Um, and so we went from those types of like subjective conversations of like, well, support says x, support says theme compatibility is a big deal.

[00:30:53] Um, that might be. Somewhat of a big deal, but it's actually probably something else that's a much bigger deal, especially 'cause of the way Zach asked this question. Sometimes folks are saying things a little bit more implicitly. So what, um, the other issue that we had was that we were trying to track this feedback, uh, in support and it ended up just becoming GitHub issues.

[00:31:16] Um, but then what happens is then you're flooding your GitHub repo with a whole bunch of feedback and the devs just need to know. What code they need to do. So you don't really want to use GitHub issues as feedback, um, areas so much. I, I just think it's really noisy and cluttered. Um, so you need a filter.

[00:31:34] Um, and ideally that filter could be, uh. Populated by your customers themselves, but it would probably mostly be co uh, populated by your support team putting stuff there in the first place. So earlier today I posted on Twitter, I retweeted, uh, Miriam's. I'm gonna keep calling it tweets. Um, I call that. What else are we gonna call it?

[00:31:57] I said super weird. Yeah, it's super weird. Um, uh, I, I, who is using fee, uh, looped in or canny, uh, and these are tools that we use at Stellar wp and these are specifically designed to be public, public, private feedback, uh, boards who also often have roadmap, um, type of, uh, functionality and things like this.

[00:32:19] So. We've been training our support team for a long period of time to anytime they get feedback about the product, um, to log it on on our feedback board, and we can do that by, by making, making a post on behalf of a customer. Or we can point them to the feedback themselves and they can go and submit it themselves.

[00:32:39] Um, and then when we get more feedback, that's essentially the same exact item, we can add them as private notes in there. So that, and then, and add it as a vote essentially. Um, so that when the time comes to say, well, what are folks really bothered by at the moment? We actually have actual hard data that says, um, we have a, a feature in Give WP that's called Form Grid.

[00:33:03] Everyone wants to do a lot more with the form grid. Like there's so many people who are just like, better form grid, better form grid, better form grid. Um, and the question isn't like, well, is that really the feedback? It's like. Look at it, it's like killing all the other feedback items. Um, so with that, being able to do that, say that with, um, with actual, uh, data and actual real feedback, uh, in a, in, in a serious way has been crucial for us.

[00:33:30] Um, we've done a lot of different releases. Actually. We have an add-on called Funds and Designations. That was completely driven by a bunch of people saying, I need to be able to designate a fund on my form in a way that matters. Um, and that was something that we would've never come to on our own in the first place.

[00:33:49] Um, so yeah.

[00:33:52] Miriam Schwab: So, so, um, just to add to that, the way that we tracked, uh, to see if there was a recurring issue, I, what you described is something that, um. We also see a lot, and I also try to avoid as much as possible it like, uh, taking it seriously, which is the feeling I feel like I got. I'm getting support to kids every day.

[00:34:13] I feel like I'm getting 10. You know, people often exaggerate, I'm getting so many every day. And then, but if you don't have actual data, you're not really sure what's going on. Right. So, exactly. So I always wanted specific numbers. So what we implemented with our support team. Was, uh, also thanks to Intercom, but probably other, uh, systems that allow this, is that we had a tagging system.

[00:34:34] If a support ticket was about some kind of topic, it got tagged by that, and then we could run reports and see if any particular something was coming up more and more. A really useful, uh, way of using that, um, input is around usability actually. So if you know 10 people say, I'm not sure how to back up my site.

[00:34:54] It's not that the functionality doesn't work, right? It's not that it's not there, it's that for some reason they can't find it. Then we internally will go and we'll be like, how can we improve? Improve usability around it? And then that will actually be something that we'll deploy. It's not always a new feature.

[00:35:07] It's sometimes just helping people go on their journey easier, which is better for everyone and makes it them happy. And also reduce the support requests, which is better for us and Absolutely. So anyway, so we would, we would tag things to get actual data, look at the reports and be like, okay, like we're getting a lot of this.

[00:35:23] It's taking up our time. Let's figure out a way to improve the usability or, or even easier, sometimes it's just documentation. Yeah. And then having any, like a place to point people and then you can save internal resources, um, or like developer resources, just like have documentation point people in that direction.

[00:35:39] And that can also solve it.

[00:35:40] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Yeah, I'll, I'll put on my tech support hat a little bit too, because sometimes I get feedback from folks when I talk about this feedback loop system that we've put together. They say, but it takes so much time for the support technicians to do it. Um, and I say.

[00:35:56] Absolutely, and that's why you should do it like the, the, you need your team to be contributing to the product, not just once a quarter, like daily, every single day. There's so much you like, like you said earlier, Miriam, you, you might not have like 200 users, but you're gonna get like. At least several dozen tickets a week with 200 users.

[00:36:18] Uh, with a couple thousand, you, you're probably getting a hundred, uh, tickets a week. Uh, that's all feedback. It's all feedback. And if you're not processing it, then it's just being wasted. Um, I always try to talk about how you need to make sure that you're funding your support team correctly and staffing correctly.

[00:36:34] So that they have the capacity to do this really highly valuable work. Um, you don't just want folks who just can, um, send emails essentially. Um, you want folks who actually contribute to your business objectives as a whole. Um, so yeah.

[00:36:52] Amber Hinds: I am curious how both of you approach, um, like building in the processes for this when, in the early days.

[00:37:01] So because that's, that's a conversation that we're continually having inside our organization. Um, we have one full-time plugin developer. We have a support dev, and my partner Chris, who like. Manages support and like points it in the different directions that it needs to go. Um, and I do all of our documentation training still on top of like everything else that I do.

[00:37:28] Right. Because that's being a founder and you do have a lot of hats and there are sometimes where they're like, like you were saying, Miriam, where it's like, oh, it's not that this feature isn't there, or. Or it's not that, you know, this is actually a bug. It's just people don't know. And so they'll say, oh, okay, Amber, and they'll assign me like, go improve the documentation on this, or go write more documentation on this and it'll sit there in my to-do list for like weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks.

[00:37:56] Right. Even though I know this is important, but there's a lot of stuff and it's, everything's important. A small team and a lot of people wearing a lot of hats. And so then you're like trying to be like, okay, what are the priorities? You know, and I'm like, well, the support rep knows what to copy and paste in the response.

[00:38:10] Eventually I'll get this public in our FAQs. But like I, I'm curious what advice you all have for smaller product owners, and maybe this is a, a good, um, transition to our best advice section that we like to wrap up on, on like how to. Prioritize building these feedback loops and, and also how to, you know, spend time making them more actionable when, you know, I mean, we might even have people who watch this video that they're a solo dev with a product and they're also doing client work at the same time.

[00:38:44] Miriam Schwab: Yeah. That's very overwhelming to be in that situation. I asked you

[00:38:48] Amber Hinds: a very big question.

[00:38:51] Miriam Schwab: Um, so one of the biggest challenges is always prioritizing, right? It almost doesn't matter what size company or organization you are, you will always have to prioritize and you will never have enough resources.

[00:39:03] That's just how it's so, okay, so first of all, the problems just get

[00:39:08] Amber Hinds: bigger.

[00:39:08] Miriam Schwab: Yeah. Basically. Yeah. Um, but the importance of focus also gets more important or it's equally important even when you're bigger. 'cause when you're bigger, you have more resources and you can easily like, be like, well, we'll do this, we'll do that.

[00:39:20] But like, you need to stay laser focused so you get

[00:39:22] Amber Hinds: distracted.

[00:39:23] Miriam Schwab: Yeah. Um, by, and everything's important. But, um, so first of all, in the beginning, I would like do quick and dirty. What do I mean? I'm gonna come back to Intercom. I'm sorry. But for example, with Intercom, once it's installed, you can easily add like a banner at the top of every page.

[00:39:38] Now, if something is coming up, you can be like, did you know we have x? Click here to find out more, and like, leave it up there for like a week, or leave it up there For particular types of users, like, like it loops into their use case or how they've been using your product. It could also have something that pops up in the side.

[00:39:55] It doesn't have to be full documentation. Create like a quick video, like at this stage really of you clicking on a bunch of things. It doesn't have to be polished or edited and just put it on a YouTube channel and share it again. Also, like on Intercom, intercom's a really good tool for click and dirty.

[00:40:11] You can pro, like in our day, in our day, it was not long ago, but there was a startup, uh, discount. And so it, it might be worth looking into that to, to get that. Or maybe there's another tool that like offers you this type of thing. But it was really great 'cause it was, it, they allowed quick and dirty. So I would do that.

[00:40:28] And the other thing, if you can, have you ever.

[00:40:31] Amber Hinds: On, on the Intercom thing, have you ever seen, I know it's targeted more towards SAEs, where people are logging into your platform, but do you think it would be possible? 'cause I'm sure it's just like a JavaScript snippet, right? Yeah. To include that in your admin pages, in your WordPress, plug it

[00:40:46] Matt Cromwell: absolutely not every word

[00:40:48] Amber Hinds: WordPress admin, but like in your

[00:40:50] Matt Cromwell: It absolutely is.

[00:40:51] Yeah. And that we, like I said, we thought about it a lot, but we thought about in the end, maybe, probably only with our paid plugins, um, because. Um, the costs for intercom are related to the number of contacts you get. So if you push that, uh, widget out to all of your active installs, um, your costs would go up very quickly.

[00:41:14] Yeah. Do you,

[00:41:15] Amber Hinds: would you get. But would you be able to use that? Oh, so this is interesting, right? Like there's MIUs, which people use to get people's email addresses out of their free installs. Would you also be able to do that with Intercom?

[00:41:28] Miriam Schwab: You won't be able to pull their email out unless they offer to you.

[00:41:31] So maybe instead of that, you can have like a link like contact us and it takes them out of their site to your site to like a form or even to, let's say, intercom there. Then they can ask a question and you can set intercom up so that they ask the question. Then it says, okay, but before we continue, can you share your email address?

[00:41:48] And then it goes straight into your system. Then you've got it. Exactly. Yeah. We had intercom syncing with HubSpot. We had a whole thing. So, but even just there, you've got it. Um, the other thing that I wanted to say, uh, wait, what was it, what was it that you were talking about? Sorry. Oh yeah, sorry. I distracted you on the,

[00:42:04] Amber Hinds: can we use intercom WordPress plugins, but yeah, so, so yeah, how, how smaller product owners that are just started can figure out how to balance this kind of stuff

[00:42:16] Miriam Schwab: and make it, so I would, if you can have a weekly meeting with your team.

[00:42:21] And be like, uh, what do you think are the top three priorities for this week? Meaning, what's like, burning, what's causing the most pain? It's possible to do that, and yeah, it's gonna be hard to say No, we're not doing any of that other stuff. The other 20, 30 things on our list, we're only focusing on these three things.

[00:42:38] But you guys together, you, you understand your product, you understand your customer's needs, you understand your goals, and you can probably agree on three things. That you're gonna focus on this week, and then at least you're getting three things done and three things, another three things, other things like you're, you know what I mean?

[00:42:53] Or two things, but like, prioritize and, um, you know, and, and just. If you can like, try, try to do that. I know it's hard.

[00:43:04] Matt Cromwell: No, absolutely. Yep. Miriam, what would you say, um, if you wanted to do a nutshell, what's your best advice for somebody, a WordPress product owner who's just jumping into feed customer feedback loops?

[00:43:15] What's your best advice elevator pitch?

[00:43:19] Miriam Schwab: Um, gather data as fast as possible. It will help you make better decisions. It's hard with a plugin that's in the repository, but try to find ways to ha engage with them outside of that. Try to have their information, not to spam them, but to be in touch with them and to add value.

[00:43:37] So, and, and once, and also tracking activity if you can't, through the plugin. Then on your site, see where people are most spending time, whatever, any kind of data that you can gather, really, it's like it's gonna help you going forward and you'll see trends. I'm a big fan of data, so I would say implement the data tracking, whatever as early as possible.

[00:43:58] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Amber, what about you? Best advice?

[00:44:04] Amber Hinds: Well, I think my best advice on mine is that don't be afraid to ask people to get on a call with you.

[00:44:10] Totally.

[00:44:11] Because I think we talked about that and we're like, oh, people won't wanna do that. And there will always be somebody who will be willing to do that for free.

[00:44:18] People

[00:44:18] Miriam Schwab: always. And they'll give pretty nice.

[00:44:20] Amber Hinds: Yeah,

[00:44:20] Miriam Schwab: basically. And if they can't, it's just because they can't, they don't have time. It's not because they don't like you or anything, and it's always worth asking. Mm-hmm.

[00:44:29] Amber Hinds: What you, Matt takeaway? What's your best advice?

[00:44:32] Matt Cromwell: My best advice, because this is a loop.

[00:44:34] It's not just about the getting the feedback, it's about making it actionable for your product. My best advice is to, uh, decide that your next release. Is gonna be a hundred percent customer driven in one way or another. Like you're, you're only gonna ship stuff that you know customers want from your plugin.

[00:44:53] So, and then work backwards from there. All right, that's what I'm gonna do. That's what like, whatever your methodology is, shape up or agile or whatnot. Uh, six week, eight week cycle, whatever you got for your releases. And just be like, all right, how am I gonna get the info to inform this release? Um, and then how am I gonna keep getting the info?

[00:45:14] How am I gonna verify the info? Uh, this is gonna make you go into your Facebook groups. This is gonna make you go into your Help Scout account. This is gonna make you ask questions out on social to get input from folks. It's gonna make you actually. Do the customer first work that you should be doing all the time.

[00:45:32] Um, and, uh, 'cause once you make that decision, it's like, well now how do I actually go about it? It's, for me, that's 'cause that's the whole goal. Like, I'm not just asking just for the sake of it to go into like, some random hole somewhere, uh, into a Google drive or into a feedback board or something. I may, I'm asking an order for my product to get better.

[00:45:52] Um, so start with the product. Circle back, come over to the customer side and that will start to help you to, um, prioritize, um, and focus on the ways to get the customer feedback that you can, um, in the first place. Um, eventually level up into something like candy or looped in or things like that. Um, but, um, any kind of, uh, making sure that you are listening and documenting and acting, uh, on feedback I think is a great start.

[00:46:22] So.

[00:46:24] Amber Hinds: Well, I think that is a great note to end on. So thank you so much for Miriam for joining us. Uh, next week Matt and Zach will be our host and they're going to be discussing the trials and tribulations of hosting your plugin on wordpress.org with special guest Nika Epstein.

[00:46:43] Matt Cromwell: Mika Epstein. I'm excited to kind of bring her outta retirement.

[00:46:47] She, uh, is doing us a favor coming out and talking about plugin directory stuff more. Um, special thanks to post status for being in our green room. We continue to, uh, coordinate with everybody there, which has been super helpful. If you haven't seen it yet. Go to wp product.com. We have a new website, which is fun and useful.

[00:47:05] Uh, I'm trying to get episodes posted there the Monday after we go live as much as I can. Uh, if you're enjoying this stuff, please subscribe. That does absolutely help us. Um, and share it with your friends and add us to your newsletters and, uh, all the good stuff. And thank you all so much. We'll see you next time.