How to Get Team Buy-In on your Customer Feedback Program

Customer feedback programs are your ticket to long-lasting and high-value customer relationships. They reveal gaps in your product so you know what customers need to solve their problems.

Without team buy-in, however, customer feedback programs fall flat. You spend precious resources sourcing, collecting, and analyzing feedback, but if your teams aren’t primed for acting on that feedback, you’ve lost a huge opportunity to inform your product strategy — and drive business growth.

Team buy-in is critical for a successful customer feedback program. A unified cross-functional effort to collect feedback, understand customer pain points, and follow up with solutions is a win-win situation for customers and employees. Ultimately, your clients see you as trustworthy and proactive, which improves the customer experience (CX) and reduces churn. In turn, employees feel great about their work and stay motivated to keep bringing in positive results, which improves employee engagement and retention.  

Especially in a volatile economic climate, customer loyalty acts as a shield for your business. Here’s how to get buy-in from team members to build that shield together.

Build an internal team and outline their role 

Team buy-in is essential for the success of your customer feedback program, but first, you need to know which teams you need buy-in from and the role they will play. So, build a pool of stakeholders that will be involved at each stage. Ideally, you want members of the C-suite and representatives from each function of the company drive company-wide action and not just changes within one department.

A SaaS business typically includes sales, marketing, engineering, customer success, customer experience, product marketing, and product management. Each team serves customer needs at different touchpoints during the customer journey, but they may be operating in silos and inadvertently withholding information that could help other departments.

Invite team members from each department and explain how a customer feedback program positively impacts their productivity and overall business growth. Then, get each team representative up to speed on why they are a part of executing the program and their role in aligning the rest of their teams with customer insights and product roadmaps. 

Let’s say your customer success teams get feedback through surveys like net promoter scores (NPS) and customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) — but you need their buy-in to share crucial customer insights with product and sales teams. 

If a customer churned due to the absence of a feature, your product teams could lean on a tool like UserVoice to incorporate that feature into a future roadmap. From there, sales teams could mark the dates to reengage with the customer and inform them about the improvement. Plus, marketing teams could use the feature launch to run teaser campaigns. In effect, you can align product initiatives with business objectives to provide tangible outcomes for your customers and business.  

When you help your team members see how a collaborative feedback program will facilitate the flow of knowledge and inform product strategy, you build a strong case and are more likely to get instant buy-in from team members.