Customer Experience Superheroes - Series 9 Episode 3 - Customer Insight Led Product Innovation with Matt Young

Speaking with Matt Young reminds us all how customer insight is not just for the 'fixes' or 'issues', but its also an input for innovation. In conversation with Lexden's Global CX Lead and CX Superheroes podcast host, Christopher Brooks, Matt shares his ideas and ideals for customer insight led innovation. 

As CEO of UserVoice, Matt has a lifetime of firsthand experience dealing with innovation designed insight. To paraphrase a famous football manager, he may not be the best in the world but he's certainly in the top one. As a self confessed introvert, the inner confidence of years of working closely with clients and customers to create new product innovations comes through. 

It's a direction of travel which has awakened progressive organisations across the globe to collect and democratise customer insight to develop product and service propositions. 

If you like what you hear, feel free to connect with Matt on LinkedIn as he's offered to respond to any question you have. After all, he acknowledges that feedback is a gift and should always be responded to. Contact him on https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattcyoung/.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Customer Experience Superheroes. My name is Christopher Brooks, and I'll be your host throughout this series. A series in which we will meet an incredible array of individuals who are making a significant contribution to the world of customer experience and customer centricity. We catch up with legends of the industry as well as some of the newer emerging voices. In my time as a global customer experience consultant, I've become involved in helping organizations to search, select, and set up their customer listening programs. This has afforded me the benefit of working with some of the world's greatest platform providers and some real customer insight specialists. So today's episode is a personal delight for me as we meet Matt Young, the CEO of User Voice, one of the world's most recognized customer insight-led product innovation technology platforms. So welcome uh Matt Young. Matt, uh, it's a delight to have you here. Really keen to hear a lot of insightful information on a topic that's of particular interest to me. And we're going to come on to this, and this is about kind of really listening to your customers, making sure you listen, not being afraid of it, and then understanding what to do with it. So welcome, first of all, Matt. Good to have you here.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Thanks, Christopher. It is my pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

People who uh you know go to the industry uh product conference or are into this topic will probably come across you, but they're also say listeners from all over the globe. Some may not have come across you on what you do. So would you mind just giving us a couple of minutes intro in terms of your journey through the world of customer experience and how you've arrived to where you are now?

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Uh sure thing. My name is Matt, and I'm the CEO of a company called User Voice. User Voice was the original uh SaaS product meant to capture feedback about software products. And it's been installed, you know, uh all the way from very small early stage startups all the way up through major enterprises like Adobe, et cetera, uh, so that people can have their say about what the product is doing well and ways it could be improved. I ended up at User Voice about seven years ago, and it was of particular interest to me because my background was in engineering leadership. And in that, in that situation, you are asked to take a lot of highly paid, highly skilled people and point them in a direction and have them build products and product features. And occasionally, I was just not sold on what we were building, even within my own organization. So the notion of democratizing uh the ability to have people tell you in their own words, uh, with their own emotion, their own passion behind it, what people wanted your product to do for them, the value that it delivers, the problems they solve, was really appealing to me to give that color and context to what they're asking you to do. You know, you hear people say all the time, like, yeah, users don't really know what they want, et cetera. Um, and they may not express the solution to you properly, but they will express the pain properly for sure. So it was really appealing to me to work on a product and a platform that can bring all that information in and offer it up to product teams, but it's even useful to marketing teams, sales teams, customer success teams, and just make the most out of what their users are telling them.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

Excellent. You practice in in the States? Are you just in the States or is a user voice taking you to other other geographies as well?

SPEAKER_01 3:54

Uh it hasn't. Uh we are used all over the world, of course, but uh user voice is is developed in the United States. We have been in business so long, though, that you know, having customers all over the globe, it's important for us to keep abreast of data privacy laws, of the way that different cultures interact with software. Multilanguage support at the root of everything is important. But then uh even thinking about how likely people will be to react to a question posed in a particular way is something that we'd had we've had to study over the years as well.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Right, excellent. That was it's just always very interesting to understand kind of the the cultural dynamics when you're working on different geographies, but also the practical legal uh requirements you have as well. That they are very varied. Let's get to the the heart of this then. So I like you work with organizations who sometimes seem to be focused on listening to the inner voice when it comes to product development or proposition development, and you get to work with them and see how things are developing and progressing. And and you might pose the question so so how did the customer see this, or what did the customer want with this? You get the response back. Well, we'll get we'll ask them at the end, you know, we'll develop it, we'll build it, we'll do some prototype testing, and that's when we'll get their feedback. I mean, how big a problem is this still? Are customers put at the start, or do you quite often find the customers are left until the end to get the feedback?

SPEAKER_01 5:21

It's it's very interesting because there's the possibility that you could make a very expensive error. Uh, if you decide to go with that inner voice and build something and it's not what the market demanded, there you've got a feature there that you've got to support for several years, or or the opportunity cost missed in building software. So you see the the inner voice happening a lot. You see uh product managers often called it the hippo problem, HIPPO for a highest paid person's opinion, uh, where someone will say, Oh, this is what we need to do, or it's a knee-jerk reaction to competition or something like that. It's prevalent, it's all over the place. And I think people think of the alternative, which is a scalable way to listen to the market as a whole, and they're overwhelmed by that. They think, you know, I've got to respond to every piece of feedback that comes my way, or I've got to have a conversation with everyone. Spoiler, you don't. Uh, that's not really the best way to run that process. But if you don't do that, uh you're just omitting the people who are going to buy your product and and not listening to them. So, A, why wouldn't you? B, I completely understand why people are scared to do it. Um, it seems like it'll be a lot of work. Every day, though, uh, we see people that that just are are wringing their hands over how difficult this might be or or what it might mean. If you if you think about the notion of product feedback, usually it's not people sending sunshine and rainbows your way, usually it's criticism. So the uh the opening of your your ears and your eyes to the the vulnerability of of what's going to come your way, it's a leap of faith, but it's one that I think people are very happy to have uh once they've once they've gone through it.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

So started on it. The problem is the type of feedback you get creates its silos in its own right. So you get that the thing you said, the issues, you get the reactive stuff, which customer service will get hold of and feel we've got to fulfill this. You'll get the active stuff, which the sales team or the customer success team will look after. And then you get the proactive stuff, which the innovation or the product development team are looking looking after. But that one voice of the customer could have delivered all three of those in one sentence or a couple of sentences. So that point about overwhelming, I really understand. I want to come on to. I also want to touch on accountability because that's three very different functions there that are all looking to hear from the same customer voice. So, so where does accountability for this sit in the first place?

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Yeah, that's uh, you know, really the short answer to that question, I think, is with the leadership of the organization. If they're savvy enough to recognize that if a customer gets a hold of a person as a representative of a company, whether it's through email or in person or through any channel you can think of, they're not worried about what that person's role is. Well, I'm a support person, so I only deal with transactional problems that you're having, or I'm a salesperson, I only deal with your wants and desires to close a transaction. People are gonna share their thoughts about the problem that you might solve with whomever they can speak with from your company. So if from a leadership perspective, you're making it crystal clear to everyone who might interact with a customer that you're gonna hear information that's gonna be valuable. And the value in that information is there for you, but it's also there for your sales team and your success team. And so if you can put systems in place that effectively triage all that information to the right people, you're a step ahead of most people in the industry, which is it's also kind of surprising. You think, well, duh, you know, people are telling me valuable things. If you think about a support person's goals, it's usually to close as many tickets as possible in a period of time. So they're not necessarily attuned to like, hey, you know, cool, I helped them with their problem, but they also mentioned something that would be a product enhancement. So I should send that over to the product team. That doesn't happen a lot. And if you do, it's uh free information coming your way.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

So if we take that then up a level, you're talking about the leadership team. There's a uh CX practitioner, uh Genie Waters, who always talks about, you know, kind of needing enlightened leaders in the first place. Because if you're having to educate them, if they are the hippo, um, and you're having to educate them that actually we've got the customer's voices out there. Is is that a long, hard and ultimately unsuccessful journey? Do you do you need to work with enlightened leaders to say, hey, look, we need to listen to the customer, we need to democratize it, we need to work together, we just need help in delivering that. I mean, of those two challenges, I mean, which which do you look at and go, I'll take this? Or do you not really have the choice? You have to deal with all of them.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

People are going to be how people are in their positions. So I think the the challenge with a lot of leaders, and I find myself guilty of this occasionally and need to check myself in this kind of thinking, is you want things to be boiled down into black and white because you have to make so many decisions every day that shades of gray complicate things. And when people say we should listen to our customers, uh, someone in a leadership position might make the erroneous jump in thought to say, well, that means my direction is just going to be shaped entirely by what people tell us. And that's not at all true. People think that listening to customers and innovation are at odds with one another. You want customers to tell you what their problems are. And then you, as innovators, you're responsible to present great solutions to the audience and make sure that you know you heard them, you understand, understood their problems, and you're coming back to them with something that's really going to help. So I think the conceptual leap that I try to get a lot of leaders over the hill of is like, this is not an all or nothing thing. This is not you just taking feedback and acting on it and being very reactionary. This is you taking advantage of high quality information in ways that enhance what you're already trying to do in terms of coming up with spectacular new solutions to problems.

SPEAKER_00 11:26

I see that works, works really well. And then there's the situation that uh we we mentioned about not needing to act upon every voice. So this is a challenging one, isn't it? Because if I happen to be part of the sales team and I'm out talking to customers, customers who I think value what we do massively, but maybe um are also valuing what the competition do, versus another salesperson who comes back and says, Well, you know, they give us all their business, but maybe it's not commercial as much as the other person. How do you create the right criteria and understanding that not all voices matter? And actually, we don't have to respond and react to everything that happens because now I've got this fresh. It's almost like for me it's a it's a slight uh it's odds at itself. We say we want to listen to the customer, and then when we do listen to the customer, we're not going to act upon what the customer says. You know, you can see those naysayers and disbelievers in the team just going, Well, why are we doing this? You know, why are we doing this? So you get my point there. You yourself, so you don't need to act on everything, do you? And not every voice can be equal, surely.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Well, not only do you not need to act on on anything, that your your get out of jail free card here is that you can't act on everything. If you if you had an organization large enough to take every piece of feedback and act on it, you'd be massive. Um, and also probably terrible at what you do because you're just bouncing around from idea to idea. So, you know, use that as a bit of solace. Like you can't possibly act on everything, so don't. We try to take all the feedback that we get in our organization and first try to compare it to clearly articulated company goals. And I think that's something that's critical to make any kind of feedback solution successful, whether it's on a pure CX front, like NPS or CSAT, all the way down to specific kinds of feedback like on a customer success team or in a product team. So we make sure that we can take all the feedback that we get and slice it and dice it by the things that we think will matter. Uh, for example, if if our goal is to grow top line revenue, I know who our target market is. I will take all the feedback that was delivered from people who are in our target market or like companies that we feel like we can close, and I'll go dig into that. And I'll just set aside all the other feedback for later because even though today that feedback is not what we're going to act on, we might tomorrow, uh, we might decide we want to go down market or upmarket or we want to go into a different region or something like that. So if you've captured everything and you can contextualize it by adding in either information from your CRM system, um, you know, I think critical in any feedback is to make sure you're annotating who it came from and the context that it came through. You mentioned sales. So was it someone who gave you feedback and then they converted, or someone who gave you feedback and it was a closed lost deal? If your goal is to increase your closed one rate, take some of that closed lost stuff that you got notes-wise, and start digging into it. You need segmentation, I think, in order to make use out of large volumes of feedback. I also really want to caution people that little bits of feedback like our company captures through our software tools, that's not enough. It's the starting point for you to go have deeper, longer, more intense conversations with people on a subject. So, really, all I think all the feedback systems that are out there aren't meant to be this one size fits all solution. They're meant to be part of an ongoing suite of research initiatives uh that should just be ongoing uh for any company that sells a product.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

And it's really encouraging to hear you kind of talk about it's all in service of the business strategy at the end of the day. You know, what you're what you're getting is to ensure are we on the right track? And if we're not on the right track, why is it we're not on the right track? And I'm sure with some organizations that insight then changes that business strategy, but with others, it kind of helps shape yes, this is the part of the insight we want to listen to in order to achieve what we're going to achieve. So you just sparked upon me there, you just said about kind of you know annotating the notes that come back. One of the challenges I've come across, I'm really interested to hear your perspective on it. And sometimes this has been driven by vendors, and sometimes it's been driven by internal capability, and that is what channels to listen to. Because, as you said, there is nothing better than a deep enriching conversation where you can kind of really probe, but actually to extract that in a way that's a true representation of that conversation and get, you know, which is likely to be the sales guy, the customer success team member, to bring it back and drop it into a system, into the right bucket where you need it, is a lot harder than it is actually to get them just to tick a box on a survey. So, what is your view on channels? Do you listen? Do you try and listen to as much as you can? And you and you said there also that something like a user voice would be a starting point, you know, springballs go and have further conversations. You know, how do you actively manage all of that? Because there's, you know, there's a lot of bit of technology there that you can bring into the mix.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

One thing that we try to do, I think whenever we embark on an effort to answer a question. Uh, that question could be a massive question, like, what should our strategy for the next three years be? Or a very specific question like, hey, we're we're bringing new machine learning features into our product, which three of these five are important to you? We try to make sure that we are identifying the best way to get the answers to those questions. And uh sometimes passive listening is a way to do it, sometimes a survey is a way to do it, sometimes a small number of interviews is the way to do it. But I think a lot of people skip the step of articulating exactly what they're trying to answer. And one uh sanity check that we try to use in anything that we do is to say, all right, well, what will I do if I hear this response or that response? That way you can say, well, would I believe it? Would I would I feel like I've got enough information to change the direction of this project because of what I heard? And if the answer is no, then it might not be a deep enough survey, a deep enough audience that you're gonna ask questions to. So I think that a little bit of upfront work in planning the research initiative goes a long way in making sure that that uh initiative will produce actionable results, something that you can actually go do something with. That in turn, I think creates a snowball effect that you're gaining more and more confidence that you know how to get answers to questions, big and small, no matter where they come from or how impactful they might be to your organization. So keeping a huge set of tools in your toolbox is a really nice thing. Also, admitting to yourself like that you can be bad at it at first is completely okay. Just get started, right? I think I I have all these quotes from people in my head, and I can never remember who said them, but uh uh someone said that embarrassment is the entry cost of getting good at something. I mean, your your first foray into listening to what customers have to say, you might find yourself staring at a bunch of information and and you you find yourself like, uh, this this just doesn't feel good, and I don't know what to do with it and any of that. Like just incrementally get better and better at it. And and your customers will, I think, empathize with the fact that you're trying to do right by them. Uh, and that that in itself engenders some goodwill to people.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

And just do you think this comes on something I think is really important in this space, and I think it gets overlooked quite often is is really understanding, and you did tap into this earlier. What is the purpose of why we're doing while we're doing this? Because I remember working with uh uh customer uh insight um lead, and he he revealed that in his previous role, people had said to him, Oh, let's go down, let's go down and have the meeting uh at the pod, and he just assumed it was like a little hub they went to. But he'd created, got himself into a rut where he'd become known as the prophet of doom, the pod, because he would just bring down here the five things, you know, every time they wanted to go forward, he'd say, These are the five things that are holding us back from going forward. And whilst his intention was to make sure that they had a frictionless run with their customers, it created this real tension because obviously when it's when they took one off, there was another one that popped on it. So, is there the challenge sometimes that you don't have that psychological trust? You don't look at information that comes in and allows you to go, wow, isn't this exciting? Look, all these things that we can get right now for customers, and what you have instead is this blame culture or you know, misattribution. And how do you get past that? Is this about setting it up in this in the right way in the first place?

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Uh, you asked a question earlier about accountability, and I think that this is a really important point in creating that that atmosphere of trust within an organization where if the software or product isn't selling well, is it the sales team's fault because they do the selling, or is it the product team's fault because they produce the thing that they get to sell, or is it the marketing team's fault because we're not talking about it right way? It's everyone's fault. Like any organization's goal is to serve their market the best that they can. And no organization is gonna do it perfectly. No organization is gonna, you know, hit home runs every single time they go to bat. So if we can all have a little bit more empathy within the organization and recognize that, you know, we're all we have our company goals, we're all working towards them, we're all doing the best that we can to get them. And here's how I'm trying to contribute that's gonna let the rest of the organization know how they can be supportive in what's going on. So if the product team says, yeah, you know, we're really trying to make our user interface easier to use, because we've heard that people are struggling with that. And we've done a bunch of bunch of research and found out that yes, that is in fact something that is getting in the way of our overall growth or our overall customer satisfaction or what it might be. Talking about that before embarking on the process of working on it will get you to the point where you know the sales team and everyone else is saying, yes, I agree, this is what you guys should do. So there's no finger pointing later, uh, saying, hey, why did you guys go do this when you know it had nothing to do with what I was asking you to do? A little bit of work up front, just like in crafting research processes processes, can get you much more aligned with the other teams of your organization. And then in fact, they eventually will start stepping in and saying, Hey, I know you're working on this. I just heard from a customer that said, XYZ, do you want me to connect you with them so you can talk to them more? That in turn is just going to create this virtuous cycle of making it easier and easier to gather the information that everyone needs to be successful.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Whenever you're engaging with clients, I'd imagine that the sense of getting feedback is not a new concept. And there probably is littered across the organization, little fragments of insights and different initiatives that have been run previously. What do you do? Do you just start again and just connect everything up? Or is it do you want to kind of feed in some of the previous insights, even if they do have a little bit of bias that you can't kind of understand the context of? I mean, what's the best practice, would you say?

SPEAKER_01 22:28

I have an interesting anecdote to share with you about that problem. Like most software companies, we use Jira to keep a backlog of all the things that could be improved or fixed in our software. And a couple of years ago, we just deleted all of it. We took the entire backlog of 7,700 things and got rid of it. Why is that? It's kind of anti-agile. If you look back over the entire history of your entire organization and say, yeah, you know, one day we may work on that. That may be true, but whatever you learned about it like three years ago, is it still really relevant today? So for our customers, we try to identify a sensibly short time horizon of information that you want to pull in. What is still relevant? What is still actionable? I would say anything pre-pandemic starting just doesn't matter to any of us anymore because the world has changed. So uh, you know, a year is a pretty big amount of information to try to pull in for any organization, but it's still probably got some merit to it and it's probably still relevant.

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Let's say we've got the leadership on board, we've got the agreement to start, you know, kind of listening and then getting some good feedback from customers on product development. How do you then set it up so that you're what you're not doing is just answering the knowns? How do you set it up so that you can you can capture the vague and the unknowns? Because in my experience, quite often, that's that's the challenge that we face is I just want to know is it blue or red? Or actually, or them to tell me the two colours that they want, whereas the customer's saying, I'm thinking about shapes, why are you talking about colours? So, how do you give the company the confidence that we're not gonna go completely off piste here, but still give the customer the freedom to express themselves in a way that you know will help the organization, even though they don't know it'll help them?

SPEAKER_01 24:16

It's a good question because everyone, I think, wants to create easily quantifiable surveys where all the answers fit into convenient little boxes. And by doing that, you're gonna rob yourself of the thing that someone wanted to say, but you didn't give them the opportunity to say. And I think in all, if people teach you about good interviews for you know almost anything where you're trying to learn something is not to ask leading questions. We try to create the digital experience around not asking leading questions. So instead of saying something like, hey, we're thinking about doing this, would that be a good idea? People are gonna say yes because it's easy to say yes. They're gonna say yes because they don't want to hurt your feelings. All of that could be hugely misleading and send you down the wrong path. Whereas if we're thinking about a new feature or something like that, I might show them a prototype and say nothing about it and just ask, what do you see here? You'll find out, do they understand what it is? You'll hear in their tone of voice whether they're excited about it or not. You can ask them specifically, all right, I didn't design this, someone else did. I'm trying to gather information for them. How do you feel about this? What's your what's your visceral reaction to it? Does it make you happy? Does it make you excited to use it? Does it make you indifferent? I've seen something like this done better somewhere else, and I don't really care. Getting to the truth of the matter really involves creating an environment when you're talking to someone where they're gonna be open to say what they're really thinking. Pretty hard to do, especially here in the United States. People don't like to say controversial things or be impolite, and then also tell you like what's really important to them. So another thing that we do is at the end of any in-person interview we do or at the end of any survey we send out, we always make sure to leave a blank space where people can fill in anything they want whatsoever. And it's often in that, like, okay, cool, you asked me about reporting or machine learning or user interface or something like that. But I wanted to talk to you about blah, blah, blah. And you'll often get the most valuable stuff in the freeform open spot at the end. And oddly, a lot of that stuff is usually really positive. Uh, we'll occasionally get stuff like, hey, I mentioned all these struggles in the survey you just sent me, but we had this really great interaction with your support team. They were on top of it, they turn things around. I mean, that's gold. I can go give a pat on the back to an often un you know feeling unsupported support team. I can lean into that in marketing and the way we sell our software. Like, hey, we have a great support team. This is what people have to say about it. But just leaving space for people to say what's on their mind and how they feel about it is really, really important.

SPEAKER_00 26:50

Excellent. And that feedback for me is something that the organization has to recognize if they provide an experience for the customer to provide the feedback. I remember working with an accountancy software company, and we went and asked customers what are the big issues that you have. And three in the top 10 were your surveys. How do you help customers understand? Look, us asking for the information becomes another moment of truth. It's an opportunity, I guess, to confirm ah, this is an organization that that listens to its customers, or this is an organization that's thinking about some advanced areas of innovation. How do you help them understand that you're providing you know an experience rather than just a service?

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Yeah, I think there are two things that come to mind. The first is simple and transactional, but to acknowledge people's time and thank them and let them know what you're gonna do with the information. Like almost all survey submission forms say, thank you, your response has been recorded, blah, blah, blah. But do you bother to tell people that you recognize that their time is valuable and here's what you're gonna do with the survey information? So it isn't just this like one-way, you know, why did I spend my time doing this situation? Because then people won't. I mean, if they feel like nothing's gonna come of the information they're providing you, they're just gonna stop giving it to you in the end. The second thing, and this is something that that we've actually studied quite a bit in, you know, today in 2022, my email, my web browsing experience is inundated with people asking for my opinion or asking me to share a few minutes or some time. What are the preferred methods for doing that today, you know, versus how they used to be three, five years ago, 10 years ago, something like that? They evolve. So using your own experience and just putting yourself in the shoes of being a consumer of a product or a service. And if that company was gonna try to learn from you what you are trying to learn from your customers, how would you want to be approached? What kind of language, what kind of tone? It's not as simple as offering someone a$20 Amazon gift card. The incentives just don't do that much. If you can empower people to understand that they are actually going to shape the direction of what you're gonna do, that they are not wasting their time, uh, just speaking into the void. How do you make that clear? And how do you how do you create an experience for them that is memorable in some way, where a survey spammed out to 20,000 users that says, hey, could I just have a few minutes? And then you go ahead and ask them 70 questions is just rude. So, really, you know, being respectful and treating your customers how you would want to be treated in that situation.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

That sense of making them feel like they're they're part of the story. So so let's let's move this forward. We've we've got we've got over that the hump, we're getting the information in. How do you then get it to the into the hands of the the UX or the product development teams in a format which isn't streams of text, but they can look at and say, I recognize this and I and I know what I need to do with it. Because this is one of the big chasms that I think quite often with feedback is is not managed very well. Um, and you have you know vendors who will stop, and then you might have a consultancy who will then interpret rather than translate, they'll make their own interpretations to suit their their ends. So, so how do you close that so you can really empower the uh the product development team to do their job?

SPEAKER_01 30:09

Uh I agree that sending someone a wall of text is not going to get desirable results. Like uh asking an individual contributor who's a designer or a product manager or a software engineer to interpret all that stuff is a recipe for uh a not so fun experience. However, I will say that it is important to give people access to the raw data uh if they want to confirm things for themselves. So if you do have a consultancy analyzing things, you do have a business analysis team or a data science team looking at things and producing analysis or insights out of that data, giving people the raw information in case they want to satisfy their own curiosities is a really good thing to do. Secondly, to give the whole company access to insights and do it in a believable way, I think is also one area where a lot of organizations fall short because they view the ownership of the data that they're collecting as something to protect. Um, a product team may silo the interviews that they do with customers and not share those, you know, Zoom recordings or whatever they might be elsewhere. Uh, how many times have you heard a salesperson say something like, oh, everybody's asking for X? Like, and you say, okay, who, you know, with recency bias, name one particular customer or something like that, but you don't get it all. So making sure you can centralize a repository of all the information that you're getting becomes uh a critical transparency effort and a critical research effort for people. As I said early, we we we annotate all the information that we get coming in to make sure that I can slice and dice the feedback that we get in ways that are furthering our own goals. And we try to provide that through our own software to our customers too. But I think if if you're showing people, okay, here's the TLDR, here's the result of our analysis, but that's not all I'm giving you. Here are the levers that we pulled to either pay more attention to data or put some other data aside. And here is the raw data, telling people the story of how you arrived at this conclusion becomes critical to get acceptance of it, even more important than that, to let people then do what they're good at and ask probing questions and lay their own two cents into like, oh, cool. Well, I understand why people ask for this now, and I get who's asking for it. You said that this is what we should do about it. And I think that's a great idea, but wouldn't even be even better if we did X, Y, or Z along with it. You don't want to miss out on those opportunities either. And only by providing the backstory behind the analysis can you really get people to do that in an effective way?

SPEAKER_00 32:43

I can see the context is so important to provide that. It's best practice to keep engaged with customers throughout the process, or is it a case of grabbing that insight, being respectful, saying move away, or oh, you know, could can you create the right engagement? Say, hey, yeah, keep come back, keep coming back to me, keep checking with me. I'm happy with this.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

We always try to put that decision into the customer's hands because there are those of us that would like to stay engaged with you. Like uh, if you think about the products that you love, my appetite for interacting with them is a lot higher than the ones that I sort of like. The software that I use to submit my request for time off or something like that. I don't really want to talk to you that much about that. I have to use it every now and then, it doesn't matter. But the software I listen to music with every day or the tool I use in my job every day, yeah, I might want to talk to you a little bit more often. So I think that one thing that we try to encourage people to do is say, okay, hey, thanks for answering this question. How often would it be okay for us to reach out and then make sure you're abiding by that? The moment people hit unsubscribe or please don't contact me again, like you've you've lost a data point. So you don't want to do that.

SPEAKER_00 33:49

And then sort of closing the loop, you've made the development change or you've designed the new product. And of course, it won't be to the liking of everybody. How do you close the loop and go back to customers in a way that says, thanks, but it does look different to what you thought it was going to look like? I mean, I guess my question is, do you? Or, you know, is it is it more uncomfortable to do that just to shy away and then next time we'll develop something that's right for them? Or is it in your interest to go back, you know, with this is exactly what you wanted, and also this isn't what you wanted, and this is why?

SPEAKER_01 34:23

I don't feel obligated to explain to people why it's different. Um, I want people to know that you asked for this, it will be different from what you asked for because there's more people at play than just any one individual customer. So no one's gonna get exactly what they want.

SPEAKER_00 34:38

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

We hurt you. This is the solution that we put forth to this problem. I hope you like it. I hope it helps you. You are always welcome to tell us how it could be better. Usually people aren't going to stick to their guns and say, Well, I told you to do it this way and you didn't. So go back and do it that way. They'll say, Oh, yeah, this is pretty good. And then you're you're reducing the problem so that they're saying something like, The next step, I think, should be X, Y, or Z. This is what you should do next. You're taking that opportunity to create a next iteration of the thing that they asked for in the first place. And you're gaining credibility at the same time by saying, you know, you gave us feedback, we took action on it. You know, we we're not taking orders, we are doing our best to help. And this demonstrates that you are actively listening to people and taking what they want into consideration as you're producing your roadmap or product plans.

SPEAKER_00 35:31

And that obviously just installs greater trust, doesn't it? And just say it's greater engagement and probably more respect for an organization that recognizes it can't produce everything for everyone. And it has appealed to some audiences and doesn't appeal to other audiences because they'll be better served by other companies.

SPEAKER_01 35:50

Even if you could produce what any customer wanted down to the T, they don't always have the agency to be the person who decides to stick with you in the end. So when someone churns, it always stinks. But I always take it as a badge of courage that if someone said, like, yeah, you know, we got a new boss and they've always used competitor X or switching to that. But I just wanted you guys to know, like, I loved your product or I loved your team or something like that. You don't have control over all the variables. So if your heart is at the right place and you're you're trying to do right by your customers, it'll come out in the wash and you'll you'll end up ahead.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

I've always felt that if you know we've when we've done pitches and we've lost and someone else has won, then not to think about the fact that we've lost, but someone else has won. Someone else has managed to deliver something that feels even more compelling than we did. That's brilliant. That's brilliant. You know, the client's got the right, you know, a better outcome as far as they're concerned. And someone else out there is better suited to them than we were. And that's that's all right with me. That's all right with me. I don't mind.

SPEAKER_01 36:51

I completely agree. Yeah, it's uh too many times. I think customers are trying to be things or companies are trying to be all things to all people. Why? Be good at what you do for the people that you're gonna do it for, and that should be good enough.

SPEAKER_00 37:03

Yeah, great, great lesson. I think we've given a number of compelling reasons here in terms of why you should face up uh to your customers and invite their feedback in. But you know, if I was if I was sitting there as having just heard this podcast and had the bravery to go into the boardroom to say we're gonna do this, give it to me in a in a sentence or two. How would how would how should I put it across to the CEO that this is the right thing to do?

SPEAKER_01 37:26

Uh I think the way I always like to put it is that whether you're listening for it or not, your customers, your potential customers, your former customers, they're talking about you anyway. Um, so if you're leaving that information on the floor by not listening for it, by not seeking it out, you're just putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. It doesn't take very much effort at all to keep your ears open and your eyes open and grab all that information and then you can turn that into something great.

SPEAKER_00 37:56

Brilliant. I know um having been and looked and downloaded myself, you guys write some really compelling stuff, some very easy to digest content on product development feedback and helping individuals just get their head around the topic. So, is there a place that you we can recommend people go to to find more of this content?

SPEAKER_01 38:16

Uh sure. Yeah, we we link it all off of uservoice.com. Uh, we tend to share it off on LinkedIn also if you follow User Voice as a company. You know, I'm probably one of the less salesy CEOs in the world. Uh, so we really try to share our story and the stories we hear from customers and the things that we learn from our research as broadly as we can, because we all just want great products to be built, uh, even just as consumers of products. So we have a pretty active blog where we're sharing what we learn as we go and the URLs change as as Google's SEO rules change, but you can always find it off of uservoice.

SPEAKER_00 38:50

And I can vouch for that. I think I think you've got some great sector-specific content that you can you could take away and learn from. So I highly recommend people go and look at that. And and likewise, Matt, if people want to get a hold of you, you sort of a person who will answer uh on LinkedIn if they connect to you.

SPEAKER_01 39:05

Uh absolutely. And yeah, not only that, like you know, email me directly, matt.young at uservoice.com. Uh, it would be really hypocritical of me to not want to listen to what people have to say. Uh you know, whether people agree or disagree, it may seem counterintuitive, but I'm an introvert and I worry just as much about what people think as anyone else does. Uh, but it it really is a gift when people spend a little bit of their time to share their thoughts with you. And every time that opportunity comes up, I will grab it.

SPEAKER_00 39:39

I'm sure I won't have covered some questions that people be thinking, why didn't you ask? But likewise, I guess, you know, it's great to hear some success stories as well, isn't it? Kind of, you know, when people say, Oh, that point you you raised there, Matt. I had that myself. And this is this is what I did.

SPEAKER_01 39:51

So success stories are are a little bit of uplifting, but even your anxieties are something that I would welcome the opportunity to help with, or at least just like get it off your chest. You know, being a good listener can can help in a number of ways.

SPEAKER_00 40:06

What's next for you, Matt? What's next for you and user voice? What does the uh the future hold for you?

SPEAKER_01 40:12

Uh, we just released a new product called User Voice Validation that's uh got a free trial on the site. You're welcome to check out. Over the course of the next year or so, whether it's through partnerships or acquisition or something like that, we know that we need to be positioned alongside everything that customer success teams are doing and sales teams are doing to make sure that we can make it even easier to spread all those institutional learnings that you get across an organization. So we're just making sure that we're connected to the right people. We're always going to be a depth-first company. We're not going to try to put forth a uh half-baked solution to something that's adjacent to what we do. Um, so I really like the idea of getting together with other best depreed products to deliver great solutions.

SPEAKER_00 40:54

Brilliant. I look forward to seeing how that manifests. That's brilliant. So, well, look, Matt, I've really enjoyed hearing you share with us the years of your wisdom and knowledge and and you know the experience just comes through in abundance there. So thank you so much for spending the time with us. And I do hope if uh people out there have got questions, they do get in contact because um you clearly are a man who has all the answers. So thank you very much, Matt, for for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 41:18

Thank you for thinking I have all the answers. I absolutely do not, but we we still try our hardest nonetheless.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

It's it's been a fun conversation.

SPEAKER_01 41:25

Thanks a lot, Christopher.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

No, appreciate it. Thank you, Matt.