Getting feedback isn’t easy. Sometimes we think we know best and that we understand our industry better than anyone else. But in order to create relationships with customers, we have to understand what is important to them.
Don’t just take my word for it. I asked three business-minded professionals to give their take on feedback and how to better manage what customers are sharing with businesses.
The first person is Solon Angel who is the founder of Mindbridge, a startup that grew to a valuation of over 100 million US dollars. He is the Managing Partner of Fresh Founders and currently the CEO of a stealth mode AI startup. He has deep expertise in B2B SaaS and AI.
The second entrepreneur is Raveena Oberoi, owner of Just Cakes. Raveena started her business when she was 16 and grew it into an incredible brand of baked goods across multiple locations.
Lastly, Bob Mathers is a customer experience specialist focused on helping B2B companies increase their revenue. Bob has helped hundreds of startups, including my company, create their customer experience playbooks.
I always say to entrepreneurs, you're going to miss the days when you knew all your customers personally, when you could ask why and get the insights that you really need.Bob Mathers
Methods for gathering customer feedback
Ingrid: How do you gather feedback from your customers and which methods have proven most effective for you?
Solon: When someone decides to speak to you, even if it's not clear or actionable, it's noteworthy. You have to stop everything and try to understand what they really want.
When someone tells you, “Hey, I don't like this, you should do something different,” take it seriously. Some of the most brilliant features in both past ventures and in our current product grew out of a complaint. Someone on my team would dig a bit more and then realize that tiny thing was a symptom of a much bigger problem.
Raveena: Data doesn't lie. Every quarter, we look at Shopify analytics and our POS analytics. We also look at our sales numbers every week as a full team. What sold, what didn't sell, what flavors are doing well, what aren't.
I've been able to cut 23 products from my menu because they weren't moving and I can focus my time and energy on the products that do move.
Your customers may tell you one thing, but their purchasing behavior can tell a different story. Looking at the data can help you distinguish between what customers say they want and what they actually buy, so businesses can make more informed decisions. Over the past six to eight months, our team has focused on analyzing sales data to base our decisions on real customer behavior, rather than just feedback. This approach has proven helpful in aligning our offerings with actual customer preferences.
Bob: One of the most common things that entrepreneurs approach me about is surveys. Once we dig into their needs a little more, we realize surveys are rarely needed.
There's a lot of survey fatigue out there, right? I don't know how many survey requests you get in a week or a month versus how many you complete. But I imagine it's lots of requests and very few that you actually finish. So I start from the end. I'm like, okay, you could do surveys, but how many responses do you need in order for it to be valuable? Well, we need 50. Okay. And what if you get a 5% response rate? Do the math on that.
So usually I err on the side of conversations because they get to the heart of the insights you really care about. I always say to entrepreneurs, you're going to miss the days when you knew all your customers personally, when you could ask why and get the insights that you really need.
If I hear the same type of feedback three times, I'm gonna talk about it with my managers. I know that threshold is low, but I also hold my team to a very high standard.Raveena Oberoi
Sorting through customer feedback
Ingrid: How do you differentiate between constructive feedback and feedback that might not align with your business goals or vision?
Solon: It comes from the context of who's giving it. Sometimes you run into individuals who will give you 20 negative comments about your app, when most people tell you one negative point. This might be a person that has a higher standard, so the question is, do we need to fix 20 things? Or is that person more demanding than the others?
And that's fine, but you just need to know that to satisfy that type of customer, they might be late comers– people that come when everything is perfect. So I will rephrase the question: are you capable and should you handle all the feedback that is being given to you?
Raveena: I have to remember that being in the food industry, people's palates are different. Someone may think my red velvet cake is the best thing in the world. Another person may hate it. So I take this kind of feedback with a grain of salt. If it's a repeated thing, then that's something to consider. If I hear the same type of feedback three times, I'm gonna talk about it with my managers. I know that threshold is low, but I also hold my team to a very high standard.
Right now, I'm away from my team for a month and this is a true test of our systems. In the time that I've been gone, we've gotten one piece of negative feedback. But, if it's one out of 74 orders that went out, am I really going to scrutinize it? Or am I going to be like: maybe we messed up. Who knows?
Bob: Maybe it sounds like a cliche, but I think the most important thing is that we are authentically curious about the experience we're delivering to our prospects and our customers. The most important part of that is setting aside all the biases and the baggage that we're bringing to the conversation.
I would say the majority of the time entrepreneurs say, “I want feedback from our customers,” but what they really want is validation. What they really want is to hear that their idea is great. Maybe there's a small thing here, a little tweak here, a little tweak there. Anything that goes outside of that, that really challenges the heart of their idea or their value proposition, they're going to dismiss very quickly. I get it. It’s a hard, scary thing to confront when you're really passionate about something. But that's what I mean by authentically curious.
I really think the most important thing is that we dismiss all of the parts of us that are looking for validation. And sometimes that means we need somebody else sitting in on the conversation because the closer we are to it, the more of our heart and our money and our time are invested into it, the harder it is to get some distance.
You have to be empathetic to what the users are going through. Someone lashes out on us, why is that? Have we done something wrong? Have we said something wrong? We try to be empathetic to what the people are going through.Solon Angel
Making sure customers feel seen and heard
Ingrid: What strategies do you use to ensure customers feel heard and valued when they provide feedback?
Solon: I try to make my team more empathetic to what the user is dealing with in the day. Like if you're talking to accountants during tax season, do you understand how hard it is? Those people plan their babies and personal life based on the tax season. Just like athletes do meal prep on sunday, many accountants do meal prep ahead of tax season. They're not athletes. They're mental athletes. It's that hard, right?
I remember an accountant on Twitter saying, all right, it was nice to spend time with my wife this year, because they're both tax accountants, "I'm going to see her on the other side of the busy season."
They just stop being a couple for weeks, right? And so, you have to be empathetic to what the users are going through. Someone lashes out on us, why is that? Have we done something wrong? Have we said something wrong? We try to be empathetic to what the people are going through.
Raveena: A lot of the time with food, I feel like people do have an understanding that things aren't always gonna be perfect. We're human. This is a handmade product. Things can go wrong. Things can get overbaked. Things can get missed in ingredients.
So I always start off there. Like, “Hey, thank you so much for your feedback. Negative or positive, it's always helpful for us. I really wanna make this right. How can we help rectify this? I just want to understand a little bit of what went wrong or what happened. Can you please tell me?” Usually they're pretty open to it. We always have a satisfaction policy so we refund 30%, or we give them store credit. And nine times out of 10, that does the trick.
Bob: That's a great question because that's probably the piece that I think most people miss the most. Asking people for feedback is largely useless unless you're going to feed back to them what you heard and what you're going to do about it, and then follow through on the communication. Doing this shows them they've got a voice.
Making people feel heard isn’t about asking good questions, it's about demonstrating through your actions–not just your words–that you've heard what they’ve said, and you value their opinion enough to do something with it.
Doing something with the feedback could be, “We're not going to do that thing you told us is really important.” But that is still a form of listening because you’ve carefully considered the feedback and understand that you’re not moving in that direction because it doesn't align with your vision or strategy. The mistake that most people make is they go and ask a bunch of people, and then they don't follow up.
And then six months later, they go back and ask those same people, and they aren't interested in filling out a survey or talking to them again because they gave an hour of their time six months ago. Maybe you did a lot with their feedback, but you didn’t communicate it.
It's definitely an art. One, you have to respond quickly. A lot of times people complain in the heat of the moment. And most of the time when you respond they're almost apologetic. They're kind. They recognize that you're doing everything you can. Most people just want to be heard.
I think it's just really important to recognize if you were in the wrong. I hate the phrase “never apologize.” Sometimes the solution is as simple as saying, “I'm sorry. I know that this has affected you. We dropped the ball. I know how this made you feel, and here's what we're willing to do about it.” Doing this brings some humanity to the situation. A lot of times people just want you to admit you screwed up and that you recognize that you made their life harder than it needed to be.
Ensure you have a process to resolve negative feedback
Ingrid: How do you handle negative feedback and what processes do you have in place to address and resolve customer complaints?
Solon: You shouldn't be able to service all customers.
If you’re McDonald's and you’re serving billions of meals, you should handle it all. But if you're not McDonald's, you're the local bakery on a corner in Paris, and you're a craftsman of bread. You're not going to service a huge market. You may only want to serve French people that like two types of croissant and don't mind if the coffee is too hot.
I was in Paris not too long ago and there was an American in line who complained the croissant was too greasy. The baker ignored him and continued serving other customers.
Then I heard the French baker say, “Oh, he's American.ll those Americans always complain about something.” And he just dismissed it. He’s not going out of business. If you don’t need to grow and you have a quirky way of running your business then no, you don't need to service everyone.
But my view of this is, even when you think this might not be constructive feedback, there's always something to learn. So I try to pay attention to all sorts of feedback, and I'd rather be overcautious with it than be dismissive too quickly.
Raveena: I’ve struggled with this topic up until about a year ago. Try your best to remove ego from the exchange. I get that your first business, your project, your service that you're working on, is your baby, and it's a reflection of you. It's very, very personal, and it's very emotional, and you're going to go up and down. So when people give negative feedback or constructive criticism, you think it's negative feedback about you as a person, but it's not.
You have to be able to separate the two. Of course there’s a piece of you in there, but you have to be able to look at it super objectively. It's going to be hard, but ask yourself this, “If I was in their shoes and someone did what they're saying I did, how would I feel?”
You really need to be able to separate your ego from what you're doing and take it in because the feedback could be a golden nugget that pushes you forward. You could learn something from it. I think humility is also baked into it. You don't know everything. You will never know everything, and you're always on a learning curve.
Customer feedback can be transformational for businesses
Ingrid: Can you share an example of a significant change you made to your product or service, based on customer feedback?
Solon: So in artificial intelligence there's the concept of false positives, right? When you present results generated by AI to humans, sometimes there's a phase of training or learning to go back and forth.
And customers in the sales process don't want to do that. It’s annoying. They would say, “I'm worried that you guys are finding too much stuff. I don't want to create all that work for myself.” They’d ask us, “How do I know that this is real work versus false work (false positives)?” And, “How do you guys deal with false positives?”
That early feedback and those simple questions led to a deep thinking exercise on how we were designing the whole app. I think part of the success of MindBridge is having instant insights on day one, without having to configure the system, without having to train it. That stems from us listening to the market.
Raveena: I started my business when I was 16. A lot of it was custom cakes from home for friends and family, that kind of stuff.
I think the biggest pivot was during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic about 80% of our business was event based, weddings, birthdays. The pandemic destroyed all of that. So we had to pivot. Then we started to see an uptick in one product: cake in a jar.
We thought, ok, why don't we make our entire business revolve around this for a little bit and see how it goes? We started to get distribution for grocery stores, vending machines, etc. I think we tripled the amount that we were making, in terms of jar quantity every single month.
Before the pandemic, we would order a pallet of jars once a month. Around a year and a half after the start of the pandemic, we were ordering almost a pallet a week. Now, we're ordering a pallet a week– sometimes two pallets a week. We pivoted it because the people buying that product are the people that are making my business stay afloat. So I need to listen to them.
I've applied that same lesson to our catalog. Three or four years ago, people loved intricate details, and they had disposable income. Now, the economy isn’t like that anymore. And people don't have as much disposable income, but they still want to celebrate. So we developed a menu that met those needs– a to-go collection with a little bit of decoration. It has a quicker turnaround and is still very affordable. Those orders make up 27% of our revenue right now. Another 53% comes from our cake jars, and the remainder is custom stuff. A strong majority of my business came from taking customer feedback. I probably would not have been able to sustain my business if I hadn’t pivoted.
Turning feedback into a business breakthrough
Gathering customer feedback and acting on it is essential to maintaining a healthy business. As entrepreneurs, we have to approach feedback–whether it’s aggregated data or an individual conversation–with an open mind and a willingness to adapt.
As Solon Angel, Raveena Oberoi and Bob Mathers illustrate, the key lies in listening with sincere curiosity, understanding the context and responding with empathy. Whether it's integrating simple yet impactful changes, leveraging data to drive decisions, or pivoting business models in response to evolving customer needs, responding effectively to feedback can transform mistakes and missteps into opportunities for growth.