#TDSU Episode 169:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:34 - Why customer feedback gets ignored

00:02:38 - NPS: A misunderstood metric

00:03:06 - The missing nuance in customer feedback

00:04:23 - Users vs. champions: Whose feedback matters?

00:06:29 - Vanity metrics vs. meaningful insights

00:08:46 - NPS: Just the starting point

00:10:04 - Treating feedback as a nurture flow

00:10:27 - Signing off

📺 Lifetime Value: Your Destination for GTM content

Website: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com

🤝 Connect with the hosts:

Dillon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonryoung

JP's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpierrefrost/

Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-zambito/

👋 Connect with Emma Lampert:

Emma's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmalampert/

[Dillon] (0:00 - 0:01)

Why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Emma] (0:01 - 0:06)

Um, it's customer feedback. No one cares about customer feedback.

[Dillon] (0:18 - 0:29)

What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP here. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:29 - 0:33)

Hey, it's not the boogity man. It's not the boogeyman. It's the, how do you do?

[Dillon] (0:34 - 0:43)

Interesting. Okay. Longer.

I think you probably had to script that. I like it. And we have Rob with us.

Rob, can you say hi please?

[Rob] (0:44 - 0:47)

Those are, that's a hard act to follow. Hello.

[Dillon] (0:48 - 0:53)

Just throw in the towel. And we have Emma with us. Emma, can you say hi please?

[Emma] (0:53 - 0:53)

Hi.

[Dillon] (0:54 - 1:00)

Thank you. Nice and simple.

And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Emma, thank you so much for being here.

Can you please introduce yourself?

[Emma] (1:00 - 1:23)

Sure. So, um, I'm Emma. I've already said hi.

Um, I've been a customer success leader for probably the last 12-ish kind of years. I mostly help or have helped startups who are just kind of acquiring customers build out their post-sales journey and their post-sales structure for their customers. Um, currently I'm building the international business, um, for Formstacks.

I'm the director for European and international operations.

[Dillon] (1:24 - 1:33)

Very cool. Emma, you know what we do here? We ask one single question of every single guest, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success?

So why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Emma] (1:34 - 1:38)

Um, it's customer feedback. No one cares about customer feedback.

[Dillon] (1:41 - 1:55)

Uh, I know I don't. So I agree with you. I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. We're not allowed to say that, right? What makes you think that?

I guess you, you talk to all these different companies and they all say, yeah, don't, don't bother or what?

[Emma] (1:55 - 2:37)

I don't think it's a question of anyone saying don't bother. I think if you ask any CEO, any kind of CRO, VP, CS, they're always going to tell you that they do care. But I think the fact is, is that if you're collecting something like NPS and more specifically, if you're a CS leader, who's being targeted with something like NPS, if none of your other metrics, particularly the commercial ones agree, no one's going to care.

And it's a, it's a waste of time. And I see loads of CS leaders getting stuck with things like NPS and being held accountable. And it's not a CS metric at all.

In fact, it's barely a product metric or a company metric. So that's if, unless something terribly awful is happening in your commercial numbers, no one cares, or at least your boss doesn't care about customer feedback.

[Dillon] (2:38 - 3:06)

Would you agree though, that it is difficult negative and negative? Okay. Makes sense.

Oh, we have a terrible NPS and our retentions in the toilet. But if you're hitting your revenue numbers, but your NPS stinks, yeah, nobody's going to pay attention. What if you could be doing better on your revenue numbers and you all just forecast it poorly?

Like you, you shop for the middle instead of the top. Do you ever find that anybody's having that conversation or have you ever tried to have that conversation?

[Emma] (3:06 - 4:22)

I have had that conversation and it's a lot more nuanced than just being able to use something like NPS. And I think one of the challenges that most people have with NPS is it's far too vague. Like you're just asking somebody whether they recommend usually, and it doesn't give you any meat.

If you can drill into that with your customers as a head of CS or CS leader more and work out what it is that's blocking them and actively work with your product team to kind of determine where those blockers are specifically within your product, and they tend to be around things like adoption, then yes, that's really powerful. And you can use that to say, if we were doing this, we would be able to increase this adoption metric, this revenue metric, we'd be able to expand potentially cross-sell, all of those things that are really like key buzzwords for SaaS businesses right now. But it tends not to come from those high level data points.

And it also tends not to come from users. So typically with NPS, you're asking all of the people that are logging into your platform or into your products to kind of rate your system. What you really want is that information from your champions that, where you can link things like business value and business metrics for your customers to products, features, issues, bugs, state within your product so that you can influence at a greater level.

But it's never just the first thing anyone gives you in their customer feedback survey that's going to show you where you could be doing better.

[Dillon] (4:23 - 4:36)

The only thing I would add to that is I do think users are valuable, but they're valuable for a different reason. It is more degrees separated from realized revenue, but still valuable. Rob, why don't you jump in?

[Rob] (4:36 - 6:29)

Yeah, it's got my mind buzzing. Because I'm thinking of some recent interactions I've had. For example, a client of mine is organizing a customer advisory board.

Like, well, let's go through the agenda. First thing on the agenda is like, all right, we're going to ask you for referrals. And it's like, okay, what about the whole feedback portion of a cab?

And I think of a different example where I learned probably about a program. And I thought it was like, super compelling, really well articulated. And it was really well thought out between having a customer advisory board doing sentiment analysis, doing advanced surveying, doing deep dive customer interviews.

NPS, I think was part of it, but I think it was like a small part. And it may have been just an obligatory checkbox that their board was expecting. Because I don't know why, like, a lot of the boards behind companies that we work with are expecting NPS as like the gold standard, as a standard, in lieu of having no standard, I suppose.

And then I'm thinking also about Emma, Dillon and JP and I were recently at a conference, and a friend of mine gave a presentation. She was like, NPS is not about the score. It is all about the feedback.

So as long as you're building some scalable, repeatable motion to get feedback, and that's being looked at on a periodic methodical basis, then it's doing what it's to do. But to your point, most companies aren't really treating it that way. They're just thinking about the number.

Cheryl was like, I don't care about the number. The number is not important to me. It's the content.

So I don't know how to reconcile this exactly myself. But I think you're bringing up one of the core divides in our world of customer success. That is customer value versus revenue out.

Customer value versus company value. I'll put it that way.

[Emma] (6:29 - 6:54)

And I would totally agree with you. I think for most people that care about the number, it's a vanity metric. For everyone who cares about improving outcomes for either their users, through usually kind of product improvements or improvements to the way something works, or actually improving that value for their customers, it's all in what they're writing, or it's all in what they would write if you ask them a really intelligent question, not just do you recommend our software?

Because I don't know anyone who does that, just as in general.

[Rob] (6:56 - 7:02)

Show up to your friend's party. Hey, have you heard of Toast? Gainsight?

Anybody?

[Dillon] (7:03 - 7:04)

JP, what about you?

[JP] (7:04 - 8:46)

All feedback is not created equal, right? It's not that something... NPS aside, I mean, you hit it, Emo, you said about vanity metrics, right?

I think that I often have this discussion in a different way with the guys because it's about this nuance. That's another word that you mentioned, right? If you get some feedback and there's not much nuance or meat on it, as you say, then it's really hollow.

What do you do with that, right? I like to think of it as if we're doing a good job of capturing what is actually going on with customers, then there is some data that is usable. And so, yes, customer feedback, I think it sounds when you said it, it's a little bit jolting.

But it sounds like what you're really saying is just some silly NPS score is not going to be useful. If we want useful customer feedback, we have to be asking these intelligent questions, right? And I think one of the things too is being able to find a link.

Rob, you mentioned the tension between... I think you were going to say customer value and revenue outcomes. I think that's what you were saying.

But I think yeah, how do we bridge? How do we find a bridge between those two things, right? I think that that is part of the space where we play in CS.

But I definitely agree. You just get some NPS, just one number. What is that?

By what scale? There's nothing. Yeah, there's nothing.

[Dillon] (8:46 - 10:04)

So we are almost at time here, Emma. And the last thing I wanted to say is I think we are conflating two different things, though, in that NPS is meant to be highly quantifiable. This sort of like one piece of data that sits on an account with the assumption that it means something.

So let's set that aside for a second. And we're doing it right. We're doing it consistently.

And we are looking at it stratified in a number of different ways. So both like, let's talk about like customer industry, but then also hierarchically, are we looking at that stratified to make sure that it's not all just this huge alphabet soup or NPS soup. But then we talk about this feedback piece.

And I think when we talk about NPS that way, I think it was you, Emma, you said it in such a way that it made me feel like it was a lead funnel. It's not something that you just send out, get a response back and you close the file and you're done. In this way, it's really just the very beginning of a long and many varied path, right?

It can go in a lot of different ways. It can be positive, it can be negative. You could get good feedback on the negative side, you can get terrible feedback on the positive side.

And it's your job to sort of like translate all of that. But I do think that that is materially different than this exercise of gathering NPS.

[Emma] (10:04 - 10:26)

Do you guys agree? I would say customer feedback is more of a nurture flow. And if you're trying to distill all of that feedback and how your users and your champions and your business kind of people feel about how your product works, it's not coming from a single metric.

And if you're using that single metric to benchmark yourself against others, or to determine how good your product is, then I think you're missing the point.

[Dillon] (10:27 - 10:38)

Good stuff. Well, Emma, that is our time. Thank you so much for bringing this and talking about it in a slightly different way.

We'd love to have you back in the future, particularly in hearing about your experience at Formstack. But for now, we do have to say goodbye.

[Emma] (10:39 - 10:40)

Goodbye. Thanks for having me. It's been great.

[Dillon] (10:41 - 10:41)

Thanks, Emma.

[Emma] (10:42 - 10:43)

Cheers.

[VO] (10:48 - 11:19)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at LifetimeValueMedia.com.

Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.

Do you have a story to tell, an opinion to share?

Join us on The Daily Standup.