For these customer success leaders, feedback is a gift — especially when it’s critical.
While it may normally be challenging to welcome criticism, these professionals — from Attain, Cleo and New Era ADR — say it’s essential to doing their jobs and developing their careers. Especially for those who are not personal users of their products and services, input from clients often sheds light on crucial areas for improvement and growth.
“The reality is that critical feedback is often more valuable than positive feedback,” said Ryan Koopmans, VP of customer success at Cleo. “It feels good to have someone tell you everything is going great, but you learn a lot more from the customer who is willing to tell you everything that isn’t happening as expected.”
When faced with constructive customer input, the featured leaders advise taking an open-minded, empathetic approach. Seeking to understand, they actively listen to the client and work with them to problem-solve their pain points.
These actions validate customers and help build more trusting relationships with them. This is important, as software company Khoros recently found that 83 percent of customers feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints. In the long run, these interactions also often fuel solutions that improve or expand a company’s products, solutions or services, resulting in a beneficial and productive experience for all.
The three featured customer success professionals connected with Built In Chicago to share these strategies and more for shifting one’s mindset to leverage the gift of critical feedback.
Data company Attain powers the Klover app, which allows users to access cash advances for their earned wages, saving tools and more.
When a customer shares critical feedback about your product, solution or service, what are the strategic steps you take to preserve the long-term health of the relationship?
Feedback plays a crucial role in driving the success of our department and fueling our customer-centric approach. It serves as the lifeblood that empowers us to shape the overall customer experience within our app, inspiring us to constantly strive for enhancements.
To effectively gather feedback, we rely on our customer relationship management system to capture valuable insights. These insights are then shared with our product and consumer teams, enabling us to collaboratively prioritize areas for improvement. Our commitment to including customers in decision-making processes ensures their voices are heard and their needs are at the forefront.
Additionally, we leverage feedback to construct a comprehensive view of the customer journey, showcasing interactions across multiple channels such as calls, emails and support tickets. This comprehensive perspective allows us to gain deeper insights into the customer experience and identify pain points and areas for enhancement throughout their entire interaction with our department. By thoroughly understanding the customer journey, we can make informed decisions and continually enhance their overall experience.
How does critical feedback allow you to learn and develop your craft as a customer success management professional?
Taking feedback personally can provide a valuable perspective. While it may go against conventional advice, personalizing the feedback allows me to truly empathize and understand the customer’s point of view. It enables me to step into their shoes and gain deep insight into their experiences, concerns and expectations.
By internalizing the feedback, I can better connect with their needs and make informed decisions to improve their overall experience. This empathetic approach helps me foster stronger relationships with customers and deliver solutions that address their specific pain points.
I focus on continuous improvement and embrace the notion that there is always room to grow and learn.”
How does critical feedback allow you to learn and develop your craft as a customer success management professional?
I consider critical feedback to be a valuable opportunity for growth, one that benefits not only myself professionally but also my department and the entire organization. When I adopt this mindset, it fosters an open-minded approach through which I acknowledge that perfection is unattainable and not worth striving for.
Instead, I focus on continuous improvement and embrace the notion that there is always room to grow and learn. By accepting that perfection is not the end goal, I remain open to new ideas, feedback and opportunities for personal and professional development. This mindset allows me to approach challenges with a sense of curiosity and a willingness to adapt, which leads to greater flexibility, creativity and overall growth.
Cleo is an ecosystem integration software company.
When a customer shares critical feedback about your product, solution or service, what are the strategic steps you take to preserve the long-term health of the relationship?
Take their feedback seriously. A customer willing to share feedback, good or bad, is a gift, as it means they are invested in a positive outcome.
In my experience, most people want to be heard and feel like you are invested in their success. While not every enhancement request or change in scope can be accepted, there is value in the discussion. If both parties are willing to come to the table to find a path forward, one can usually be found. In fact, over the course of my career, some of my best customer relationships were born out of discontent.
Implementations get delayed, projects go sideways and technology doesn’t always work as intended, but how you handle those situations says more about the partnership than how you communicate when everything is going perfectly.
How do you bounce back from receiving a piece of critical feedback?
I try to look at things logically, from both parties’ points of view. In customer success, we are tasked with being both our company’s and our customer’s advocates, so being able to understand critical feedback from the customer’s perspective allows us to advocate on their behalf.
It also helps to establish a long-term relationship if the customer understands that our success is tied to their success. It forces us to understand the feedback being given beyond the surface level, so we can problem-solve the situation. What is the root cause of the concern? Does it require a fix, or does the customer just want to be heard? Is it a misunderstanding or miscommunication that can be addressed quickly, or does it require broader action by one or both parties?
From my experience, feedback tends to get more critical when people feel trapped. Sometimes, helping them problem-solve and find a path forward, even if it isn’t exactly what they were asking for, helps turn things around quickly.
Being able to understand critical feedback from the customer’s perspective allows us to advocate on their behalf.”
How does critical feedback allow you to learn and develop your craft as a customer success management professional?
Learning is meaningfully derived from experiences, both good and bad. If we are receiving the same feedback over and over again, then we have failed to learn or take proper action the first time we received it.
At my level, I am looking for patterns. Are we receiving this feedback most consistently from a particular vertical or related to a certain project team? Does this tend to come up when a certain technology or partner is engaged? Are we capturing that feedback and sharing it with the appropriate parties to affect change in product, process or people, depending on what the situation calls for? Is this a training issue that can be resolved by adjusting our onboarding processes?
The reality is that critical feedback is often more valuable than positive feedback. It feels good to have someone tell you everything is going great, but you learn a lot more from the customer who is willing to tell you everything that isn’t happening as expected.
New Era ADR is a legal technology company for the litigation and dispute resolution industry.
When a customer shares critical feedback about your product, solution or service, what are the strategic steps you take to preserve the long-term health of the relationship?
Preserving customer relationships takes top priority when they submit critical feedback. My first strategic step is to review and analyze the feedback received. The amount of information submitted by the client is often influenced by the method the client utilized to submit feedback. For instance, surveys, emails and chats tend to be concise and limit our client’s ability to provide details, whereas a phone call enables them to delve into specific issues.
I find it crucial to contact the customer as soon as possible after receiving the feedback to get any extra information. I do this with the primary goal of ensuring we understand the customer’s needs. This also allows them to elaborate and hopefully feel heard.
I provide an estimated time frame for resolution and outline our next steps. It is essential to communicate with the customer as soon as the issue is resolved or the feedback has been addressed.
Furthermore, I always inquire about their satisfaction with the resolution. This approach maintains open communication, nurtures trust and cultivates a mutually beneficial working relationship. I find this approach not only preserves the client relationship but strengthens it.
How do you bounce back from receiving a piece of critical feedback?
Receiving critical feedback can be challenging, yet it is often the most valuable. That is why it is crucial to have a strategy in place to overcome the emotional reactions it may invoke. I found being empathetic and understanding the situation from the user’s perspective are the most effective ways to put emotions aside and evaluate the feedback.
Achieving this understanding immediately after receiving the feedback is not easy. In such instances, I find it helpful to step back and take a short break. This break creates the mental space necessary to approach the feedback with a fresh mindset and gain a comprehensive understanding of the critique through the user’s eyes. I’m able to think critically and devise effective and creative resolutions. Instead of dwelling on my initial reaction, I redirect my energy toward finding a resolution.
For more complicated issues, I involve the relevant New Era ADR team members in meaningful discussions. These internal discussions provide me with deep industry knowledge and crucial technical product understanding. This often sheds light on the feedback and helps me see the issue more clearly from the user’s standpoint.
Instead of dwelling on my initial reaction, I redirect my energy toward finding a resolution.”
How does critical feedback allow you to learn and develop your craft as a customer success management professional?
As customer success managers, we often find ourselves not being users of our products or services. Therefore, user feedback becomes invaluable in two ways. First, it grants us insights into our customers’ needs. Second, it sheds light on aspects we may be unaware of in our products or services.
This understanding is essential for our company at large to deliver value effectively. I cannot stress enough how critical this feedback is for providing the best possible experience to all our customers.
When a customer encounters a technical issue, their feedback is often the sole means by which we can confirm the resolution proposed was successful. We sometimes discover that our proposed solution was inadequate, necessitating further troubleshooting.
Similarly, when a customer proposes a new feature, their feedback becomes instrumental in ensuring that our product’s evolution is customer-driven. The feedback grants us a deeper understanding of how they wish to utilize our products or services to derive value, which in turn facilitates conversations centered around their return on investment. It’s only through our users’ feedback that we can create a customized product that changes the world of litigation.
