Building a product roadmap is a vital and incredibly useful process for any product manager, and the right roadmapping software can make the difference between a clear, insightful, and flexible plan that anyone can understand, and a chaotic mess of missed deadlines and broken promises. 

A well-made roadmap will help to ensure your teams are aligned with your product vision, and it’ll help you to build trust and excitement with your users and potential customers. It can even improve productivity and motivation – knowing that everyone else is on the same page as you can do wonders.

In this article, we’ll break down what you should be looking for in your product roadmap software, then we’ll share our top picks of the bunch, as well as a few honorable mentions.

We’ll also compare some of the best product roadmap software options available today, highlighting where each tool works best.

Why use product roadmap software?

Product roadmap tools provide a structured and visual way to outline the product development journey. It helps teams create a strategic plan, prioritize tasks, and communicate their vision effectively across departments. 

Whether you’re a lean startup or a profitable enterprise, using dedicated roadmapping software can lead to increased efficiency, better collaboration, and more informed decision-making.

Sharable, easy-to-understand roadmaps can help to ensure that all your stakeholders know what you’re working on and why. They foster communication and help to ensure that your different teams aren’t stuck in silos without an understanding of the bigger picture.

The best product roadmap software will also provide you with tools to help you prioritize your work and organize your backlog. In-built prioritization scoring options and frameworks can help you to ensure you’re staying on top of things, and using your resources as efficiently as possible.

Since the latest wave of AI advancements hit the scene, the quickest-moving teams have already harnessed these powerful tools to provide time-saving (and thus money-saving) AI-powered features. Much of the less inspiring or more time-consuming tasks can now be made much quicker and easier using these innovative systems.

Key benefits of using product roadmap software

Finding the right product roadmap software offers numerous advantages, including:

• Enhanced Collaboration: Teams can work together, regardless of their physical location, to align their efforts and contribute to the roadmap.
• Clear Communication: A well-structured roadmap provides stakeholders with a clear understanding of your product’s direction and goals.
• Adaptability: As market conditions change or new insights emerge, you can easily adjust your roadmap to stay in line with your business’s evolving needs.
• Efficient Resource Allocation: By prioritizing features and tasks, you can allocate resources effectively to ensure timely delivery.
• Increased Accountability: With a documented roadmap, responsibilities are clear, and accountability is heightened across the organization.

Top features to look out for

When considering product roadmap software, certain features can greatly enhance your planning and execution processes. Look for software that offers:

• Customizable roadmaps: The ability to create roadmaps that suit your product’s unique needs and adapt as your strategy evolves.
• Collaboration tools: Features that facilitate communication and collaboration among cross-functional teams, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
• Prioritization capabilities: Tools that help you prioritize features and tasks based on factors like customer feedback, business goals, and market trends.
• AI assistance: Effective AI-powered tools can potentially save you a lot of time that would otherwise have been spent on day-to-day tasks.
• Integrations: Seamless integration with project management, development, and communication tools to streamline workflows.
• Shareable roadmaps: Clear, accessible visual representations of your roadmap, making it easier for all stakeholders to understand and engage with your plans.
• Analytics and reporting: The ability to track progress, analyze results, and gather insights to refine your strategy.

Top 8 product roadmapping tools

While all of the product roadmap software listed below will help you create a roadmap, the one that is right for you will depend on the size of your team, the complexity of your product, whether you’re managing a single product or a portfolio, and more. 

One note on the listed prices: all the prices below include annual discounts where offered, so if you are planning on paying monthly you will likely end up paying slightly more.

1. ProdPad

Price: Modular, starting at $24 p/m

Free trial: As long as you need

Good for: Lean startups, SMEs, and enterprises looking for comprehensive, time-saving, and user-friendly roadmap software.

ProdPad is an end-to-end product management software made by product managers, for product managers. With a very user-friendly interface, it helps you to get up and running with a minimum of fuss, and will help you get the best from the entire product journey. 

The sharable roadmaps are simple to understand yet rich with nested detail, so even someone who’s never heard of your product could look at it and know what’s going on. They can be organized in a number of ways, allowing you to visualize your plans for your entire portfolio. It even ties your OKRs directly into your roadmap, to help various stakeholders understand your strategy and how it aligns with your product vision.

This is particularly useful as teams scale, when product decisions are no longer made in a single room and the cost of misalignment increases. Being able to see why something is on the roadmap, not just what is planned, becomes essential rather than a nice-to-have.

ProdPad’s modular price plans help you to pick exactly what you need from the range of features available, and its generous free trial starts at 7 days, though it gets longer the more you use it, allowing you all the time you need to really work out how it can improve your workflow.

ProdPad has also recently rolled out a growing range of AI-powered tools to help reduce your day-to-day workload. It can write your feature ideas for you, so you can get on with solving your users’ problems. It can discover common themes in your customer feedback, link that feedback to initiatives, detect duplicate ideas in your backlog, analyze how well your ideas fit your product vision, and much more.

With just a few prompts and a few minutes, you can go from a blank page to a fully developed roadmap that has feature ideas that are linked to supporting customer feedback and tied in to measurable objectives. It will help ensure your roadmap is fully aligned with your business goals and strategy, and that you’re not wasting your time focusing on the wrong thing.

ProdPad also fosters communication and collaboration across all your teams, with unlimited reviewers able to see and contribute to your feature ideas and lend their expertise and insights to the development process.

All in all, ProdPad isn’t just product roadmap software. It’s a user-friendly end-to-end suite of product management tools that will empower you to make products that solve your users’ problems, and will save you time and effort while you do it.

Top Features:

Idea and feedback management: Streamline the collection and prioritization of ideas and feedback from various sources, including a customizable customer feedback portal.

Customizable and sharable roadmaps: Roadmaps that are simple to understand, but rich with contextualized information on product planning, bringing together strategic direction and day-to-day product management

Outcome-based roadmapping: ProdPad ties in Objectives and Key Results directly into the Now-Next-Later roadmap (invented by ProdPad co-founder and CEO Janna Bastow), so anyone who looks at it can easily see how each initiative is working towards company objectives, and the metrics used to define success.

Innovative AI-driven tools: ProdPad is at the forefront of the AI revolution, with GPT-powered tools to help you write up feature ideas, create user stories, analyze how your ideas fit with your product vision, find themes and opportunities in your customer feedback, and more.

Product Portfolios: Top-level view that brings together all the information on your products. Gives every member of your team, and customers, a practical overview of your strategic objectives. with tailored and accessible resources on current and future product offerings. 

User Personas & Feedback: In ProdPad, your customer’s problems, needs, and desires are fundamentally built in to the workflow. User personas and real customer feedback can be fed into every stage of the decision-making process. 

Collaboration: ProdPad offers a dynamic environment to communicate ideas and developments. Team members can contribute and provide input in a way that fits with their daily jobs, while product managers retain control while being able to tap into diverse sources of insight and innovation.

Integrations and Export: ProdPad has a wide range of integrations and export options, from workflow software like Jira and Trello, to customer feedback solutions such as Salesforce and Slack, and even a live API and Zapier integration. 

Pros:

• User-friendly interface for easy adoption.
• Robust prioritization tools for informed decision-making.
• Wide range of integration options
• Exceptional customer support for prompt assistance.
• Publicly sharable roadmaps that can be adjusted depending on the audience.
• Powerful GPT-powered AI tools to help you work more efficiently.

Cons:

• Provides so much information and feedback that it can be overwhelming for inexperienced product managers.
• Advanced analytics might be limited in lower-priced plans.
• @ Megan – I feel like we should add another one here for the sake of balance, but can’t think of something mild enough to fit.

2. monday.com

Price: Paid plans including roadmaps start from $20 p/m

Free trial: Free basic plan (limited features)

Good for: Large teams that will be able to take advantage of all the options available

Not satisfied with just being product roadmap software and providing for just one part of your workflow, monday.com has positioned itself as a full-spectrum “Work OS”. With a wide range of integrations, customizable automations, and an inbuilt app marketplace, it has the potential to be your one-stop-shop for all your products and projects. However, this also means it’s very complicated to set up.

Roadmaps are just a part of this, though they aren’t available on the basic plan so you’ll need to pay more to access them. Unfortunately, monday.com only provides timeline and Gantt charts, beyond the basic Kanban style, as your roadmap options.

Essentially, this is a powerful project management tool that can also be useful in product management, if you don’t mind paying more, and working out the complex automation system required to get everything working the way you want.

Top Features:

Customizable Boards: Create custom boards to match your product’s development stages.

Task Tracking: Monitor tasks, deadlines, and progress within a visually appealing interface.

Integration with Third-Party Apps: Seamlessly connect with other tools your team already uses.

Automation: Set up automated responses to certain events, cutting down on busy work

Collaboration Tools: Foster communication and teamwork through built-in features.

Pros:

• Only provides timeline and Gantt chart roadmaps
• Versatile platform catering to various business needs.
• Highly customizable interface for personalized workflows.
• Easy-to-use task tracking for streamlined project management.
• Extensive integration options.

Cons:

• Most features require higher-priced plans.
• Steep learning curve for complex setups.
• Automation can fail, potentially causing major issues.

3. airfocus

Price: Plans start at $69 p/m

Free trial: 14-day

Good for: Small teams with a decent budget seeking simple prioritization and roadmapping software.

This is theoretically one of the easier-to-use options on the list, with a pretty intuitive interface and a straightforward process for building a basic roadmap in a short time. It’s customizable, flexible, and sharable, and can be a useful roadmapping tool for product managers.

There are also a number of prioritization tools, such as airfocus’ proprietary game Priority Poker. It’s essentially an in-app method of gathering prioritization scores from a variety of stakeholders, in which you have a deck of cards from 1 to 10, and use them to pick your most and least preferred initiatives.

However, airfocus has quite a high price point, especially given that it doesn’t provide much support for product development and management beyond roadmapping and prioritization. Given that smaller teams are the ones most likely to benefit from its ease of use, this could be a stumbling block. It also lacks AI assistance or automation options, increasing the time you need to spend using it as part of your workflow.

Top Features:

Simple-to-use: Helpful with getting a roadmap up and running quickly.

Prioritization tools: Includes prioritization and scoring frameworks to help with managing your workflow.

Priority Poker: Provides an interactive in-app prioritization game similar to Buy-a-Feature.

Roadmap visualization: Create clear, shareable roadmaps to align teams and stakeholders. Offers outcome-based roadmaps, along with other options like Gantt charts on higher-tier plans.

Pros:

• Intuitive interface for quick adoption.
• Data-driven prioritization for objective decision-making.
• Risk assessment and mitigation features for comprehensive planning.
• Integration capabilities for a seamless workflow.

Cons:

• Advanced features are limited to higher-tier plans.
• Pricing might be a challenge for smaller teams.
• Lacking automation or AI assistance.

4. Wrike

Price: Plans start at $10 p/m

Free trial: Free basic plan

Good for: Teams seeking an all-in-one project management solution.

Another all-in-one workflow suite, in a similar vein to monday.com. Wrike provides a huge range of options to cover almost any aspect of your work. It is highly versatile and can be very useful in encouraging communication and alignment across departments.

Its lower-tier plans are cheaper than its main competitors, though the more powerful tools are locked behind a much more expensive tier. Roadmapping options are somewhat limited, with just Kanban boards and Gantt charts on offer.

Another great feature of Wrike is its customizable workflow. Teams can create their own workflows that align with their specific needs and processes. This flexibility ensures that every team member can work in a way that suits them best, leading to increased productivity and better outcomes.

While Wrike is a powerful project management tool, it is less directly useful for product people due to the limited roadmap options, as well as the somewhat clunky and dated user interface.

Top Features:

Agile project management: Enables using Agile methodologies for flexible project execution.

Resource Management: Efficiently allocate resources and manage workloads.

Advanced Reporting and Analytics: Offers robust reporting tools that provide insights into project progress, team performance, and resource utilization.

Time Tracking and Budget Management: Enables users to track time spent on tasks and projects, aiding in accurate billing and budget management.

Pros:

• Comprehensive project management functionalities.
• Real-time collaboration for efficient teamwork.
• Good range of integration options.
• Free templates to fit various working methodologies.

Cons:

• Unintuitive, dated UI.
• Only Gantt charts and Kanban roadmaps.
• Learning curve for complex project setups.
• Might offer more than needed for smaller projects.

5. Craft.io

Price: Plans start at $19 p/m

Free trial: 14-day

Good for: Larger teams seeking a comprehensive product management platform.

Craft.io is a solid option for agile teams seeking a versatile product management kit. The robust analytics and reporting features address the growing importance of data-driven decision-making in today’s business landscape.

Its impressive integration capabilities enable blending it with existing workflows, reducing friction in collaboration, although migrating work over from other tools can be time-consuming.

It’s worth noting that Craft.io’s pricing structure might pose challenges for smaller teams or startups with limited financial resources. While much of the roadmapping functionality is available on the basic plan, many of the tools most useful to Agile teams are only available on more expensive plans, and don’t actually come as part of the package but are paid add-ons.

The emphasis on end-to-end product management features is undoubtedly a strength, but it results in a steeper learning curve for those seeking to take advantage of the customization options.

Top Features:

Idea Collection and Management: Provides a centralized platform for gathering, organizing, and managing ideas from various sources, such as team members, stakeholders, and customers.

User Story Mapping: Enables teams to create visual representations of user stories, features, and tasks.

Customization Options: Offers customization capabilities, enabling teams to tailor the software to their specific workflows and processes.

Analytics and Reporting: Robust analytics and reporting to track the progress of tasks, monitor KPIs, and gather insights into performance.

Good roadmap options: Provides a number of options for displaying your roadmap, from old-fashioned timelines to lean, outcome-based roadmaps.

Pros:

• Good variety in roadmap options.
• Robust analytics and reporting capabilities.
• Integration with many popular tools.
• Numerous useful features for end-to-end product management.

Cons:

• Pricing might not suit smaller teams or startups.
• Many useful features are only available on higher-tier plans.
• Steep learning curve for making the most of the customization options.

6. Roadmap.space

Price: Plans start at $19 p/m

Free trial: 14-day

Good for: Design-focused teams wanting to create visually appealing roadmaps.

Roadmap is a relatively simple entry into the roadmap software market. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it excels at creating visually engaging and comprehensible roadmaps. It makes it easier for all stakeholders, from team members to executives, to quickly understand the product’s strategic direction and timeline.

Its Presentation mode helps when sharing it with stakeholders across your organization, and its sharing options, such as embedding your roadmap into your app, aid in driving engagement.

Roadmap also provides a solid customer feedback system that integrates with a number of feedback sources, providing you with a single inbox for all of your feedback. It also helps to close the feedback loop, by keeping users updated on any actions that have been taken as a result of their feedback.

However, as it is one of the simpler tools on the list, it might not have enough functionality under the hood to satisfy larger teams, or more complex products with multiple dependencies. 

Top Features:

Intuitive Visual Roadmaps: Helps to create visually appealing and easy-to-understand roadmaps.

Simple: If you don’t have complex product management needs and just want a roadmap, Roadmap is a decent choice with a shallow learning curve.

Presentation Mode: Offers a mode that enables users to maximize their roadmap’s visual impact in meetings or presentations.

Feedback management: Provides a consolidated source of feedback, and enables users to track the progress of actions taken as a result.

Pros:

• Visually pleasing interface for engaging roadmaps.
• Ease of use in creating and modifying roadmaps.
• Emphasis on collaboration facilitates alignment and communication

Cons:

• Might be more design-oriented than feature-rich for some teams.
• Doesn’t provide much support for product management beyond roadmaps.

7. Ignition GTM

Price: Modules start at $16, plans start at $79

Free trial: Free basic plan

Good for: Agile teams looking for a comprehensive package to help bring a new product to market.

G2 score: 5/5 (though only 7 reviews at the time of writing)

Ignition describes itself as a Go-To-Market (GTM) tool, aiming to provide you with everything you need to get your product into the hands of your prospective customers.

It provides for Kanban and timeline roadmaps, which is not an extensive range of options, but where it really shines is in how it leverages the roadmap to help you create a fully-fledged marketing plan using AI suggestions from their ‘Copilot’. 

It will even automatically generate a timeline roadmap for you (though it’s still a timeline, so your mileage may vary). Getting started on Ignition is a relatively simple process if you’re already familiar with Agile methodologies.

Ignition is a solid choice for planning your next release, though it may be of more use as a whole package to product marketers rather than product managers. It might be difficult to establish if it works for your team, however, as the basic free plan is very limited in scope.

Top Features:

Enables Agile project management: Supports Agile methodologies for efficient project execution.

Good analytics and reporting: Provides a robust suite of tools to track performance.

AI assistance: AI-powered tools help with getting set up and managing your workflow.

Easy-to-use interface: Relatively low bar for entry thanks to the simple interface.

Pros:

• Agile-friendly platform for streamlined work processes.
• Solid product management features for effective execution.
• Integration capabilities allow linking with other PM tools.
• Templates and automation make getting set up easier.

Cons:

• Modular and granular pricing structure can be complex to navigate
• Limited features in free basic plan might hinder thorough evaluation. 
• Majority of advanced features restricted to higher-tier plans or modules.
• Only timeline and Kanban roadmaps.

8. Trello

Price: Plans start from $5

Free Trial: Free basic plan

Good for: Small teams seeking lightweight product management with roadmap capabilities.

Chances are you might already be using Trello as part of your day-to-day workflow. It’s a simple and effective tool for managing your tasks, tracking progress, and enabling communication in your teams.

It’s very easy to use, though it also customizable and you can create a number of templates to help reduce the busy work of writing out your ideas and initiatives. It’s quick to learn, and the free plan works plenty well for most of what you’ll want it to do.

In terms of roadmapping it’s relatively limited, though for smaller teams and internal communications it’s not a bad choice, allowing you to present a simple view of your current priorities, what’s next in the pipeline, and what you’re considering doing down the line.

It also integrates with a wide range of other product management tools, so if you start off using Trello and decide to go with a more robust option later, you should be able to easily migrate, or even keep Trello as part of your larger workflow.

Top Features:

Kanban-Style task management: Intuitive interface organizes tasks using a visual Kanban board, making it easy to track progress and manage workflows.

Customizable boards: Users can create custom boards that match their product development stages, team processes, and specific requirements.

Integrations: Connects with various tools to enhance collaboration and streamline workflows.

Collaboration tools: Trello’s interactive features facilitate teamwork, allowing team members to communicate, comment, and share attachments directly within tasks.

Simple task prioritization: Users can categorize tasks using labels, due dates, and checklists, enabling basic prioritization within the board.

User-friendly interface: Trello’s straightforward design and drag-and-drop functionality ensure a quick learning curve and easy adoption.

Pros:

• User-friendly design makes it an accessible tool for teams of all skill levels, allowing for quick onboarding and adoption.
• While not as comprehensive as dedicated roadmap tools, Trello’s customizable boards enable a simple visualization of project stages.
• Free plan provides a viable option for startups and small teams with limited budgets, offering core functionality without cost.
• Ability to integrate with various third-party tools allows teams to incorporate it into their existing workflows.

Cons:

• Roadmap capabilities are limited, making it more suitable for simpler project management needs.
• Lacks the scalability and advanced features needed for larger projects or organizations.

How to choose product roadmap software

With so many capable tools on the market, choosing the right product roadmap software isn’t really about finding “the best” one. It’s about finding the right fit for how your team works, and how you expect it to evolve over the next few years.

Before you decide, it helps to step back and look at three practical dimensions: your team, your scale, and the outcomes you’re trying to drive.

1. Start with how your team actually works

Before you look at features, look at behaviour.

Some teams need little more than a clear, shareable view of priorities. Others need a roadmap that connects strategy, delivery, customer feedback, and performance metrics.

Ask yourself:

• Is product management a dedicated role, or shared across functions?
  
• Do stakeholders regularly ask why things are being built?
  
• Do you need collaboration across multiple teams, or just a single squad?
  

If your team is small and delivery-focused, lightweight tools may be enough. As soon as decision-making becomes distributed, however, tools that support context, collaboration, and transparency start to matter much more.

2. Consider scale, not just size

Scale isn’t just about headcount. It’s about complexity.

You may only have a small product team today, but if you’re:

• Managing multiple products
  
• Supporting different customer segments
  
• Balancing commercial, technical, and user-driven priorities
  

…then roadmap software that works at both initiative level and portfolio level becomes increasingly valuable.

Many teams outgrow timeline-only roadmaps because they struggle to adapt when priorities change. Outcome-oriented and Now-Next-Later style roadmaps tend to scale better, especially in fast-moving environments.

3. Focus on outcomes, not just plans

Different tools optimize for very different conversations.

One of the biggest differences between roadmap tools is what they optimize for.

Some tools are great at visualising plans. Others help teams connect:

• Customer feedback to ideas
  
• Ideas to initiatives
  
• Initiatives to objectives and measurable outcomes
  

If your roadmap is mainly used for reporting, simple visuals may be enough. If it’s used as a decision-making tool, you’ll want software that keeps evidence, intent, and success criteria close to the work itself.

This becomes especially important in 2026 and beyond, as AI-assisted product teams move faster and expectations around clarity and accountability increase.

4. Look beyond features to long-term fit

The real test is whether the tool still works a year from now.

It’s tempting to choose roadmap software based on a checklist of features. A better question is:

Will this tool still support how we work a year from now?

The strongest tools tend to:

• Adapt as your product practice matures
  
• Support different audiences with different views
  
• Reduce admin and busywork rather than add to it

Ultimately, the right product roadmap software should make it easier to have better product conversations, not just prettier roadmaps.

The post Best Product Roadmap Software in 2026: Features, Pricing, and How to Choose appeared first on ProdPad.

Voice of the Customer (VoC) software tools help you turn scattered customer input into organized, actionable insights. Whether you’re a Product Team trying to prioritize features or a CX leader trying to close the loop on user frustration, the right VoC tool can help you hear your customers loud and clear – and actually do something about it.

What is Voice of Customer (VoC)?

We’ve actually covered this in more detail over in our glossary article, so head there if you need to swot about on the whole concept of VoC. 

If you think you know what Voice of Customer (VoC) is all about, then let us just fire a quick definition out to make sure we’re both on the same page here. 

VoC is the active practice of collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback – via surveys, reviews, support tickets, interviews, and social media – to understand user needs, frustrations, and preferences, and to shape product decisions accordingly.

Got that? Ok, so what do you need to do this whole VoC thing?

What are VoC Tools?

VoC tools are software platforms that help you capture customer feedback through various channels, analyze both structured and unstructured input using metrics like NPS, sentiment analysis, and thematic grouping, and turn those insights into meaningful action.

What are the benefits of using VoC tools?

Voice of Customer tools can be seriously valuable components of your tech stack. VoC tools provide the bridge between what your customers say and what your product actually delivers. 

These VoC software tools empower teams to hear the signals through the noise, respond to real user needs, and avoid the trap of building in a vacuum. Here’s what they help you achieve:

• Enable structured, data-driven decision making
• Provide continuous real-time customer listening at scale
• Surface emerging pain points and trends faster
• Support smarter backlog prioritization
• Improve customer retention and satisfaction through proactive response and loop-closing

Who should use VoC tools?

VoC tools are relevant for a broad spectrum of teams, but most commonly, they’re driven by either the Product Team or the CX/Customer Success (CS) Team. And while they’re aligned in wanting to improve the customer experience, their reasons for investing in VoC can be quite different.

Product Teams use VoC tools to gather insights that directly inform roadmap decisions. For them, feedback is fuel for ideation, prioritization, and validation. They care about what customers need and whether the team is building the right thing at the right time. 

A VoC tool for Product needs to integrate with wherever you do your backlog management, ideally provide analysis so you can easily spot the themes, and help tie feedback to real outcomes.

On the flip side, CX/CS Teams lean on VoC tools to monitor satisfaction, identify friction in the customer journey, and ensure that issues are addressed before they escalate. These teams are more focused on metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES, and typically need tools that can listen across channels (emails, chats, calls) and surface trends for operational improvement.

In both cases, VoC tools act as the voice amplifier – just with slightly different dialects depending on the listener.

Types of VoC tools

VoC tools come in a number of shapes and sizes. Depending on your team’s objectives – whether you’re gathering direct user input to inform product strategy or listening across customer support interactions to identify service trends – the type of VoC tool you need will vary. 

Here’s a breakdown of the main categories and what they’re best suited for:

Survey & Feedback Management tools

These tools focus on capturing feedback through forms, surveys, and widgets. That can be structured feedback with established customer satisfaction frameworks – think metrics like NPS, CSAT, CES that give a quantifiable pulse on how your customers feel. Or it can be custom questions you ask depending on the insights you want to discover. 

These VoC tools are designed to help you proactively ask your customers questions and seek answers to help you understand how they’re feeling about your product or service. 

Text, Conversation & Sentiment Analytics Tools

These tools are designed to analyze unstructured customer input  –  the stuff buried in support tickets, chat transcripts, call recordings, online reviews, and even social media. 

Using AI and natural language processing, they uncover sentiment, patterns, and recurring themes that would otherwise be missed. Ideal for CX and CS Teams who need to understand what’s going wrong (or right) without relying on customers to fill out surveys.

Unified Customer Intelligence Platforms

These platforms aim to do it all. They combine survey capabilities with sentiment analysis and multi-channel listening, pulling everything into one cohesive place. They provide a holistic view of customer experience across touchpoints  –  from support tickets and surveys to emails and call transcripts. 

These unified VoC platforms aren’t just capturing feedback, nor are they just analyzing feedback – they’re doing both. These VoC tools often include built-in mechanisms for surveying or collecting in-product feedback, so they don’t rely entirely on third-party integrations to hear the customer’s voice in the first place. That end-to-end control – from capture to insight – makes them incredibly powerful for organizations that need a centralized, unified source of truth.

How do Voice of Customer tools work?

VoC tools function by creating a closed-loop system for capturing customer input, analyzing it for insights, and routing those insights into the right workflows. The core flow looks like this: 

1. Capture feedback (via surveys, widgets, portals, reviews, or listening tools)
2. Process feedback using AI or manual categorization to extract trends, themes and sentiment
3. Feed actionable insights to you through some sort of visualization so you can use that to inform your product strategy and decision making

Some organizations opt for a unified VoC platform – a single system that handles everything from collecting customer feedback to analyzing and visualizing insights. Others string together a few best-in-class point solutions to cover each part of the journey: maybe a feedback portal for capture, a sentiment analysis tool for insight, and a product roadmap tool for action.

Whichever approach you take, what matters is that you have a coherent system that allows you to capture the customer’s voice at scale, understand what’s being said, and act on it meaningfully.

Key features of the best VoC tools

Not every VoC tool is created equal – and not every team needs the same set of features. But there are some common, foundational capabilities that the best Voice of Customer tools tend to offer. 

These aren’t just “nice to haves” – they’re must-haves if you want to run a truly effective, scalable VoC program. Here’s a breakdown of the essential features to look for, and why they matter:

Surveying

Surveying is the backbone of many VoC programs, and there are two main approaches: standardized frameworks like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES); or custom surveys with structured questions tailored to your specific goals. 

Whether you’re looking to benchmark satisfaction over time or dig deeper into user experience with targeted prompts, the best VoC tools give you the flexibility to do both – automate, segment, and act on your chosen data.

Feedback Portals or In-App Widgets

Make it easy for customers to leave feedback – right where they’re already engaged. Portals and widgets streamline input collection, giving you a high volume of relevant feedback without interrupting the user journey.

Sentiment and Text Analytics

Structured feedback (like NPS scoring) is useful, but most of the gold lies in open-text comments. Sentiment and thematic analysis powered by natural language processing helps you sift through the noise and spot recurring themes or issues hiding in long-form feedback.

Themes, Trend Dashboards & Real-Time Alerts

Good VoC tools don’t just collect data – they visualize it in a way that makes the insights actually usable. Dashboards that surface common themes and trends over time help teams spot what’s bubbling up and where to focus. Real-time alerts mean you’re not waiting until the next retro to act on a problem. 

This is about finishing the job – taking all that customer input and analysis, and packaging it into something easily digestible so teams can find the right insights and act on them fast.

Integrations with CRM, Support, or Product Tools

Feedback is only useful if it reaches the people who can act on it. The best VoC tools plug into your CRM, help desk, Product Management stack, and communication tools so insights flow straight into action.

Take Product, for example – you need your chosen VoC tool to link the feedback and insights directly to the work in your backlog. That way, you’re not just collecting feedback, you’re actively using it to drive prioritization decisions. It also means your Dev and Design teams have the context they need as they work on features. 

This is exactly what ProdPad does: it takes customer feedback, automatically analyzes it and surfaces the themes, and connects it to Ideas in your backlog and Initiatives on your Roadmap, so every decision is evidenced by real user input.

Feedback Tagging, Routing, and Action Workflows

Tagging lets you organize feedback by user type, persona, product area, or priority. Routing ensures it lands on the right desk. Workflows help you close the loop – so you don’t just listen, you respond.

How to choose the right VoC tool for your business

Choosing the right Voice of Customer tool isn’t just a question of budget – it’s about fit. You need a solution that works for your team’s structure, goals, channels, and maturity level. Are you focused on product feedback and roadmap prioritization? Or are you looking to measure customer sentiment and improve operational performance? Are you managing feedback across channels or just starting with email surveys? Your answers to these questions will steer you toward the right kind of platform.

Here are the core factors to consider:

1. Your goals

Are you looking to gather product feedback? Improve customer service? Monitor sentiment? Different tools are optimized for different use cases. Make sure the tool you choose aligns with your outcomes.

2. Your scale

Are you a mid-market team that needs a lean, flexible setup? Or are you managing customer experience across multiple business units and geographies? Some tools are built for scrappy product teams, others are enterprise-grade behemoths.

3. Your channel sources

Think about where your feedback is coming from – surveys, support tickets, social media, review sites? Choose tools that can pull from the channels that matter most to your customers.

4. Ease-of-use and adoption

A powerful platform that’s too hard to use won’t get adopted. Look for clean UX, clear workflows, and strong documentation so your team can actually use the tool – and benefit from it.

5. Integration requirements

VoC tools are most effective when integrated into your existing stack. Consider which systems the tool needs to plug into – whether that’s your CRM, helpdesk, product management platform, or data warehouse.

6. Pricing and total cost of ownership

It’s not just about the monthly fee. Think about how many seats you’ll need, what features are gated, and what the cost of onboarding and switching might be. Choose a tool that fits your budget now and scales with you later.

The 9 Best VoC Tools

There are a lot of Voice of Customer tools out there – some excellent, some… not so much. To help you cut through the noise, we’ve pulled together a list of the best VoC tools on the market today. 

We’ve categorized the best VoC tools by type so you can find the one that best fits your team’s goals – whether you’re looking to capture structured survey data, analyze sentiment in support tickets, or do it all in one platform.

Unified Customer Intelligence Platforms

ProdPad

A complete Product Management system with customer feedback at its heart. ProdPad comes with an unlimited number of feedback portals and widgets you can use in your app. It also allows you to integrate with other tools (such as your support system, CRM and even Slack and Teams) so you can easily pull in customer feedback from multiple sources. 

But most crucially, ProdPad offers a unique way of tying all your customer feedback directly into your product strategy and planning – literally making each piece of feedback part of your idea and roadmap workflow. Whether Feedback is added directly into ProdPad, or automatically routed in via an integration or through a portal, the powerful AI capabilities of the Signals tool within ProdPad mean you won’t have to manually work through all that feedback to understand what your customers are saying. Signals automatically does the analysis for you and visualizes the themes so you can easily see the issues you need to tackle.

ProdPad’s AI also means feedback is automatically linked to any relevant Ideas in your backlog, and stays linked as that Idea progresses through your development workflow. Meaning every time a solution ships, you get a neat list of customers to close the loop with. 

This close connection between feedback and ideas in your backlog and on your roadmap also means that anyone working on those features or initiatives can see why you’re building what you’re building. 

Yes, this is us – so we might be a little biased. But there’s a reason thousands of Product Teams rely on ProdPad to capture, analyze, and connect feedback to product strategy. It’s built from the ground up to make product-led feedback loops seamless and scalable.

With this tool you can:

• Launch multiple customizable feedback portals or in-product widgets
• Let customers comment on your roadmap items
• Route in feedback through integrations with CRMs, communication tools, support systems and more
• Have Customer Teams easily send feedback via email, Slack or Teams, browser extension or their own tools and systems 
• Tag feedback by user, company, customer value and more for better context
• Connect feedback to related ideas in your backlog or on your roadmap
• Enjoy automatic analysis with Signals surfacing the themes across all your feedback 
• Close the loop with a list of customers to contact when a feature ships

Pros:

• Strongly product‑focused – funnels feedback seamlessly to the Product Team to fuel their thinking and decision making
• A central place to route all feedback and then run automatic feedback analysis across the lot 
• The ultimate and practical way to run a customer-focused product strategy

Cons:

• Less suited to enterprise CX programs that need omnichannel voice analytics
• Limited AI sentiment analysis on support tickets or social media
• Not a full NPS or CSAT surveying suite

Pricing: Take a look for yourselves! Although you can pay for just the VoC tool from ProdPad, we would recommend you also use our Roadmapping and Idea Management tools to get that complete Product Management workflow flowing. And don’t forget, you can try ProdPad for free. 

Qualtrics XM (Voice of the Customer)

Qualtrics XM is an enterprise VoC tool that offers broad capabilities including survey distribution, customer journey mapping, text and voice analytics, and social media feedback collection. It’s designed to handle high-volume data and deliver insights through customizable dashboards.

Best suited for large organizations with mature customer experience programs, Qualtrics allows teams to design complex survey logic and integrate feedback workflows across departments. While it’s powerful, the platform may be more than most mid-sized teams need, and it comes with a corresponding cost and learning curve.

With this tool you can:

• Distribute surveys across email, web, and mobile
• Analyze open-text feedback with AI and sentiment tagging
• Build custom dashboards for different roles or departments

Pros:

• Highly customizable and scalable
• Suitable for global, multi-department CX programs

Cons:

• Complex to implement and configure
• Higher cost than point solutions

Pricing: Custom enterprise pricing; varies based on use case and volume.

Clarabridge (Now part of Qualtrics)

Clarabridge, now integrated into Qualtrics, focuses on analyzing unstructured feedback from call centers, emails, chats, and social platforms. It specializes in advanced emotion detection and root cause analysis, making it useful for identifying nuanced patterns in customer sentiment.

Often used by enterprises with heavy call volumes and omnichannel support operations, Clarabridge provides detailed conversation analytics. However, it’s typically implemented as part of a broader VoC or CX solution and can be resource-intensive to set up.

With this tool you can:

• Analyze voice and text-based feedback for sentiment and emotion
• Discover themes and issues across interaction channels
• Generate structured reports from unstructured data

Pros:

• Deep NLP and emotion analytics
• Strong capabilities for contact center feedback

Cons:

• High complexity and long implementation timelines
• Best suited for large enterprise environments

Pricing: Enterprise-only with custom quotes.

Medallia

Medallia is a full-suite VoC and experience management platform designed for enterprise use. It captures feedback across multiple channels including surveys, contact center recordings, mobile apps, and social media.

Its strength lies in real-time alerting, AI-driven predictive insights, and deep integrations with enterprise systems. Medallia is often used to operationalize CX improvements at scale, though it may be too complex or costly for smaller teams or product-focused workflows.

With this tool you can:

• Collect feedback across digital and in-person touchpoints
• Use predictive analytics to identify experience gaps
• Trigger alerts based on customer sentiment shifts

Pros:

• Strong in multi-channel experience monitoring
• Predictive analytics and real-time feedback routing

Cons:

• Less flexible for product-focused use cases
• Requires significant resources to implement and manage

Pricing: Enterprise-only, priced by scope and scale.

InMoment

InMoment offers a multi-channel VoC platform aimed at customer experience teams. It combines survey tools with social listening, online review monitoring, and contact center analytics. Its strength lies in its ability to gather data across touchpoints and consolidate them into a single view.

Often chosen by retail, hospitality, and service-oriented industries, InMoment emphasizes experience improvement workflows more than product feedback loops. It’s useful for organizations aiming to improve service delivery or operational processes, though less focused on product development needs.

With this tool you can:

• Distribute surveys and monitor online reviews
• Analyze support transcripts and call center logs
• Build dashboards and alerts for customer experience trends

Pros:

• Broad data capture capabilities across customer channels
• Real-time alerting and follow-up workflows

Cons:

• Not optimized for product team workflows
• Requires internal alignment to act on insights

Pricing: Custom enterprise pricing depending on volume and features.

Survey & Feedback Management Tools

UserVoice

UserVoice is a feedback management tool focused on helping Product Teams collect and prioritize feature requests, rather than answers to open-ended questions that ask about problems they’re facing. So that end, it’s often better suited to more output-focused teams, rather than outcome-focused. 

It offers a public or private-facing portal where users can submit feature ideas and vote on others’ suggestions. 

The VoC platform includes segmentation features for filtering feedback by customer or account type and integrates with tools like Jira and Salesforce to bring feedback into planning workflows. However, it lacks advanced sentiment analysis or multi-channel support, making it more suited for structured feedback than unstructured voice or text data.

With this tool you can:

• Collect feature requests through a customer-facing portal
• Allow users to vote on ideas to gauge popularity
• Integrate feedback into your product development workflow

Pros:

• Transparent feedback system that encourages engagement
• Helps surface the most requested features quickly

Cons:

• Limited in analytics and sentiment processing
• Not ideal for broader CX or CS use cases

Pricing: Starts at around $499/month; enterprise pricing available.

Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback is a customer experience and survey platform that enables teams to collect structured feedback through channels like web, email, SMS, kiosks, and mobile apps. It supports standard survey formats such as NPS, CSAT, and CES, and offers dashboards for monitoring and reporting.

It is commonly used by CX teams looking to measure satisfaction across multiple customer touchpoints. While it doesn’t provide advanced analytics or product integration workflows, it serves well for organizations that need a straightforward tool for running feedback campaigns and tracking key metrics. 

Its dashboard lets you monitor key satisfaction metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES, with built-in analytics to track trends, spot issues, and trigger follow-ups.

It’s useful for organizations that want a simple but powerful way to run feedback campaigns across touchpoints without needing complex integrations or enterprise-level onboarding.

With this tool you can:

• Distribute surveys across multiple channels (web, SMS, email, kiosk)
• Analyze NPS, CSAT, CES responses with dashboards
• Monitor feedback trends with customizable alerts

Pros:

• Easy to deploy across varied touchpoints
• Real-time insights and custom survey logic

Cons:

• Limited to survey-based data collection
• Sentiment analysis isn’t as robust as specialized analytics platforms

Pricing: Starts at $49/month with enterprise plans available.

Text, Conversation & Sentiment Analytics Tools

SentiSum

SentiSum is a text analytics tool that processes customer feedback from unstructured sources like support tickets, chat logs, emails, and reviews. It uses AI to categorize issues and assess sentiment, making it useful for surfacing patterns in high-volume support environments.

It’s generally used by CX and Support Teams looking to reduce manual tagging and get visibility into common pain points. While it doesn’t offer survey capabilities or roadmap integration, it’s a strong fit for teams needing post-hoc analysis of existing customer conversations.

With this tool you can:

• Automatically tag feedback themes across channels
• Track sentiment changes over time
• Integrate with help desk platforms like Zendesk and Intercom

Pros:

• High-volume processing with solid accuracy
• Good for support-driven insight generation

Cons:

• Doesn’t offer native survey collection
• Better suited for CX and CS Teams than product prioritization

Pricing: Custom enterprise pricing; varies by volume and integrations.

Thematic

Thematic is a feedback analytics tool focused on identifying recurring themes and sentiment in unstructured customer feedback. It ingests data from surveys, support conversations, or review platforms and uses machine learning to categorize comments into topics that help organizations understand what customers are saying at scale.

It is often used by Research and CX teams who want to understand the “why” behind NPS or CSAT trends. Thematic does not include survey functionality itself, so it’s best suited for teams that already have feedback data and need help analyzing it.

With this tool you can:

• Import open-ended feedback from surveys or support systems
• Identify common themes and track how they trend over time
• Visualize sentiment shifts linked to customer feedback

Pros:

• Provides actionable summaries of large feedback datasets
• Reduces manual effort for theme identification and reporting

Cons:

• No built-in feedback collection tools
• Requires existing data sources to be effective

Pricing: Custom enterprise pricing based on usage and integrations. 

Ready to turn feedback into action with VoC tools?

VoC tools can be game-changing when you choose the right one for your needs. Whether you’re an ambitious Product Team trying to prioritize your roadmap or a global CX org looking to optimize touchpoints across channels, there’s a VoC platform out there for you.

The key is to stay focused on your goals. Don’t get distracted by shiny dashboards or feature bloat – look for the tools that fit into your existing workflows and make it easier to connect feedback to outcomes.

And if you’re on the product side of the house, you owe it to your team to try a tool that’s built specifically for product strategy. Check out ProdPad (yes, that’s us). Try it for free or book a demo and see how product feedback can flow straight to you in Product and make your prioritization decisions so much easier. 

The post 9 Best VoC Tools in 2025 appeared first on ProdPad.

In this guide, we’ll show you exactly how to build a VoC program from the ground up. From defining your objectives for the VoC initiative and mapping customer touchpoints to choosing the right tools and turning insights into action. We’ll cover all the steps you need to ensure your VoC program delivers real, measurable results. 

Why is this important? Because in today’s competitive landscape, understanding and responding to customer feedback gives you those nuggets of truth to make impactful improvements to your product.

Want really good feedback? Train your customer-facing teams to give you better, quality feedback that you can actually use. Say goodbye to feature requests and hello to customer feedback that digs deeper.

What is Voice of the Customer?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the act of actively tuning in to what your customers are saying – and not saying – about your product or service. It’s more than just passively collecting feedback. VoC is a hands-on, proactive research approach for gathering insights across channels like surveys, support tickets, app reviews, interviews, social media, you name it.

Done right, VoC helps you spot what’s working, flag what’s not, and uncover what your customers actually want. It’s your fast track to reducing customer churn, prioritizing the right features, and delivering more of the stuff your users love.

And it’s not just for Product Teams. Be it Support, Sales, Marketing, or Leadership, everyone wins when the customer’s voice is part of the conversation.

Want the full lowdown? 

We’ve broken down the nuts and bolts of VoC in our Product Management Glossary. If you want to dive deeper into the philosophy and origins of the concept, you’ll find it all there. 

What is a Voice of the Customer program? 

So, a Voice of the Customer program is your game plan for actually doing VoC research in a structured, repeatable way. Instead of rushing into feedback collection in a slap-dash way, a VoC program defines a specific way to:

• Capture insights from all your key touchpoints
• Organize and analyze that data
• Turn feedback into meaningful action
• Close the loop with customers

What are the benefits of a Voice of the Customer program?

Why build a whole program around your Voice of the Customer initiative? Because it’ll be chaos if you don’t. Diving into customer interviews has good intentions, but if no framework is in place on how you handle responses, analyse feedback, and action it, you’re essentially wasting time. 

It’s like writing an essay at school. You could dive headfirst into analyzing the meaning of Romeo and Juliet off the cuff, but a better essay will be one that is planned with a structure and a compelling argument. This is all you’re doing when setting up a Voice of the Customer program – you’re laying out a framework for your feedback to fall into. 

Here’s what a well-run Voice of the Customer program brings to the table:

Real, reliable customer insight: A VoC program creates a clear, consistent pipeline of feedback. No more guessing what your customers want, you’ve got the data to prove it.

Better product decisions: When VoC is part of your process, you’re not building in a vacuum. You’re solving the right problems, for the right people, at the right time.

Lower churn, higher retention: Customers stick around when they feel heard. A strong program helps you surface pain points early, show users you’re listening, and keep them coming back.

Smarter prioritization: Not all feedback is created equal. A structured approach helps you spot patterns, weigh impact, and prioritize what actually matters, preventing you from barking up the wrong tree.

A leg up on the competition: When you’re plugged into what customers want (sometimes before they know), you can move faster, adapt quicker, and stay ahead of the curve.

Cross-team clarity: A shared VoC program gets everyone on the same page. Everyone’s working from the same source of truth about what customers really need.

Who leads a Voice of the Customer program?

A Voice of the Customer program works best when there’s a clear owner, but it shouldn’t live in a silo. 

Now, your Customer Success team is going to be a major player in acquiring Voice of the Customer feedback, leading the charge in gathering feedback. These teams are closest to the customer’s voice day to day, so they’re often in the best position to act once things are kicked off. But who makes that call? 

Well, that is down to the Product Team to set the direction. Remember, a Voice of the Customer initiative is an active endeavor that you start when there’s a strategic need: a question you need the answer to. 

So the Product Team needs to lead the way and define what they want to learn, when to ask, and where to listen. They’re responsible for shaping the questions, selecting the right touchpoints, and ensuring the insights gathered align with broader product goals.

It is a collaborative, cross-functional team effort, though. As well as this, Marketing plays a key role in communicating changes driven by customer feedback, and Leadership helps prioritize what to act on and allocates resources to make it happen. This all goes to say that VoC is not a one-person show.

Some companies even appoint a dedicated VoC Manager or form a cross-functional task force to drive the program forward. Regardless of your setup, what matters most is that someone is responsible for keeping the wheels turning and ensuring insights are actually acted upon.

How do you run a Voice of the Customer program?

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Setting up a VoC program means building a process that captures feedback, makes sense of it, and turns it into meaningful change. Here’s how to do that step-by-step:

1. Define your objectives

Before you start collecting feedback, you need to figure out what you’re trying to learn. Otherwise, you’re just gathering opinions without direction – and that is just general feedback management, not a focused VoC effort. 

You never want to run a proactive Voice of the Customer program for the sake of it – that just wastes time. If you have something you want to learn, figure out what it is right at the start.

Clear objectives keep your program focused and aligned with business goals. They help you filter out noise and focus on insights that drive impact.

Ask yourself, are you trying to…

• Improve customer satisfaction or loyalty? Use feedback to understand what makes your customers happy and double down on it.

• Reduce churn? Identify what’s pushing users away before it’s too late.
• Spot friction in the onboarding experience? Learn where users are getting stuck so you can smooth things out.
• Validate your roadmap with real user needs? Ensure you’re building the right things, not just the loudest things.
• Refine your messaging or positioning? Use customer language to speak in ways that actually resonate.

2. Map your customer touchpoints

To gather meaningful feedback, you need to know where conversations are already happening.

If you only listen in one place, you’re only hearing part of the story. Many believe that Voice of the Customer is only obtained through interviews, but there are so many other touchpoints that give you a much fuller picture. Mapping the touchpoints you’re going to look at helps you cover your blind spots and collect feedback from different angles.

Sure, run Voice of the Customer interviews and surveys, but also consider looking at:

• Support tickets – Customers are already telling you what’s broken or confusing.
• App stores or review sites – Raw, unfiltered opinions, especially from new users.
• In-app chats or feedback widgets – Great for capturing context-sensitive input.
• Sales and success calls – Rich insights from direct conversations.
• Social media mentions – Where emotions often run high (both good and bad).
• Online communities or forums – Where your power users often hang out.

Map these out so you can plan where you want to investigate to hear from your customer.

3. Choose the right tools

A VoC program lives or dies by its tool stack. You need systems that help you capture Voice of the Customer feedback at scale, organize it in one place, and surface actionable insights. Without the right tools, feedback gets lost, scattered, or ignored. Good tech turns chaos into clarity.

The tools at your disposal include:

• Survey tools: These let you easily create, distribute, and manage surveys across different customer segments. They’re ideal for capturing structured feedback at key moments in the customer journey.
• Support tools: Capture real-time customer conversations, frustrations, and wins, often revealing valuable feedback without customers even knowing they’re giving it.
• Analytics tools: Turn user behavior into insight. They help you understand where customers are succeeding, struggling, or dropping off, offering feedback through action, not just words.
• Product feedback tools: Allow you to route all feedback from other systems and sources into one central place, tag, organize, analyze and then link feedback to your idea backlog and roadmap, helping your product and CX teams turn insight into actionable next steps. ProdPad is the best example out there

Top Tip Look for tools that integrate with your existing workflows. Features like automation, tagging, sentiment analysis, and easy-to-share dashboards will help scale your program and keep everyone aligned.

4. Design your feedback loops

Now that you know where to listen and what tools to use, decide how and when you’ll collect Voice of the Customer feedback. A great customer feedback loop asks the right question at the right moment, in the right format. Bad timing = missed insight.

Proactive Voice of the Customer work is not something you need to do all the time, but instead at certain times when there’s something specific you need to learn. Some good options for creating a feedback loop include:

• CSAT surveys after support interactions: Measure how helpful your support experience actually is.
  
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys after a user reaches a wow moment:  Gauge long-term loyalty and willingness to recommend.
  
• In-app micro-surveys tied to product usage:  Ask quick, relevant questions when users are already engaged.
  
• Post-cancellation surveys (exit interviews): Learn why people are leaving, and what might’ve kept them.
  
• Customer interviews or focus groups: Go deeper with power users and champions. Run a Customer Advisory Board meeting to get valuable insight.

No matter what way you get this feedback, keep it short, relevant, and frictionless. Your customers are busy, so make it easy for them to share.

5. Collect and centralize feedback

With your loops in place, the data starts coming in. Now you need somewhere to put it. Scattered feedback leads to missed opportunities. Centralization ensures feedback is visible, shareable, and usable.

Options include:

• A feedback inbox or Slack channel
• A shared Notion board or spreadsheet
• A dedicated tool that centralizes and categorizes feedback

That last option is something ProdPad can help you with. With ProdPad, you can store all your feedback alongside your product roadmap, linking customer feedback directly to your Ideas and Initiatives, helping you to prioritize what to do next as you develop the product. 

CoPilot can also help organize and sort through your feedback – from summarizing long pieces, to automatically suggesting links to relevant Ideas in your backlog. 

6. Analyze the data

Now it’s time to make sense of the mountain of feedback you’ve collected. Data without analysis is just noise. 0s and 1s. Insight turns noise into action.

Look for:

• Recurring pain points – Where are people getting stuck or frustrated?
• Highly requested features – What are users consistently asking for?
• Moments of delight – What’s exceeding expectations?
• Gaps between expectations and reality – Where are you under-delivering?

At this point, you’ve got loads of noise shouting at you. Analyzing this feedback turns it into one collective voice that you can understand and act on.

If you use ProdPad you can enjoy automatic feedback analysis with Signals, our AI tool scans through all your feedback and spotlights the themes to help you understand what problems you should be tackling.

7. Turn insights into action

Listening is just step one. Real value comes when you act on what you’ve learned. If nothing changes, feedback becomes a black hole, and customers stop sharing it.

Ways to put insight into motion:

• Feed key findings into your product backlog and tie feedback directly to your new or existing ideas.
• Share customer stories across the business and build empathy and alignment across teams.
• Update user personas and other documentation. Make sure internal artifacts reflect real user needs and what you’ve learnt. 
• Refine onboarding, messaging, or education. Remove friction or confusion right where it happens.
• Shape roadmap priorities and themes to align what you’re building with what people care about.

But most importantly… close the loop. 

Let customers know you heard them. “You asked, we built” goes a long way toward loyalty. We actually have a template on how to close the loop via email. Check it out, as well as 10 other customer email feedback templates: 

How often should you run a Voice of the Customer program?

A Voice of the Customer program isn’t a box-ticking exercise, it’s a strategic tool you turn to when you need clarity, not just activity.

VoC is most valuable early in the product development process, when you’re exploring new territory and need to make confident, customer-informed decisions. It helps you dig into the real problems worth solving and uncover how your users think, feel, and behave, before you’ve committed to building anything.

Run a VoC program when:

• You’re kicking off a new product or feature
• You’re entering a new market
• You’re targeting a new user segment

These are the moments when a VoC program shines. It gives you richer, deeper insight that helps shape what you build and how you deliver it.

Treat your VoC program like a focused tool. Use it when you’re trying to answer a specific question, test a hypothesis, or inform a key decision. When your purpose is clear, the insight you get will be too.

Once you’ve gathered what you need, scale back the program. Shift into a lighter, more passive customer feedback collection method. Keep listening through support conversations, product analytics, in-app feedback, and other ongoing channels.

How do you measure the success of a Voice of the Customer program?

A successful Voice of the Customer program isn’t defined by simply collecting lots and lots of feedback – it’s about what you do with it. So, if you’re wondering how to know whether your VoC program is working, here are a few solid indicators to keep an eye on:

1. Internal engagement
Are teams actually using the feedback? A healthy VoC program fuels roadmaps, influences marketing, informs onboarding, and shapes support processes. If customer insights are popping up in internal discussions and decision-making, you’re doing it right.

2. Time to action
How quickly does feedback lead to action? You don’t need to solve everything instantly, but customers should see visible improvements based on what they’ve shared. If it’s all being collected and none of it’s closing the loop, you’ve got a bottleneck.

3. The right actions
Often you’ll be conducting a VoC initiative to test the validity of a new problem area, or to check a hypothesis around a new market opportunity. So one major way of testing the success of your VoC program is whether or not you built the right thing (or avoided building the wrong thing) as a result. 

4. Customer metrics
Look at things like NPS, CSAT, user retention rates, and churn. These metrics aren’t perfect, but if they’re improving alongside your VoC efforts, you’re on the right track.

5. Closed feedback loops
Track how many feedback items have been acknowledged, addressed, or actioned. Bonus points if you follow up with the customer to say, “Hey, we heard you and here’s what we did.”

In short, the best VoC programs don’t just measure sentiment, they move the needle. They help you become more responsive, more aligned, and more customer-centric with every iteration.

What tools do you need for a Voice of the Customer program?

You don’t need a high-tech dashboard or complex AI to run a successful Voice of the Customer program. But having the right tools in place can help you capture, organize, and act on feedback without losing track of it.

Here’s a quick rundown of what you’ll need:

1. Feedback collection tools

These help you gather insights directly from your customers. Whether through surveys, in-app feedback, NPS, reviews, or social media listening, these tools capture the voice of your users at key touchpoints.

2. Centralized feedback management

A system to bring all the feedback together, organize it, and identify patterns. This ensures you can easily analyze and prioritize the insights you receive.

3. Analytics and reporting

Tools to help you track trends, identify key themes, and generate useful reports for stakeholders. Look for features that allow you to filter and segment feedback by customer type, product area, or other relevant categories.

4. Collaboration and Product Management tools

Once feedback is turned into actionable insights, you’ll need a way to track and manage those ideas. Integrate your VoC program with your existing Product Management tools to ensure feedback is properly acted upon.

5. Customer data platforms

Bonus points for connecting feedback to specific customer segments or behaviors. This adds valuable context to the insights and helps drive more targeted improvements.

Building your program 

By now, you should have a solid understanding of what it takes to build a successful Voice of the Customer program. You know how to define your objectives, gather feedback, analyze it effectively, and turn those insights into actionable steps that can drive real improvements. 

The main point here is that listening to your customers is only part of the equation. The real value comes when you act on that feedback and ensure it’s integrated into your broader business strategy

To make the most of your VoC insights, it’s crucial to have the right tools in place to track, organize, analyze, and act upon the feedback you receive. This is where ProdPad comes in. 

With its seamless integration with customer feedback from multiple channels, ProdPad makes it easy to store, analyze, and track feedback on your roadmap. It empowers your team to make informed, customer-driven decisions, making sure that your product development is always aligned with real user needs. 

Start turning your VoC insights into actionable change today. Try ProdPad and bring your Voice of the Customer into focus.

The post Voice of the Customer Program Guide: How to Set One Up appeared first on ProdPad.

As a Product Manager, hearing directly from your users is like finding gold. It’s pure insights that help you fine-tune your product, prioritize the right improvements, and ultimately create something people love. But here’s the catch: customers rarely just hand over feedback without a little nudge. If you don’t ask, they’re not going to magically tell you what’s working, what’s frustrating, or what they desperately wish your product could do.

That’s where a great customer feedback email comes in.

Email is one of the easiest, most direct ways to reach your users and ask for their input. But not just any email will do – you need one that actually gets responses.

That’s why we’re giving you the ultimate customer feedback email template – plus a few extras you can use for specific situations. No more struggling with wording or worrying if you’re asking the right questions. We’ve got you covered. Let’s dive in.

Types of customer feedback email templates

We’re not going to give you one customer feedback email and call it a day – that’ll be short-changing you. There’s no single type of customer feedback email, so a single template just ain’t going to cut it. 

Instead, there are two main types of emails you need to send, one for when you’re proactively asking for product feedback and another for when you’re closing the loop and responding to feedback. 

Proactively Asking for Product Feedback

These emails help you collect insights from customers before they even think to share them. They should be timed to key moments in the user journey and framed in a way that makes responding easy and valuable. 

There are different situations where you’ll send this type of feedback – and don’t worry, we’ve got a template for all of them:

Onboarding Check-Ins – First impressions matter. Send a feedback email after a new user has had time to explore your product, asking about their initial experience. 
Post-Feature Launch Surveys – After rolling out a new feature, ask targeted users for their thoughts. This helps gauge adoption, uncover pain points, and guide future improvements. 
Ongoing Product Sentiment Surveys – A broader, periodic check-in (quarterly, annually) to understand overall satisfaction and long-term trends.
Support Interaction Follow-Ups – After a customer reaches out to support, follow up to ensure their issue was fully resolved and capture insights into the support experience.
Renewal & Retention Check-Ins – Before a customer’s renewal date, ask about their experience and any blockers to continued use. This can prevent them from churning.
Customer Research & Beta Testing Invites – When gathering deeper insights, invite customers to participate in research interviews, surveys, or beta programs. 

Closing the Loop and Responding to Feedback

A lot of the times you can get feedback without asking for it. Following up on this feedback builds trust. Customers want to know their input matters, and these emails ensure they see the impact of their contributions.

How to use this customer feedback email template

To use our list of customer feedback email templates, all you have to do is copy and paste your desired template and change out the variables – which are the stuff in brackets, like your product name and features. 

It’s that easy. Let’s check out the templates you can choose from:

Customer feedback email template example: Asking for feedback

Here’s our customer feedback email template for when you want to proactively ask for feedback. All you need to do is copy and paste and switch in your product or feature name so that it makes sense and is relevant to you. You can use this exact email directly (we won’t mind) or you can take it as a base layer and add to it as you see fit. 

Customer feedback email template example: Responding to feedback

Don’t leave your customers hanging once they give you feedback. Close the loop and show that their feedback is valued and has led to something by responding to them. Try something like this: 

How do you write a good customer feedback email?

You know the saying: Give someone a fish, they eat for a day. Teach them to fish, they eat for a lifetime. The same goes for customer feedback emails.

Sure, you can take our ready-made template, plug it in, and never think about it again. But wouldn’t it be better to actually understand why it works? That way, you can tweak it, improve it, and even create your own perfect version.

If you’re feeling ambitious (or just want to know what makes a feedback email actually effective), here are the best practices you should follow. Our template already checks all these boxes, but hey, knowledge is power.

Keep it short and to the point

People are busy. No one is going to read an essay just to get to the part where you ask them for feedback. Be clear, be concise, and get to the ask quickly.

Add some personality

Nobody likes receiving a robotic, generic email. Write like a human. If your brand has a playful tone like us, embrace it. If your audience prefers a more professional approach, keep it polished but warm. A little personality goes a long way in making your email feel authentic.

Give them a reason to respond (What’s in it for them?)

This sounds harsh, but humans can be selfish creatures – it’s not that people don’t like to help, it’s that  getting something in return will always sweeten the deal. Make it clear why giving feedback benefits them. Here are some ideas:

Early access to a new feature
A discount or exclusive offer
A chance to influence the product they use daily
A personal thank-you (yes, even that can work!)

Whatever incentive you choose, spell it out in the email. If there’s no obvious benefit, your response rate will suffer.

Clearly state what you’re asking

Be specific. Are you looking for feedback on a new feature? A general product experience? A recent support interaction? The clearer you are, the more useful the feedback will be.

Send it to the right people

Not all customers are equally likely to respond. A brand-new user might not have much to say yet, while long-term customers will have strong opinions. Segment your audience through cohort analysis so you’re targeting the people who are most likely to give insightful feedback.

Think about how you send it

Before you blast out an email from some generic support inbox, consider this: People are more likely to respond to an email that feels personal.

An email from “no-reply@company.com”? Probably getting ignored.
An email from “Greg@company.com” or even the CEO’s name? That’s a different story.

Some companies send feedback requests directly from a real person’s inbox, especially someone on the product or Customer Success team. This makes the request feel more personal and increases the chances of a response.

At the end of the day, the goal is to make customers feel like their opinions matter – because they do. Follow these best practices, and you’ll not only get more responses but also more valuable insights to improve your product.

Of course, emails are just one way to get customer feedback. To fully understand your user, make sure to explore all the different ways to collect customer feedback in 2025: 

When should you send a customer feedback email? 

You’ve got the template, you’ve got the tips, but when’s the right time to actually hit send ?

The truth is, there’s no one perfect moment to ask for feedback. It all depends on what you want to learn and who you’re asking. That said, there are some key moments where sending a feedback email makes a lot of sense. 

For each of these moments, your messaging is going to be a little different. Because of that, we’ve included a few extra customer feedback email templates for each situation to help you out. Don’t say we don’t go above and beyond for you. 

First, let’s look at those bespoke situations when proactively asking for product feedback: 

Soft-launching a new feature

Rolling out something new? Don’t just throw it out into the wild; gather insights early! Pick a segment of users who are most likely to use this feature based on user profiling or behavior, and invite them to join a beta test. Their feedback will help you refine things before a full release.

New customers (post-onboarding)

First impressions matter! After a new customer has completed product onboarding, send a quick feedback email to see if they had a smooth experience or if something needs improvement. This helps you catch issues early and improve the process for future users.

Long-term customers (loyalty check-ins)

Your long-time users are a diamond mine of insights. After they’ve spent a few months (or more) with your product, ask them what’s working, what’s missing, and what would make them love your product even more. This kind of outreach also strengthens customer relationships and can be part of a customer loyalty campaign.

Churned customers (exit surveys)

Losing a customer is never fun, but it’s also a learning opportunity. When you experience customer churn, send a short and simple exit survey. Ask why they left and if anything could have changed their mind. The insights could help reduce future churn.

Running a customer advisory board

If you’re serious about ongoing customer feedback, consider recruiting for a customer advisory board – a small group of engaged users who are willing to provide regular insights. Use an email to invite your most active customers to join and help shape your product’s future.

Email list subscribers (content feedback)

If you send regular newsletters or educational content, don’t just guess what your audience likes – ask them! A quick feedback email can help fine-tune your content strategy and ensure you’re delivering value.

If you’re yet to launch a customer newsletter, you’re missing out on a regular source of product-led growth. We’ve covered the best Product Management Newsletters that you can learn from and get inspired by.

When should you send a response to feedback?

Customer feedback is a conversation. There are a couple of key moments when you should send a response to the feedback you’ve received. This isn’t a one-and-done activity either. It takes a few messages to successfully close to the loop. 

Here are the main moments to follow up, and a template to follow to do it all properly:

1. When feedback first comes in

As soon as a customer submits feedback, acknowledge it. Let them know their voice has been heard and what happens next. This sets expectations and reassures them that their input isn’t disappearing into the void.

2. When feedback is added to the roadmap

If feedback makes it onto your product roadmap, let customers know! This is the perfect moment to show that their input is shaping the future of the product.

3. When the solution is live

This is the ultimate loop-closer: letting customers know when their feedback has turned into reality. This is also a great moment to invite them to try the new feature and share further thoughts.

Who sends a customer feedback email?

Getting customer feedback isn’t a one-size-fits-all job. Sometimes, it’s about casting a wide net with automated outreach, and other times, it’s about sending a carefully crafted, personal email. The trick is knowing when to use each approach—and who should be pressing “send.”

Mass Outreach – Scaled feedback collection

For regular check-ins like onboarding surveys, post-support follow-ups, or general product sentiment checks, mass outreach is the way to go. These emails are often automated and designed to capture trends across a broad user base.

Who’s responsible?

  Customer Experience Teams: They make sure feedback isn’t just collected but actually used to improve the customer journey.
Marketing Teams: Product Marketing Managers know how to get emails opened and responded to, seamlessly integrating feedback requests into broader engagement campaigns.

Individual Outreach – Targeted, high-value insights

Some feedback requires a personal touch. When gathering deep insights, like during Voice of the Customer interviews, feature validation, or success measurement after a launch, Product Managers and Customer Success Managers should be reaching out directly. A well-timed, personal email makes all the difference in getting thoughtful, actionable responses.

Who’s responsible?

  Product Managers (PMs) – They should personally engage with users to gather insights that shape the roadmap and refine strategy.
Customer Success Managers (CSMs) – They maintain close relationships with customers and can capture in-depth feedback that supports retention and long-term success.

By balancing mass outreach with individual conversations, companies can collect feedback at scale while still capturing the nuanced insights that drive real product improvements.

So, who’s responsible for getting that feedback email into your customers’ inboxes? Well, it’s not just one person’s job. In most companies, it’s a team effort, with different departments playing their part. Here’s how the work gets divided:

The feedback you get from your Customer Teams is vital – teach them how to acquire and share really useful feedback:

What to do after sending a customer feedback email?

So, you’ve hit send. Your beautifully crafted email is out in the wild, making its way to inboxes. Now what? Sit back and wait? Nope. The real work starts now.

Close the feedback loop

If you leave users shouting into the void, don’t expect them to bother next time. Close the customer feedback loop.

• Acknowledge responses. A quick “Thanks for your feedback!” can go a long way.
• Act on insights. Spot a trend? Flag recurring pain points? Now’s the time to loop in the right teams.
• Follow up. If a customer takes the time to share detailed thoughts, show them you’re listening. Let them know what’s changing based on their feedback.

Analyze the data

Raw feedback is great, but actionable insights are better. Break it down:

• What are the biggest themes?
• Are there clear trends across different customer segments?
• How does this feedback compare to past responses?

Use this data to fuel product updates, improve support, or tweak messaging.

With ProdPad, all that feedback analysis is done for you thanks to our AI-powered Signals tool. All you need to do is forward your customer feedback email responses to ProdPad (you can email feedback in – it’s that easy) and let Signals run its analysis and surface the themes. 

Learn more about Signals:

Decide what’s next 

Not all feedback requires an immediate overhaul, but some insights might demand urgent action. Prioritize what to tackle, loop in the right teams, and start planning the next steps. The customer feedback you receive can help a lot when it comes to backlog grooming and prioritizing your product roadmap.

With ProdPad, our AI CoPilot will automatically flag any relevant, existing Ideas in your product backlog each time a new piece of Feedback is added. So you can spot where you’re already working on a solution to the customer issue, and see where that is in your process. 

You can also create new Ideas inspired by a piece of Feedback or a Signal from a bunch of Feedback, and link all the related Feedback so you can always keep the supporting evidence for your product decisions close at hand. 

Rinse and repeat

Customer feedback isn’t a one-and-done thing. Keep the cycle going:

• Regularly ask for feedback.
• Show customers the impact of their input.
• Continuously improve how you collect and act on insights.

Follow our lead 

Customer feedback emails can be tricky. You’re asking for help, and not every customer will be eager to give it. But with the right approach, you can make the process effortless and rewarding. Luckily, we’ve got templates to help you do just that.

 Of course, customer feedback emails are just one piece of the puzzle. With interviews, surveys, usage data, and sentiment scores, you have a wealth of ways to learn from your users. As a Product Manager, it’s not just about collecting feedback; it’s about making sure your teams know how to gather it the right way.

Empower your internal stakeholders with the right tools and techniques to collect truly useful feedback. When feedback is done right, it’s not just noise; it’s the key to building something great.

Explore ProdPad’s Feedback Management with a free trial.

The post Customer Feedback Email Template: 11 Templates for Every Situation appeared first on ProdPad.

What is a product demo?

A product demo is a carefully curated experience designed to help potential users grasp your product value proposition and functionality. In your product demo, prospects get a hands-on look at the core features most relevant to their needs and see how your solution aligns with their goals.

Whether it’s a personalized walkthrough led by Sales, a self-guided tour embedded in a product-led go-to-market strategy, or a recorded deep dive, a demo bridges the gap between curiosity and commitment.

Product demos can be a major step in the user journey. They’re an opportunity not only to showcase functionality but also to connect emotionally, helping users envision how the product will make their lives easier, faster, or more efficient.

Ideally, product demos are customized to a specific user or at the very least, user segment. This allows the demo to be more focused on their specific needs.

For example, a demo for one customer type may spotlight different features than another. When done well, demos are a powerful tool to create interest, build trust, and inspire users to take the next step – be it starting a free trial, subscribing, or arranging a deeper dive with the team.

For Product Managers, product demos are an extension of your work. They reflect the quality, positioning, and usability you’ve crafted, and while you may not always be in the room presenting, your influence on their effectiveness is undeniable. We’ll go into how in a little bit. 

Types of Product Demo 

We’ve already alluded to the fact that there are multiple types of product demos you can choose from. Let’s put them all under the microscope: 

Live product demo

Live product demos are typically conducted by a salesperson, Account Executive/Manager, or Customer Success team member. You might see these people being described as ‘Product Experts’ but they’re typically members of Sales and/or Success.

In a live demo, the presenter customizes the walkthrough to the specific needs of the customer, diving into features that align with their challenges and goals.

These demos can happen virtually or in person, and they allow for real-time engagement – prospects can ask questions, clarify doubts, and explore specific use cases.

Live demos work well in complex or B2B environments where personalized guidance helps prospects grasp the product’s full value.

Self-guided product demo

Self-guided product demos empower users to explore the product at their own pace, without the need for a live representative. This approach is commonly used by product-led growth companies and is often embedded in freemium or reverse trial models.

Self-guided demos are structured to provide an intuitive exploration of the product’s main features, leading users down a path that highlights the core value without direct and human assistance.

Self-guided product demos work best for products that are relatively straightforward and with very intuitive UIs, allowing users to explore without much hand-holding.

Recorded product demo

Pre-recorded product demos provide an on-demand overview of the product’s key features and benefits. Often available on a company’s website or sent as a follow-up in the sales process, these demos cover a curated selection of functionalities and are typically high-level.

Recorded product demos videos are scalable and easily accessible, making them ideal for reaching a broad audience. The drawback is that they lack interactivity and personalization, making it hard to address unique customer needs.

Interactive product demo

All the above types of product demos are a passive way for potential users to understand what you do. In these scenarios, users are being shown the product – kind of like a college seminar or a talk. Sometimes, you can only appreciate the value of something by doing it.

This is where interactive demos come in. Instead of watching a live presentation or exploring a series of self-serve demo videos, an interactive demo gives users access to a preloaded demo environment where they can actually try out the product themselves. Ever been to a department store and played a demo version of the latest video game on those big kiosks?  – this is kind of like that.

By letting you get your hands dirty, an interactive demo is often more engaging and immersive, helping you reduce the time to value.

Do note that an interactive demo is not a product tour. Unlike product tours, which are designed to boost user activation, interactive demos are sales and marketing materials used to show prospects the product’s potential.

By definition, ProdPad’s sandbox environment is an interactive product demo. We offer anyone interested in learning more about ProdPad, the chance to access a live, pre-filled demo environment, where they can play and explore.

Here, our potential customers can kick things around to their heart’s content, without needing to create an account, enter any card details, or speak to anyone on the team. Access is unlimited and forever – it won’t expire – but any ‘work’ they do in the sandbox (e.g. build a new Roadmap), won’t be saved (that’s what they’d need a free trial for).

Look, it’s probably easier if you go take a look for yourself. Like I say, access is free and forever and you won’t need to create an account or set a password or anything. 

Product demo vs product tour

We’ve touched on it briefly, but this is a discussion worthy of its own section. A product tour is not a product demo. I’ll admit, they’re pretty similar, like twins, but you can spot the differences if you look close enough.

A product tour is typically an in-app, step-by-step walkthrough designed to guide new users through essential features and workflows. Unlike traditional demos, product tours are embedded within the product and triggered once a user signs up or starts a trial. They’re particularly useful for product onboarding, helping new users quickly understand core functionalities and reach early success milestones.

In short, product demos are all about selling the product, while a product tour is designed to help users succeed within the product and get the most out of it. They’re both pretty important but don’t you dare get them mixed up ever again .

What type of product demo should I use?

So you know the different types of product demos. How do you know which one to use? As a Product Manager, you don’t run your demos, but you do have a say in how they should be delivered. Here are the three main things you need to consider:

1. What’s your go-to-market approach?

If you’re following a product-led growth strategy, your product itself drives user acquisition and conversion. It’s your primary piece of marketing material. In this case, interactive, self-serve product demos and tours can be your most effective tool, as they empower users to explore and engage independently. These tours provide an in-app experience that highlights the product’s core features, allowing users to see its value firsthand and make quick decisions.

You’re also likely using SaaS pricing models like freemium or reverse trial, making it well suited to self-serve or prerecorded product demos.

For a sales-led approach, where the user journey is guided by sales representatives, a structured demo video or live demo walkthrough often complements the sales process well. These videos can serve as a consistent, scalable resource that the Sales Team can use to deliver a polished overview.

2. Are you high-touch or low-touch?

Are customers connecting with your teammates from different departments at every step of their journey, or are you keeping an eye on them from far away? The amount of touchpoints you have with users impacts the best type of product demo.

In a low-touch onboarding model, users navigate their journey primarily through self-serve resources. Automated, self-guided product tours or video demos are essential here, offering users the flexibility to explore at their own pace and revisit material as needed. These options are scalable, helping users get up to speed without needing assistance.

For a high-touch onboarding model, live, personalized demos are often a better fit. High-touch approaches rely on relationship-building and tailored support, often catering to enterprise or high-value clients with specific needs.

A live product demo by a Sales Rep or Customer Success Manager can help users see how the product can be customized for their requirements, fostering a strong initial connection and trust.

3. How complex is your product?

The more complex your product is, the more likely users will need in-depth guidance to reach your desired activation point. Interactive product demos that break down key features in digestible steps can help make complex products easier to grasp.

Alternatively, if you have a high-touch approach to onboarding, a series of recorded video demos covering various use cases and workflows can provide an accessible knowledge base for users to revisit whenever needed.

For very complex products with intricate workflows, consider combining multiple formats: live demos for personalized introductions, supplemented with an online library of video walkthroughs or interactive tutorials that allow users to go back and review specific features as they deepen their usage over time.

Who’s responsible for a product demo? 

Well, this is kind of the whole point of this article. A Product Manager does many things – so many that we listed all the possible Product Manager tasks – but, presenting product demos is something you likely won’t actually deliver yourself – at least not externally to prospective customers.

For live demos, it’s typically the Sales Team running the show. They’ll be scheduling and customizing these interactive presentations to highlight how the product solves specific customer challenges. They’re the ones building rapport, adapting the pitch on the spot, and aiming to convert potential users into active customers.

For self-serve or automated demos, your users are left to navigate the product on their own, Here, the demo’s quality and intuitiveness are what will help users grasp your product’s value – without any human assistance. Your users are on their own.

This doesn’t mean that you should sit back and relax though. As a Product Manager, you can still very much get involved in your product demos, and do various things to ensure they’re as good as they can be. 

How do I make my product demo better? 

So, we’ve figured out that product demos aren’t completely out of your hands. Cool. So, what can you do as a Product Manager to improve them? Here’s our full list of tips and tricks you can try to make your demos better without having to get behind the camera and present them yourself. 

Craft the demo narrative

Product demos need to tell a story. As the expert on your product’s unique selling points and the customer needs, you should collaborate with Sales and Marketing to shape a demo narrative that resonates.

Instead of simply listing features, focus on storytelling: craft a journey that aligns the product’s capabilities with the audience’s challenges and aspirations. This ensures the demo delivers a memorable experience that highlights real-world value.

Don’t leave your other teams to create these without support. Provide material like user stories, write them internal PR documents, and even consider sharing the discovery work you did to validate the product or the major features in the first place. This will all help them understand the value of your product and the reason potential customers should care about it.

If your teammates don’t know why your product is so good, they won’t be able to share that with potential customers.

Share customer insights on pain points

You’re in tune with the pain points that brought users to your product in the first place. You spent countless hours in product discovery to learn that. By passing on these insights, you can help the Sales team tailor demos to address top concerns directly, making the demo feel more relevant and engaging for potential users. The result? A demo that doesn’t just show off features but actually speaks to the user’s needs.

Build complete demo environments and sample data

A realistic demo environment that’s reflective of your final product – complete with meaningful sample data – is essential for showcasing how your product works and why it’s valuable.

Work with your team to create demo accounts that highlight ideal use cases, guiding prospects through scenarios they can envision themselves in. This helps users connect with the product’s utility right from the start.

It can be tempting to leave features out of your interactive product demos, but this can lead to a frustrating experience. Give users enough to see the potential of your product.

Regularly refine the demo content

The needs of prospects evolve as the market changes. So should your demos. Keep a pulse on industry trends, competitor moves, and emerging customer demands. Updating demo scripts and sample data regularly to reflect these changes can keep your demos fresh and compelling, making sure your product stands out in a competitive landscape. Following data-driven Product Management practices can help you monitor and stay ahead of the curve. 

Set up a feedback loop with Sales and Customer Success

Feedback from the teams conducting demos is a goldmine for product insights. Listen to what’s resonating, what’s unclear, and where questions arise when presenting a live demo. By setting up a customer feedback loop with Sales and Customer Success, you can stay informed about how prospects are reacting to demos, which features get the most attention, and what might need clarification or enhancement.

This allows you as a Product Manager to leverage product demos to make improvements and create a more attractive product.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Salespeople, if they’re doing a good job, are busy as hell – running from call to call, chasing invoices, ringing bells. It can be hard to get them to take a hot minute to share feedback with you. We get it. We’ve been there.

But, fear not, we’ve created what you need to rectify this problem. Not only do we have a guide on how to Get Customer Teams to Share User Feedback, but we also have a ready-made training deck that you can take along to their next sales meeting and present to the team (it includes a speaker script). Download a copy of the slide deck below .

Refine the self-serve demo experience

For self-serve demos, use data and A/B testing to continually improve the user journey. Look at where users drop off or seem confused, and refine the flow to remove friction and better showcase your product’s core value. Consider split-testing different versions to understand which sequences are most effective at moving users to activation.

Show, don’t tell

Product demos play a critical role in the customer journey, helping prospects understand and experience the value your product offers. While Product Managers may not always be directly involved in presenting demos, their influence is essential in shaping the experience.

By crafting a compelling narrative, sharing valuable customer insights, and ensuring realistic demo environments, PMs can significantly improve the quality and effectiveness of demos.

Collaborating closely with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams ensures that demos resonate with the specific needs of potential users, showcasing the product’s true value.

And don’t forget to keep coming back to these demos! Ongoing refinement is key. As customer needs and market dynamics evolve, you need to stay attuned to feedback from demo sessions and adjust content accordingly.

I’ve already offered you access to our interactive demo environment – why not also come and see our live demo in action! Come and see what the best Product Management tool in the world can do for you and your team  .

The post Making Your Product Demo Better as a Product Manager appeared first on ProdPad.

What is a product tour?

You’re likely already well-versed in what a product tour is. You experience them every time you open a new app or piece of software, and we’re willing to bet that your product has some sort of tour or educational component already in place. 

In short, a product tour is an in-app tutorial that guides users through the key features and functionality of your product. They often focus on teaching how the user interface (UI) works, what everything does, and where each feature is located. 

Product tours are designed to help users get up to speed with the product quickly and ensure they don’t miss any hidden features that may benefit them. They’re activated automatically, usually triggered when a customer uses the product or clicks on a new feature for the first time. 

Why do you need a product tour?

Would you trip up a baby that’s still learning to walk? Of course not. That would be horrible. Well, without a product tour, you’re kind of doing the same to your new users. Without any help or guidance on how to best utilize your product, they’re going to struggle to find the value in what you offer, and if they can’t find value they’re gonna look elsewhere. 

Well, including a product tour in your onboarding process improves the chance that customers stick around. It also gives you the control to show them what you want them to see first. This lets you create a logical education flow that builds upon the previous point, ensuring that by the end of the tour, there are no gaps in your user’s knowledge. 

No matter how intuitive your product is, it will come with a learning curve, some steeper than others. The goal of a product tour is to make that curve feel manageable; like it’s a slight uphill incline instead of an unscalable cliff. 

Here’s a look at some other benefits of adding a product tour to your onboarding process:

It encourages users to actually try your product 

You need a product tour in place for first-time users so you have a way of actually inviting them to stay! Product tours act as great initial call-to-actions to get new users to explore your product. It adds that sense of urgency which can be the difference between losing or retaining a customer. A good product tour doesn’t just show a visitor how to use your tool, it should make them desperate to use it.

It helps users reach their wow moment

The wow moment is the point in time when a new user realizes the value of your product and why they need it. It’s the lightbulb moment that flicks a switch in their head from being a skeptic to a believer in your product. You want your new customers to have this realization as early as possible – a product tour that showcases key features and benefits is going to help customers reach this moment a hell of a lot quicker. 

It drives customer success

You want your customers to have a good time with your product, and you also want them to find success when using your product. That’s why you went to the trouble of building it in the first place. A good product tour gives your customers the tools they need to succeed with your product and use it properly. This improves the customer experience and boosts satisfaction, making them more likely to buy, renew, or upgrade their plan and advocate for your brand.

It can breathe life into unused features

Ever spent a lot of time on an amazing feature that no one is using? We’ve all been there. Well, if engagement for a feature is low, you could try to direct attention to it with a product tour. See, product tours aren’t just for new users, seasoned customers can also benefit from them when you highlight additions and changes. A tour is a far more engaging way to showcase a feature than an email or blog and could help you boost its performance.

How do you build a product tour?

There’s no one way to build a product tour. Each product and app is different and will require different things from its onboarding experience. That’s the beauty of building a tour – you can make it your own unique experience that best matches your product and overall brand. 

That said, we do think there’s one thing that every Product manager should do:

Use tools! 

We highly recommend that you use dedicated product tour and onboarding tools when building your flow. That’s what we do here at ProdPad, and you’ll find most of your competitors will too. 

Nothing is stopping you from making a bespoke, one-of-a-kind product tour from scratch in-house, we just think it’s a lot of extra effort that you don’t need to go through. 

For starters, building a product tour that way is hard. Unless you’re an expert coder, you’re going to need to rope in your Developers to build your tour in-app. This takes a lot of time and resources which could be spent on other things – such as progressing your product roadmap!

The process of building a tour yourself will take much longer compared to using a tool, and you also sacrifice flexibility and control over the process. As Product Managers, we like to have control. 

Product tools provide no-code solutions, allowing you to build your flow, input your copy, and set up your automation easily. You can get on with it yourself without having to plan development time and you can make changes and edits on the fly. These tools allow you to move much faster and ship your product tour in less time. 

As well as this, dedicated tools give you: 

• Analytics to measure the performance of your tours
• Customization options
• Templates to help you beat writer’s block and get started
• Integrations with other software

What are the best product tour tools?

If we’ve sold you on using onboarding software tools, you’ll be desperate to know what the best tools out there are. Conveniently, we’ve already put together a detailed list of what we think to be the best onboarding software tools. You’re welcome.

Not only can these tools help you build product tours, but they also have extra functionality like surveys, hotspots, checklists, and more. 

What are the key components of a product tour? 

When building your product tour, you have a lot of different elements to choose from that can alter how your tour looks and functions. These elements or components offer unique ways to share information and will suit different use cases. Understanding these elements gives you the knowledge to build the best product tour and choose the right option for your needs. 

The elements you’ll find in user onboarding software will vary, but you can expect to find: 

• Pop-ups: These are some of the most common UI patterns you’ll find in product tours and walkthroughs. Many products use a pop-up known as a welcome modal to first interact with the user and welcome them to the platform. They can range from simple splash screens to larger modal windows, and work by ‘popping up’ over your screen to share key information, usually in the form of screenshots, animations, and illustrations. Be mindful not to instigate pop-up fatigue by using them too often, as this can cause aggravation and lead to users dropping off.

• Tooltips: This component is a small, descriptive textbox that typically activates when a button is clicked or hovered over, usually emanating from that area. Their purpose is to provide a brief, contextual explanation of what a key feature does. Unlike pop-ups, they don’t take up the whole screen. They’re designed to make the product tour more interactive and engaging, and often instruct the user to do something.

• Hotspots: Hotspots are short and sweet little messages that encourage users to check out a certain area of your product. They’re effectively call-to-actions, and can say things like ‘click here’ or ‘psst, you may want to see this’. They’re designed to encourage and are often followed by a tooltip. 

• Slideouts: Slideouts are interesting-looking panels that slide out from either the side, top, or bottom of the screen. These are thought to be less intrusive than pop-ups as they don’t take over the whole screen and still enable the user to engage with the tool. They’re often used to encourage customers to take specific actions. 

To make sure you use the right components, you need to consider what element best suits your product. There are some questions you need to ask yourself to make sure you’re building your tour the right way. 

Think about: 

• The device type: is your product a mobile app or web-based? The difference in display size will impact what types of elements best suit the product. Small tooltips may be harder to see on mobile, requiring a full modal window instead. 

• Your different users: Do you have a varied target user base with differing understandings of technology? If so, you may have to build two separate product tours to suit each experience level. A novice may appreciate more tooltips explaining simple functionality, while an expert may get frustrated with these interruptions. 
• The uniqueness of your product: Does your product follow industry conventions or does it do something completely different? If your product works the same as others or has familiar features, then users will have a better time getting to grips with it and won’t need as much information from the tour. If it’s all brand new, then you need to thoroughly explain these new changes. 
• The complexity of your product: Are the core features of your product easy to find or do users have to navigate through multiple layers to access everything? Opting for contextual product tours that trigger when a user finds a new feature can work best here as it ensures they’re not overloaded with too much information at once. 

Product tour best practices

To ensure your product tour is the best it can be, it’s worth knowing all the best practice theory. All great product tours tend to have the following qualities, so make sure you consider them when building your tour. 

Make it easy to use 

The whole goal of your tour is to make your product simple and easy to understand. If your tour is too complex, then you’re kind of missing the point. The elements you add to your tour should be self-explanatory in terms of how to use them and how to progress to the next tooltip, slide out, or pop-up. 

Structure it well 

You want to build a product tour that naturally flows from one point to another. Your structure plays a massive part in this. It needs to intuitively guide users from one section of your product to another, in an order that makes sense.

When building your structure, make sure your users understand what they’re learning, what they’re trying to accomplish, and what they stand to gain.

Keep it light 

We get that you’re excited about your product and can talk about it for hours, but you need to hold back in your product tour. You don’t want to overwhelm your users with too much information. Remember, reams of text can be boring to read. 

Less is more when it comes to your product tour. Keep your copy tight, short, and snappy, and don’t dwell on features for too long. Figure out what is crucial for users to understand during their initial exploration and limit your tours to that. Users can always build on their knowledge in their own time with self-help guides and chatbots.

Make sure it’s not boring 

A boring product tour is just as bad as having no tour at all. If your language is dull and your content just doesn’t inspire, your tour isn’t going to be effective. You want users to have a good experience with your tour, so use engaging language and images to keep them invested in what you’re teaching them. 

A bored user is more likely to leave your product and look elsewhere for a solution to their problem.  

Get to the point 

When making a product tour, you want it to be quick and snappy. You need to respect your customer’s time and ensure you don’t keep them from using your product for too long. 

Quickly show them what they need to know so that you’re not wasting any of your user’s time. When they first log into your product, they’re going to want to start getting results instantly. Don’t let your tour become a barrier that they’ll want to skip through. 

Make it interactive

A passive tour is more likely to bore your users. It’s a good idea to make one that offers an interactive element. A tour that’s just made up of pop-ups or a single video explainer that users can easily skip through won’t work as well as one where they need to perform an action to trigger the next step. 

By building a product tour with automation, you can make it more interactive to engage the user with your product. With these types of tours, you can get users to start exploring your tool while you aid them, helping them to better learn how it all works while keeping them engaged. 

Lead with value

Your product tour should be more than just a step-by-step guide on how to use your tool, where all you’re saying boils down to ‘do this, then do this, then do this’. You need to show why you’re getting your customers to perform an action and make clear what the value of each action is. By being upfront about the benefits of your tool and how it meets their needs, you’re showing them the value proposition early on in their journey.  

Personalize for better engagement

Each one of your users wants to feel unique. Make them feel special by adding personalization to your product tour. This can be as simple as using personalization tags like their name so that they feel more connected with your product. 

You can also go further and create different tours based on different audience segments, showing them the key features they specifically care about. Not all customers are planning to use your product in the same way as each other, so try to identify this and create a product tour that displays the right messages and information that’s suited to each user.

Keep making data-driven improvements with feedback

You’re not going to nail your product tour the first time. To make the best one possible, you’re going to have to make changes and edits to your flow. To help guide you, be sure to monitor user behavior to find points in the flow where users drop off, or where there are elements of confusion. Most onboarding software tools have analytics built in to help you make changes to optimize the user experience.  

Don’t use internal language 

When building your product tour, be mindful of the language you use. Your customers do not have the same vocabulary as your internal team, so make sure to stay away from jargon or complicated industry phrases. 

You also want to make sure that you provide definitions for terms. The main goal is to make your product tour easy to understand, so don’t complicate things with internal language used by experts.

Examples of good product tours

One of the best ways to know what goes into a good product tour is to see them in action. We’ve found a handful of what we believe to be great examples to act as inspiration for when you go off to build your own. 

Check out these examples to learn what you should be doing when building your product tour. 

Of course, we think we’ve put together a pretty nifty product tour ourselves, but we don’t want to pat ourselves on the back too much, so we’ve gone for other examples. However, if, as a Product Manager, you want to experience a tour designed specifically for you, then start a free trial of ProdPad and give it a whirl. Of course, there’s no commitment and no credit card needed.

1. Grammarly

Grammarly has a well-renowned product tour that we think is ace. When you start the spell checker for the first time, you’re put into a demo environment that lets you play around, similar to the ProdPad sandbox. This environment is then supported by hotspots and tooltips that divert your attention to key aspects and features.

What’s really great about the Grammarly product tour is that they don’t force you to take part but rather ask if you’d like the demonstration. This is great, as there may be a lot of returning customers or users familiar with similar tools that may not need the extra help. 

Plus, thanks to the tooltips and hotspots, Grammary’s onboarding process becomes more interactive, helping the user to actually learn while keeping them engaged.

2. Slack

When Slack went through a major layout and UI redesign, the platform offered a product tour to help users through these key changes. This product tour excels because it utilizes personalization well to connect with the user. Here, Slack made use of native components like a theme chooser so that each experience felt tailored to each customer. 

All the elements also looked pretty snazzy and well-designed, and the placement of tooltips, animations, and more helped to instill confidence in the new layout. A great touch is that once the tour finished, users were directed to the Slack Help Center, where they could access more information if they wanted to. 

3. Hubspot

Hubspot offers a great example of a product tour that knows its audience and its product. It opts for a simple tooltip approach, using minimal text and flashy elements to keep things easy to understand. This benefits Hubspot because it’s a massive platform, so having a comprehensive and long product tour could overwhelm and confuse new users. 

Opting for simple tooltips makes the whole tool feel easy to use. Highlighting certain sections of the product is also a great call, especially as they pulsate, giving life and urgency to the instructions. It’s a small touch that keeps the tour dynamic without bombarding the user with too many visuals.

Lead the way with product tours

By adding a product tour, you’re making it much easier for your users to engage with and understand your product. They’re like little guides showing off the key sights and information of your product, ensuring that users know the basics to effectively explore your product themselves. 

A great product tour can go a long way in improving customer satisfaction and reducing customer churn, helping to ensure that new customers stick around with your product and become active users. By using the right tools and elements, and by following the best practices, you can make a product tour that does the business.

Again, if you want to see how we’ve approached our onboarding and product tour, and want to see the key features of ProdPad in action, start a free trial now. We’d love to know what you think. 

The post How to Build a Kickass Product Tour appeared first on ProdPad.

What is a Customer Advisory Board?

A Customer Advisory Board is a group of current customers that meet regularly to discuss your product. It’s made up of people who represent the varied demographics, firmographics and use cases of your customer base. This group will share how your product meets their needs and expectations and provide feedback on how the product can be improved. 

As the Product Manager, you should engage with this group of customers in regularly scheduled meetings. These sessions are goldmines and can give you the highest quality, most valuable insights to inform your product planning and ensure that the product you’re developing perfectly matches what users want and need. 

Why do you need a Customer Advisory Board?

Every feature of your product should be created to benefit your customers. To do that, and to make sure you don’t become a Feature Factory churning out unneeded updates, you need a good understanding of what users need. 

As a Product Manager, you don’t want to be shooting in the dark about what you think customers want. You know this right?

You probably have a bunch of different feedback channels right now. Maybe you have one of ProdPad’s Customer Feedback Portals, or you’re pulling in feedback from your support tool. Possibly you have a few in-app feedback prompts, or you join the odd customer call. 

But a Customer Advisory Board can be one of the most valuable and fruitful feedback mechanisms available to you, especially when following Customer Advisory Board best practices. If you haven’t already established a CAB, we strongly recommend that you do! 

But why are the thoughts of one small group of customers so valuable? Well, if you’ve followed Customer Advisory Board best practices, their feedback will be illustrative of your entire customer base. Addressing the concerns of those people in your CAB will likely appease your entire customer base too. 

Simply put, having a Customer Advisory Board can seriously supercharge your feedback game and become a key part of your Customer Feedback Strategy.

What are the benefits of a Customer Advisory Board?

We’ll be honest with you now. Putting together and maintaining an effective Customer Advisory Board is a lot of effort. That said, it’s well worth it.

When following Customer Advisory Board best practices, you’ll get: 

Regular access to customer feedback 

Having easy access to in-depth customer feedback is the main reason Product Managers should have a Customer Advisory Board. A CAB is a direct channel that you can leverage throughout the year to get insights you can action. 

Once recruited, you’ve got a reliable group of customers on standby who can give you a clear understanding of your product’s strengths and weaknesses.

You don’t even have to wait till your next meeting to get feedback. Once you’ve built up close relationships with your CAB members, one Customer advisory board best practice is to engage them with simple surveys and questionnaires, or just fire them a quick email to get answers to your burning questions. Nice. 

Customers invested in your product 

Over time, the customers in your Customer Advisory Board will develop closer relationships with you. This makes them more invested in your product, increasing the chances that they become an advocate. 

By demonstrating to key customers that their opinions matter, you’ll build loyalty which may be rewarded in word-of-mouth recommendations, referrals, and more. 

When running a successful CAB, the members inside it can become a useful marketing channel, shouting about your product and helping you to drive the acquisition of new customers. You’re also likely to find that you’ll prevent customer churn from these members in particular, and reduce churn across the whole user base thanks to having a product that so tightly meets the needs of its users!

A chance to validate new ideas

Not sure what product ideas and hypotheses will work? Instead of throwing Ideas against the wall to see what sticks, you can instead turn your CAB into a sounding board. 

You can approach these group members with new ideas that you believe are worth exploring to see how real customers feel about them. This is a great way to test the worth of your ideas before sinking development time into them. 

In a nutshell, running new ideas by CAB members stops you from wasting time and money on building the wrong things. 

Opportunity to perfect your sales pitch

Let’s get this clear now: a Customer Advisory Board Meeting is not a sales pitch. You shouldn’t be trying to sell new features to your customers or encourage them to upgrade their current packages. Not directly in the meetings anyway. 

But, what you can do – once you’ve got a strong relationship with your CAB members – is ask them about your value messaging and positioning. 

Finding out what propositions best resonate with their pain points and challenges can help you build a more compelling sales pitch for the similar customers that each member represents.

And hey, you should make sure your Customer Advisory Board members are first to hear about new features and functionality. If you’ve done a good job of listening to their feedback and building the solutions accordingly, then you’ve got a high chance that they’ll be buying – you won’t need the hard sell. 

What are the best practices when recruiting for a Customer Advisory Board?

A Customer Advisory Board is an invitation-only group of people. Think of it as a secret society, or your very own Justice League of customers.

When thinking about the people you want to invite to these ongoing sessions, consider what each person brings to the table. You want customers who are going to be open, responsive, honest, and engaged. They also need to have enough expertise in their organization and know its needs, which is why senior roles are often prioritized.

Once you’ve picked the people you want in your CAB, you just have the small matter of convincing them to join. 

With a CAB, you’re asking customers to give up their time to help you make your product better. This can be a big ask. To help recruit for your Customer Advisory Board, you need to showcase what’s in it for them. Highlight some of the benefits of the Customer Advisory Board, such as: 

• It’s a place for them to voice concerns and make recommendations to improve a product they rely on. 
• It’s a chance to network with peers and build professional connections. 
• They’ll be able to learn the best practices and added uses for the product. 
• They’ll get insight into new features and functionality of your product before it’s live.

Should you incentivize people to join a CAB? 

If the people in your CAB are only there because you’ve promised them a goodie bag and free lunch, then it’s likely that they’re not going to be as invested in these discussions as they should be. 

A CAB meeting allows participants to voice their opinions and make your product easier and more effective to use. The chance to influence your product development to suit their needs should be incentive enough. 

Now this doesn’t mean you should strip back on your offerings. Just don’t focus on free coffee and gifts as the main way to attract customers to join the advisory board.

How big should a Customer Advisory Board be?

There’s no specific size your CAB should be. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, so the right one depends on your goals and capabilities. 

Customer Advisory Boards with fewer participants are easier to manage and allow your customers to build stronger relationships with your organization. However, you run the risk of lacking diversity and perspectives. 

Larger CABs allow you to access a wide range of perspectives and better represent your entire customer base. The challenge is that it can be super difficult to manage all these people and run meetings. Imagine trying to organize loads of people with everyone all trying to get their opinions across – a bit of a nightmare, right?

The sweet spot for most organizations hovers at around 10-20 members. This amount still allows you to get broad insight without losing control of the discussion.

Who should you invite into a CAB?

Don’t invite any old average Joe to your Customer Advisory Board. The goal is to get specific insights representative of your entire customer base, so be tactical when sending your invites. 

Focus on a wide range of customer types to get a deeper understanding of what the wider market thinks of your product. 

For example, if your product has customers in the tech, healthcare, and construction industries, you won’t get a true reflection of your customer base if all your participants are tech-folk. 

Similarly, if you only have representatives from large enterprises on your Customer Advisory Board, the feedback won’t represent the pain points of smaller businesses in your audience base.

Think carefully about your different types of users and try to enlist a varied set of people who can act as a flagbearer for each audience type. 

Of course, don’t only add customers who are based close to you so that you can facilitate in-person CAB meetings, as this can lead to you excluding useful demographics. 

It’s best practice for a Customer Advisory Board to meet in person, but we understand that might not be an option for some companies. You could have a global customer base, meaning that finding one central location that everyone can travel to is tricky, if not impossible. 

In this case, don’t be put off from going virtual. When you do, think about ways to make this as comfortable and special an experience as possible. Think of ways to make the session feel different from your average Zoom call. 

The Best Practices for Creating a Customer Advisory Board

So you want to put together a Customer Advisory Board that’s up to snuff? Follow these Customer Advisory Board best practices to make sure you get the most out of these groups. 

Keep the people in your CAB consistent

After you’ve selected the people you want in your CAB, stick with them. You don’t want members switching out for others, as this can damage group cohesion and impact the quality of insights. 

By focusing on the same people, it’s easier to build continuity from previous meetings, and members will feel more comfortable with each other, stopping them from being guarded about their business needs and issues.

Set specific goals for your CAB

Before launching your CAB, establish clear objectives for what you want to achieve. By knowing what you want to find out, you’ll create focused and productive meetings. Some goals might include gathering product feedback, exploring market trends, or validating strategic initiatives.

Set an agenda for your CAB meeting

To get the best feedback, you want your CAB members to be prepared. In the invite, send an agenda of what you propose you’ll discuss in the meetings. This ensures that participants are ready to go and helps prevent the meeting from going off-topic.

Ask pre-meeting questions

Before the meeting, send a questionnaire or survey to your CAB members to get initial statistics and feedback that you can discuss in more detail in the meeting. For example, you can ask simple questions about product usage and satisfaction, allowing you to get key statistics to spark a more nuanced discussion. 

Host meetings at the right frequency

When scheduling in-person (or indeed virtual) CAB meetings, you want to make sure you get the cadence right. You don’t want infrequent meetings, yet you also don’t want to run them too often and burn your participants out. 

It’s best practice for a Customer Advisory Board to have a meeting once a quarter, giving users enough time to prepare. To further your connection, you can also introduce more frequent calls or online surveys to help you gather insight all year round while keeping customers engaged but not overwhelmed.

Respect their time

Customer Advisory Board members are putting in a lot of their own time to provide feedback. Be sure to respect this. Make sure that the insights you’re looking to find require the dedicated time of the people involved. If it can be answered in a survey or questionnaire, it doesn’t merit being included in a CAB meeting.

Equally, if your goal for a CAB session is too far-reaching, you may struggle to hit your objective in the allotted time. You cannot let these sessions overrun! It’s just downright rude. So make sure what you’ve put on the agenda is realistically achievable in the time. 

The topics should also resonate with the board. Asking them in advance what things they might like to cover can ensure that you’re talking about highly relevant topics for real-world customers.

Customer Advisory Board meeting structure

So it’s meeting time. 10-20 customer representatives are getting ready to speak with you in person or virtually. They’ve taken time out of their busy schedules and they’re expecting a worthwhile experience that respects their time. No pressure. 

To make sure that the CAB meeting is effective for both you and your invited members, it’s a very good idea to have a pre-arranged structure in place to guide the session. 

What you discuss in your meeting will differ each time, depending on the goals and pre-determined topics of the meeting gathered from your pre-meeting agenda and questionnaire/survey. That said, each meeting can follow the same flow to help you stick to your timings and expertly guide the discussions.

Here’s a comprehensive outline for an effective CAB meeting. Do play around with it and make changes to find something that best fits you. 

1. Introductions: Welcome guests and outline the objectives of the meeting. You can also touch on the agenda points you sent out when scheduling the meeting. Make sure everyone introduces themselves so that they’re encouraged to speak and be heard early on in the meeting.
2. Product Update Presentation: Include a brief presentation going over some of the key changes to your product since the last meeting. Go over things like your company’s progress and product updates you think the customers will be interested in. 
3. Feedback Session: Begin your feedback sessions with an open discussion focusing on any proposed updates or features you want to learn about. In this session, you can use the statistics gained from pre-meeting questions and dive deeper into the ‘why’. 
4. Discuss Market Trends & Challenges: Discuss some of the emerging market trends and challenges that your customers are facing surrounding your product. Get feedback on how your customers think your product can address these challenges and trends to make it more effective. 
5. Show Your Product Roadmap: Showcase your current plans in your product roadmap and share your visions for the future. In this session, you can gather thoughts and opinions on your plans and input on what features or initiatives they would like you to prioritize. 
6. Open Discussion: End your CAB meeting with an open forum Q&A. Let customers share their burning feedback and insight and add extra concerns and suggestions. Discuss any missed items from the agenda, or open up to new considerations that have been sparked in previous meeting sections. 
7. Conclude Meeting: Summarize the key takeaways from the meeting and the action items, assigning responsibility to internal team members for follow-ups. Talk with your customers about the next steps and any touchpoints for the next meeting.

What do you do after a Customer Advisory Board meeting?

Once everyone’s heading home or logging off, as the Product Manager, your work isn’t done. One of the first things to do after a Customer Advisory Board meeting is to get together with your product team for a post-mortem. 

Here you should discuss key insights gleaned from this meeting while it’s still fresh in your mind. Focus on any top-priority discoveries and be sure to also assign action items so that everything is followed up on. 

You’re probably going to want to tie specific feedback to certain product Ideas. Have a look at how you can do that in ProdPad. 

You can also review the success of the meeting to generate ideas on how you can improve it for next time, and also evaluate participants to make sure that everyone involved is still a good match going forward. 

To prove to the participants that their feedback has been actioned and appreciated, create follow-up communication to showcase how you plan to use their insights. Share how their input affected your roadmap and influenced your decisions regarding new product ideas.

7 Tips for leveraging your Customer Advisory Board

By now, we’re all clear that following Customer Advisory Board best practices are great ways for you to get feedback on your product through regular meetings. But what if we told you that you can leverage your Customer Advisory Board for far more? As we said, having direct access to your key customers is invaluable, so it’s best to squeeze as much juice out of it as possible. 

If you’re looking for creative ways to leverage your CAB, here are some additional things you can try: 

1. Use your CAB for Beta testing

So you have a new, exciting product feature that looks like it’s ready to go. It’s been through rigorous alpha testing and now needs to be put through its paces in a real-life environment. 

To get the most out of beta testing, you want people who actually use your product to give it a go. This is where you can utilize CAB members for a closed beta test. This benefits the customers as it gives them a first look at the new feature in action, and benefits you because it’ll help you find bugs and fix issues before it’s available to the wider market. 

2. Get case studies from your CAB 

Case studies act as valuable trust signals, showcasing to prospective customers how your product is solving the issues and meeting the needs of businesses similar to them. When you have a Customer Advisory Board, you can ask them to provide detailed descriptions of how they use the product to turn into case studies. 

3. Ask members to be webinar guests

Got customers in your CAB with a large amount of expertise in a specific area? Do you have people lining up to learn more about that subject? Then you should get them to be a guest in your company webinar or podcast. 

Hosting a webinar with your Customer Advisory Board members helps position both your companies as thought leaders and also acts as great promotion and lead magnet material. 

4. Collaborate with CAB members for content

You can also use CAB members to help you create other content. Think about using CAB members as guest blog writers to share their knowledge on a relevant subject. You can also collaborate by sending them whitepapers and e-books to share on their websites. 

If you scratch your customer’s back, they’re likely to scratch yours, so make sure to return the favor and produce content for them. 

5. Involve them in your product discovery

A great way to leverage Customer Advisory Boards is to get them involved in your product discovery process. Ask them some of your product discovery questions to get invaluable insight to build a more customer-centric solution. 

Doing this will help you uncover the most valuable product concepts. Need help with your product discovery process? We’ve got a step-by-step guide.

6. Use them for market research

So you’re designing a product or feature for a specific market – it’ll be good to get some insight about that market to guide you. Your CAB members are experts in the markets they operate in, so be sure to leverage them for market research. 

Use CAB members to discuss industry trends and gather insights on competitors. CAB members can provide valuable perspectives on market shifts and emerging opportunities.

7. Add them to an online community

By adding CAB members to a preexisting online community, you’re providing them a place to network, interact, and share ideas. This helps to create a space to provide ongoing feedback and insight that can be valuable for you as a Product Manager. It provides continuous engagement and helps all members grow more invested in your product. 

If you’re looking for product-focused Slack groups to join, check out our list of 17 Slack groups for Product Managers. 

Get on Board with the Customer Advisory Board

Customer feedback is essential for Product Managers to have any hope in hell of building a product that meets their needs. A CAB remains one of the best ways to get high-value, direct feedback from the customers you trust most, especially when following Customer Advisory Board best practices.

Of course, getting feedback is one thing, recording it and actioning it is a whole different kettle of fish. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Product Management tool that comes with feedback management functionality? 

Guess what, ProdPad offers exactly that! 

Tie your customer feedback directly to the Ideas in your backlog for better products that solve the right problems for your customers. Have a look at how it works in our ProdPad sandbox.

The post Customer Advisory Board Best Practices: How to Unlock the Power of a CAB appeared first on ProdPad.

Why use user onboarding software?

We don’t need to tell you the importance of nailing your product onboarding, right? If you don’t help your first-time users quickly and easily understand your product – what it does, how to use it and why it will be valuable to them – they won’t continue to use it, adopt it or pay for it. Your product will fail. 

So we’re agreed that it’s crucial to guide your users through their first use of your product and give them a specific onboarding experience to ensure they come back for more. But why do you need to use a user onboarding software tool for this job? Why is it better to add a tool to your stack for this, rather than just building your own product tours and onboarding flows directly into your own product? 

There are a couple of pretty compelling reasons.

You have full control

Using user boarding software for your product tours and onboarding flows will give you, as a Product Manager, far greater control. These no-code solutions mean you can just jump into the tool and create your flows, add your copy and make all the tweaks you want to, when you want to, without having to beg, borrow or steal time from your developers.

You can move faster

You can also move a lot faster because you won’t have to rely on any help from developers. 

If you choose to build your own onboarding flows and product tours directly into your product, you’ll need to factor that into your development planning. That will likely mean you need to add that to your product roadmap and prioritize the work amongst everything else. 

Whereas if you use a ready-made tool for this job, then you can just get on with it yourself and you won’t need to disturb the product roadmap. You can get this initiative up and running concurrently to the other initiatives on your roadmap. 

So, you can move faster AND avoid impacting the rest of the product development you want to do.

What is user boarding software?

Regardless of whether you use these tools in your own product yet or not, you will have experienced the work of these tools yourself when you’ve first signed up for a new app. Those tool tips, modals, pop-ups and notifications that guide through and show you how to use the product – that’s user onboarding software in action.  

User onboarding software is the behind-the-scenes toolkit that creates and powers these smooth, helpful experiences for new users.

These tools are typically SaaS products that provide you with a low to no-code way of creating these onboarding flows and integrating them into your product.

What should you look for in user onboarding software?

There are a lot of user onboarding software tools on the market right now and it can be hard to work out which ones are worth evaluating. That’s why we’ve compiled this list – to give you a shortlist to pick. But what are the fundamental features and functionality you should expect from a user onboarding software tool? Let us walk you through the key things you should be looking for in a decent product tour tool.

No-code necessary

The beauty of using user onboarding software rather than building your product tours directly into your product is the ability it affords you as the Product Manager to crack on with it yourself. As we’ve already said, it means you can get in-app tours up and running without having to plan it into your development sprints and patiently wait until it gets prioritized. 

All the tools we’re recommending on this list allow you to build and publish your flows from their own UIs. All you’ll need to do is add a one-time script to your product and then you can create, tweak and publish to your heart’s content.

Analytics to measure performance

The whole point of creating these product tours is to guide as many new users as possible through certain activation tasks and valuable actions. So you need your user onboarding software to tell you how successfully that is being achieved. 

You need to use a product tour tool with a robust analytics suite that will allow you to see things like views and completion rates for complete flows, as well as individual steps. Ideally you would also be able to filter the analytics by different user segments so you can drill down further. 

Analytics for individual sessions can also be useful, providing details of the events and the timings so you can form a picture of how your users are moving through the flow step by step. 

Customizable branding & design

You need to be able to customize the appearance of the pop-ups, tool tips and guidance notes that appear for your users so your tours are blended into the overall app experience and don’t feel jarring. It’s important that these tours feel part of a consistent experience and not a bolted-on addition. 

All of the tools on our list have robust out-of-the-box design customization that should allow you to pick your font, colors and more. Some of these user onboarding software tools also offer custom CSS so you can tweak the appearance of any of the tour elements even further, should you need to. 

Integrations

You should consider the integrations you might need when it comes to your user onboarding software. You’ll want to push data into your chosen tool to help improve the targeting of your product tours, and you’ll likely want to push data out to communicate and measure results and to help inform other experiences across other channels. 

So, think about the rest of your tech stack – what integrations would you ideally need? And would you be happy with using something like Zapier to connect the apps, or would a native integration be better? 

Consider the following integrations when selecting your user boarding software:

• Your product analytics tool
• Your CRM
• Calendar tool to book demos or onboarding calls
• Your Live chat tool

Triggers and targeting options

At a basic level you’ll need to be able to set the triggers for when your product tours pop up. That could be a particular page in your app, or it could be based on a particular action a user has taken. You’ll need some level of control on when the product tour first fires so you can be sure it comes in at the right time. 

Some of the user onboarding software tools on our list will allow you to get more sophisticated with your triggers and enable you to segment your users and show different flows to different cohorts. 

Templates to get you started

It’s always helpful to see examples to help kick-start your thinking, so consider whether you’d ideally like your chosen user onboarding software to come with some ready-made template onboarding flows that you can pick up and adapt. They’re a great way to get started and can help you move that bit faster.

A/B testing and experimentation

You’re a Product Manager, so experimentation is in your blood! You’ll want a tool that will allow you to test different flows and measure the results so you can learn and iterate. If this sounds like something you’d want, be sure to double check your chosen tool has the ability to A/B test flows at least.

Common features of user boarding software

Here’s a quick checklist of features you’d typically expect to have in a good user onboarding software tool. 

• Product tours
• Checklists
• Announcements – banners, modals
• Surveys
• Hotspots
• Tooltips
• Analytics
• Segmentation and targeting 

Now you understand the lay of the land when it comes to user onboarding software, let’s dive into our list of the best 9 solutions on the market right now.

The Best User Onboarding Software

In no particular order…

1. Chameleon

Chameleon is a fairly extensive user onboarding tool offering all of the features listed above. They have product tours, tooltips, surveys, widgets, modals, banners and checklists. 

Chameleon also recently launched a universal search bar facility, which is pretty interesting.  It’s called Helpbar.ai. You can connect it to your help center and use it to offer your users the ability to search within your content and to get AI answers to their questions. 

There’s a cool way to try this out. Just add your help center URL into their website and you can instantly use the search functionality to get an AI generated answer to any question. Check it out for yourself. 

They also have a great Inspiration Gallery on their website that showcases a whole bunch of in-product guidance examples including tooltips, onboarding flows, upsell modals and more.

Pricing

Chamelon offers three pricing tiers, from Startup to Enterprise. The cost ranges depending on your product’s userbase. For 2000 monthly users, the Startup tier is priced at $279 a month. A nice bonus is that The HelpBar functionality of Chamelon is free is to use. Find more details on their pricing here. 

2. Appcues

Appcues are one of the major players in the user onboarding software game, with some big SaaS customers using them like AdRoll, ProfitWell and Vidyard. 

Appcues have one of the largest selection of integrations – 28 of which are native. Also, kudos to them on the integrations page on their website – thats some really nice web and UX design right there!

If you’re looking for a product tour tool that will work across both desktop and mobile and/or on mobile native applications, then Appcues should be one of your front runners. They have a particular focus on mobile with the Appcues Mobile tool. 

They also offer AI-powered localization that will deliver your onboarding flows in each user’s local language. So no matter what language you use in your product, you can deliver that all-important guidance and tutorial content in the user’s own language.

Pricing

The cost of Appcues scales depending on your average monthly user base. For 2500 monthly active users, Appcues Essentials plan will cost $249 a month, while their Growth tier costs $879 a month for the same monthly users. There’s also an Enterprise plan with custom pricing. Find out more on their pricing here.

3. Userpilot

Userpilot comes with an analytics tool that goes beyond the engagement with your product tours, so you can use this tool as your overall product analytics tool. Userpilot also has event auto-capture, allowing you to create all your tracking events without needing developers’ involvement.

The analytics for the user onboarding flows in Userpilot also offers the ability to set what they call ‘growth goals’ which you can use to measure your ongoing success rate. For example, you could set a goal of achieving 300 demo bookings with a particular product tour and the grow goals feature will track progress against that goal and surface an easy-to-understand goal report. 

Pricing

Userpilot offers three plans, a Starter, Growth, and Enterpirse tier. Their cheapest plan starts at $249 a month, with their Growth tier costing $749 a month when paid annually. If you’re looking for a pay monthly option, their Starter plan increases to $299 a month. Get the full breakdown of Userpilot pricing here.

4. Product Fruits

From a team based in the Czech Republic, Product Fruits specializes in AI generated product tour content. So if you’re not sure where to start or want to get off the ground particularly quickly, this could be a good way to spin up something as an initial test. 

These guys also allow you to deploy their snippet via Google Tag Manager, so you can get setup and have user tours published to your product without needing to bother your dev team at all.

Pricing

Product Fruits offer three tiers from ‘Core’ to Enterprise. Their lowest package starts at $79 a month for up to 1500 users. They define users as unique, active monthly users. Find more details on their pricing here.

5. UserGuiding

The folks at UserGuiding claim you can get completely set up and running in just 15 minutes. UserGuiding positions itself as the easiest of the user onboarding software tools, with the simplest implementation. 

Interestingly, you actually build your tours through their Chrome extension. This allows you to create and test the tours on top of your product right away, in real time. 

Pricing

UserGuiding offers three different options, a Basic, Professional, and Corporate Plan. The basic plan starts at $89 a month, with the Pro plan costing $249 a month based on a product with 2500 monthly active users. For their Corporate Plan, get in touch directly to get a quote. All the details of UserGuiding’s pricing can be found here.

6. Userflow

Userflow claim that their script has a 5 – 10x smaller footprint than their competitors. This could be a deciding factor for you if you’re concerned about the impact of these user onboarding software scripts on the speed of your app.  

Userflow also allow you to run multiple environments, meaning you can build and test your onboarding flows on your staging environment first before replicating on production. This means you can have one Userflow account and publish to more than one place.

Pricing

Userflow pricing starts at $240 a month for their Startup plan, designed for products with less than 10,000 monthly active users. To access their Pro plan, pricing starts at $680 a month, but scales up based on your overall active users. Find more details on their pricing here.

7. Whatfix

Whatfix, as a user onboarding software, goes a little further than some of the other tools on this list. Whatfix has three core areas to its product. Alongside their ‘digital adoption platform’, they also have a product analytics tool and something called Whatfix Mirror. 

Their Mirror tool is a simulated web application package that lets you create replicas of your web app to use like a sandbox environment for hands-on user training. Pretty cool right? This means, you can spin up a replica of your app without needing to borrow development time to do it. 

Within their user onboarding software tool they have a nice feature which allows you to export any of the content or tours you’ve created as videos, slide decks, how-to articles and PDFs. This is a great feature for helping you to scale your training materials quickly and easily. So every time you create a new product tour, you can spin it out into a whole range of different materials which your CS teams, Sales people and even Marketing can use as content.

Pricing

Whatfix offers three different plans, their Standard, Premium, and Enterprise tiers. In terms of pricing, you’re going to have to ask them directly. You can find out more about what each tier offers and request pricing information here.

8. Intercom

Intercom is first and foremost a Customer Service tool. You might even use it in your company to run your Help Center, live chat and Support tickets. But did you know they also offer a user onboarding tool? 

Needless to say, their product tours integrate seamlessly with the other elements of Intercom including their live chat interface. This means that you can surface relevant product tours to customers when they ask specific questions in the chat window. So, if a user hops into the chat to ask how to use a particular feature, rather than surfacing a help article on it, the chatbot can surface a link directly to the product tour for that feature. Neat hey? 

So if you’re already using Intercom as your Support tool, it could be well worth taking a look at their product tour functionality before you start evaluating brand new tools.

Pricing

Intercom starts at $39 per seat per month for their Essential plan, and rises to $139 per seat per month for the Expert plan. You can also choose to add on Proactive Support Plus for $99 a month to get advanced in-app and outbound support. Learn more about Intercom pricing here.

9. Hopscotch

Hopscotch doesn’t restrict the number of product tours you can create, no matter what pricing tier you are on, which is a nice touch. They also offer discounts for early-stage startups.

With Hopscotch, you can create your own tour templates, making it easier to create more and more tours and have other people on your team build experiences for your users. 

However, if you need to run your tours across both desktop and mobile, Hopscotch won’t be the tool for you as they don’t currently support mobile applications. 

Pricing

Hopscotch keeps things simple, offering a single plan that you can choose to pay monthly or annually. When paid annually, it’ll cost you $6.67 a month, or $79.99 for the year. Their pay monthly plan costs $9.99. Learn more about their pricing here. 

That concludes our list of the best user onboarding software tools. You should find a tool that works for you in terms of both functionality and budget from that lot. For the record, here at ProdPad we use Userflow. If you want to see that tool in action, why not start a free trial of ProdPad and take a look at our onboarding flows. We’d love to know what you think!

The post 9 Best User Onboarding Software Tools appeared first on ProdPad.

We will cover:

• Why it’s important to train them
• What does useful product feedback look like? 
• The challenges of getting good feedback from your customer team
• How to train your customer teams to speak to the roadmap 
• How to structure a training session
• How and when to deliver the training
• Examples of good product feedback to show them
• Don’t let them forget! 

You’ll also get a downloadable, editable, ready-made slide deck to use with your teams to deliver this training.

But first…

Why is it important to train your customer teams to get useful feedback?

Because it will make your job easier, faster and more successful. Simple as that.

If what your customer teams submit as feedback from users is the best it can be, it will significantly cut down the amount of time you have to spend deciphering, interpreting and extracting insight from each piece of feedback. 

It’ll require less follow-up questions from you, less digging and delving. If you’ve coached your customer team mates to ask the right questions and capture the right insight, then that is a job you don’t have to do. 

Nearly all the Product Managers we speak to have experienced the same problem at one point or another. A Support rep submits some user feedback to the Product Team which just reads “customer wants a calendar integration”. Sigh. Now you have to send the customer an email, or pick up the phone and ask them why. Why do they think they need a calendar integration? What is it that they think a calendar integration will do for them? Are they hoping to reduce the number of missed appointments? Are they just wanting to cut out the need to manually update their calendar? Or maybe they want everyone else in their family to know about the appointment? What is the problem they need to solve? 

Because it’s only once you know the fundamental problem they have, that you can evaluate the best way to solve it. And yes, that might end up being a calendar integration, but it might equally turn out to be a new push notification or an automated SMS. 

If you don’t uncover the problem to solve for each piece of user feedback, then you’ll end up in what Janna Bastow (our CEO and Co-Founder and inventor of the Now-Next-Later roadmap) calls The Agency Trap. If most of the pieces of feedback your Customer Teams send over are actually feature requests, then you can easily end up building to order. Functioning like a software agency rather than a product-led organization. 

So, to be truly effective as a product company, you’ll want to be finding out the problems your target customers have and solving them in the best possible way. And training your customer teams to get to the heart of the problem, is one of the important ways you can achieve that. 

What does useful product feedback look like?

Before we launch into how to go about this training, let’s decide what the end goal is. What exactly is useful feedback? What does it look like? 

Here are the core principles of useful product feedback.

• It’s clear who the user is and what type of customer they are  
• It explains what the customer is trying to achieve
• A problem or challenge has been articulated
• There’s an understanding of how often this problem is felt
• There’s an indication of how important solving this problem is for the customer
• The situation or context of the customer is noted
• The motivation for getting this task done has been identified

Now, I must caveat that list. That is the absolute dream. If every bit of feedback ticked all of those boxes you would be flat out winning at Product Management and Customer Experience. The reality won’t be quite so perfect… but this gives you something to aim for! 

What it boils down to is this… you want feedback to tell you the customer is trying to achieve, what problem they have encountered and how important solving that problem is to them.  

The challenges of getting ‘good’ feedback from your customer team

Over in our article 5 Ways to Get Customer Teams to Share User Feedback, we covered the reasons why it’s often hard to get any sort of feedback shared by your Customer Teams. But here we’re concerned with the quality of that feedback. 

So why is it hard to get the right kind of feedback from these colleagues? 

The customer is always right

You’ve heard this right? Customer Service or Support reps will have this mantra gently whispering away to them all day long. They’ll have grown up on this principle – it’s ingrained and underpins all their customer interactions. You don’t disagree with the customer, you don’t argue with them!

And, of course, we don’t want them to disagree with the customer! We just want them to delve a little deeper. We want them to help the customer really understand what is at the heart of their request. It’s about not just taking what they’ve said at face value and reporting it back to Product verbatim. 

But this isn’t easy and maybe it doesn’t come naturally to Customer Teams. They aren’t therapists after all. 

It takes longer

Customer-facing colleagues are often super busy (isn’t everyone ), so taking the time to dig deeper can often be something they don’t have the time to do. 

It is far quicker to just make a note of what the customer has said and ping it over to Product. Done job. 

How to train your customer teams to speak to the roadmap 

This is another advantage of having your Customer Teams well versed in delving into the problems underlying their customers’ feedback. 

Let’s say a customer declares that they need a certain feature. Once your customer teammate has successfully taken that request back to the underlying problem they want to solve, now they should be able to talk to the different ways that problem is already being looked at by the Product Team (if it is). 

This is why it’s important to have your roadmap structured around problems to solve. It makes it super easy for a CSM to hear a problem, find said problem on the roadmap and advise the customer of where that sits in the priorities. And maybe even give them some sneaky previews into the different ideas that are being explored as a part of the initiative to solve that problem. 

They can even invite the customer to be part of the discovery or testing of the solution! That will go a long way to making them feel listened to, valued and invested in the product.  

They will have flipped a simple feature request into an exploration of the customer’s struggles or desires at the same time as giving them a window into the scientific workings of the Product discipline, tirelessly working to discover the best solutions. Trust me, the customer will walk away from this feeling impressed. It’s win/win. 

How to structure a training session

By now I think we’re clear on what useful feedback looks like and why it’s important to coach the Customer Teams to be able to deliver it. But how do you actually go about coaching this stuff? How should you explain it to them? What tips and advice can you give to help them coax out the most useful insights? 

Here’s how you should structure your training. 

1. Tell them why it matters
2. Explain what is in it for them
3. Be clear about what the most useful feedback looks like
4. Give them examples of great feedback
5. Outline the questions to ask
6. Show them examples of flipping feature requests into useful feedback

Tell them why it matters

When it comes to training your colleagues around this, the first job is to win their enthusiasm for the task. You need to convince them that working to delve deeper into customers’ feedback is worth their time and effort. So start by focusing on winning them over to actually being coached in the first place. If you fail to explain how important this is, in a way that means something to them, then they ain’t gonna be listening all that well. 

Explain what is in it for them

Which is why it’s worth giving them the overall benefits to the organization – providing you the right insights to ensure you can build the most valuable product for your customers and therefore increase retention and acquisition – but ALSO the more immediate benefits that will directly impact them and their job. 

Those might include:

• Better relationships with their customers (thanks to talking for longer, digging deeper and increasing their understanding), making communication easier and interactions happier.
• Being able to deliver more positive news more often – rather than saying ‘no we don’t have that feature’, they can say ‘we’re actually exploring how to solve that problem in a better way’.
• Having to deal with far fewer disappointed customers who expected a feature request to be actioned, but instead understand that their problem is going to be explored.

Be clear about what the most useful feedback looks like

Next, you’ll want to be explicit about what useful feedback looks like. So take the principles we’ve covered above and explain them to your trainee. But don’t just use the theory, make it crystal clear with some concrete examples. 

Give them examples of useful feedback 

Whether you actually find a great example from your real feedback inbox, or you make something up to illustrate the point, make it crystal clear by showing them something concrete. 

Outline the questions to ask

Now they’ve seen what the end goal is, take them through the best ways to get there. Here you need to arm them with a list of questions to help them dig deeper, help the customer unpick what it is they need, and get to the heart of the problem. 

Those questions could be:

• What do you think that feature would do for you?
• Why do you feel you need that particular functionality?
• What is the problem you believe that feature will solve?
• What are you trying to do?
• What is the outcome you want to achieve?

Show them examples of flipping feature requests into useful feedback

This is a top tip from our Head of Product here at ProdPad, Kirsty Kearney-Greig. She has done this with our Customer Teams to great effect. It involves picking out a real piece of feedback that they have submitted to the Product Team and flipping it from less useful feedback to some very valuable insight. 

Having the two interpretations side by side is extremely helpful when it comes to understanding the difference. 

Original piece of feedback:

“The customer wants access to the revenue fields via the API.”

Improved feedback after delving deeper and asking the right questions:

“The customer has a monthly report for the Board that requires them to add their revenue numbers per agent per week. Cutting and pasting them from the Rental Report in our product is taking about 2 hours of their time each month. This is time they don’t have to spare! They were wondering whether they could access the right revenue fields via the API and set up an integration that will automatically feed the data into the Board report. They need a solution that greatly reduces the time they have to spend on this task, if not remove it completely.”

How and when to deliver the training

You can’t just email this around and expect much to change. This is coaching that needs to be delivered face to face (well, face on a screen to face on a screen at least). You want to speak directly to your trainees and be able to see their reaction (so you can respond accordingly). 

Do it properly – use a slide deck

So I would urge you to deliver this training to them formally. By that I mean that you’re explicitly standing in front of them, with a slide deck, at a pre-planned time. Don’t worry, that’s as formal as it needs to get. I’m not suggesting everyone has to wear a suit and keep a straight face. The important thing is that this doesn’t come in the form of a passing comment or two. You need to get across the importance and therefore you should give this training the gravitas it deserves. It will help set the right tone and expectations with the team. 

If the thought of creating a slide deck for this fills you with dread, do not worry! We have you covered. We’ve knocking up a ready-made deck for you to download and use with your team. So all you need to do is book in the time with them.

Get a slot in their regular team meetings

In terms of when to deliver the training, there are a few pointers I can give here. If you can, try and deliver the training to multiple customer-facing colleagues at the same time. And try to ensure their managers and leaders are in the room. It’s a good idea to speak to the commercial leaders beforehand and stress the importance, asking for their support in encouraging their teams to work in this way. 

But, if your customer-facing teams are doing a good job, their calendars will be full with customer or prospect calls. So finding a time in the diaries can be extremely tricky. Therefore, it’s a good idea to get yourself a slot in their existing, regular team meetings – that way you know everyone will be there and you don’t have to struggle with finding a time. 

Or do a roadshow

If even that is proving hard, then you could consider taking your slide deck on the road. Yes this will take up more of your time, but I’m hoping you’re sold on the value this could bring! Slot yourself in with each team member for half an hour and run them through the training. 

Make it part of onboarding

Then, once you’ve gotten around everyone, you’ll need to think about new starters. Here I would suggest you speak to HR or the team leaders and ensure this training becomes a standard part of any new starter onboarding for any customer-facing role. 

Don’t let them forget! 

Once you’ve delivered the training to your customer-facing team mates, don’t dust your hands off and walk away. You need to keep reiterating this message if you stand any chance of it becoming a habit for your colleagues. 

This should be considered as ongoing coaching rather than just one-off training. So whenever you spot a piece of feedback coming from a team mate that falls into the ‘not as useful as it could be’ category, take it to them and give them that feedback in the moment. Work with them on how it could be delved into and the exploratory questions they could have asked. 

The post How to Train Customer Teams to Get Really Useful Feedback appeared first on ProdPad.