client success | lead up

How to get the most valuable feedback from your customers and prospects

Feedback is how you refine your product, shape your messaging, and uncover blind spots. But not all feedback is created equal. The most useful feedback doesn’t just confirm your assumptions or point out flaws, but it reveals intent, context, and patterns that help you make better decisions.

So how do you get that kind of feedback from customers who are busy and prospects who aren’t yet invested?

Let’s take a look.

Ask why

Too many feedback forms and surveys stop at surface-level questions:

“Did you like this feature?”
“Would you recommend us?”
“What didn’t work for you?”

While feedback that comes out of these questions can be useful, you may get even better insights by focusing on the why.

Ask:

What were you trying to accomplish?
Why did this feature help, or fail to help, you do that?
Why did you choose us over other options? Or why didn’t you?

You’ll uncover underlying motivations, not just reactions. And that’s what drives product clarity and positioning.

But a word of caution: how you ask why matters. If it comes off like you’re challenging the validity of someone’s feedback, especially if they’re voicing frustration, they may get defensive. Worse, they might double down on a perception that your product lacks something crucial, even if it’s a misunderstanding or misalignment.

Instead, approach with genuine curiosity and a tone of collaboration. Frame it like, “I want to make sure I fully understand so we can get better at solving that problem.” That keeps the door open to dialogue and positions you as a partner, not a skeptic.

Talk to the extremes

It’s tempting to focus on your “average” customer. But the most valuable insights often come from:

Your biggest fans: They can articulate your differentiators and help you understand your true value.
Your toughest critics: They reveal gaps you’ve ignored or underestimated. Remember Bill Gates’ comment ““Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
Your lost prospects: They tell you where you missed the mark and what mattered most in their decision.

Build regular cadences to talk to all three. Exit interviews with lost deals are especially underrated.

How to get lost prospects to talk to you

Reaching out after a deal is lost can feel awkward, but when handled with the right tone, it can actually build long-term goodwill.

Lead with humility and transparency. Try:
“Thanks again for considering us. We know you made the best decision for your team. We’d love to learn how we can improve for the future. Would you be open to a short conversation?”
Offer value in return. For example:
“We’re refining our onboarding process and messaging. If you’re open to sharing your thoughts, we’ll send you a preview of what we’ve changed based on customer feedback.”
Keep it low-effort and non-salesy. Clarify upfront:
“This isn’t a sales call, just a chance to learn from your experience.”

How to get to the real reasons

Often, the reason prospects give (“pricing,” “missing feature”) is just the surface. To uncover the deeper drivers, use open-ended prompts like:

“Walk me through your decision-making process and what mattered most to your team.”
“Were there any trade-offs you had to make?”
“Was there anything that gave you pause about our product?”
“If you could have changed one thing about our offering, what would it have been?”

Don’t be afraid of a little silence. Often, the most honest feedback comes after the first, more “polite” answer.

Observe behavior

What people say they want and how they actually behave often diverge. This is especially true in SaaS.

Let’s say you launch a new page builder in your CMS. During interviews, both developers and non-technical users express excitement.

But once it’s live, your data shows that power users continue making update right in the HTML, non-technical users still submit help tickets for formatting issues, or bounce rates from the feature documentation are high.

That’s a red flag: behavior doesn’t match enthusiasm. Why? Maybe:

The interface wasn’t intuitive enough.
They weren’t confident using it without training.
It didn’t accommodate the custom components your developers already rely on.
Governance concerns are forcing users back to IT for review anyway.

This kind of insight won’t surface through surveys alone. It shows up in click paths, support logs, and feature adoption data.

So instead of just asking, “Do you find the page builder helpful?”, combine that feedback with behavioral signals:

Are users completing their tasks independently?
Are certain roles ignoring the feature altogether?
Is usage consistent across departments?

In the CMS world, watching how content is actually created, updated, and published is often more revealing than what users say about the tool.

Ask open-ended questions

Instead of asking “What do you like about our product?”, ask:

“Tell me about the last time you used our product to solve a problem.”
“Walk me through how you currently manage [X] and where you get stuck.”
“Walk me through a workaround that you use just to avoid a specific feature.”
“What’s the process like when someone new joins the web team. How easy is it for them to get up to speed?”
“How does the system support (or hinder) collaboration between departments?”
“If your system disappeared tomorrow, what would you miss, and what wouldn’t you?”
“What’s something you wish your system could help you do that it currently can’t?”
“Can you tell me about a moment when using the tool made you look like a hero internally?”

Stories provide context. They help you see how your product fits into real workflows and where it falls short. They also help you uncover language you can use in your own messaging.

Make feedback-giving easy and low-risk

Don’t expect people to write a novel or get on a one hour call with you. Offer simple ways to share:

A single question in a pop-up: “What’s one thing that would have made this page more useful?”
A quick check-in email: “Mind hopping on a 15-minute call to give us some honest feedback?”
Embedded tools like Hotjar or FullStory that let you capture input as users interact.

Also, avoid making feedback feel like a trap. Let people speak freely, anonymously if needed, and make it clear there are no wrong answers.

Quick tip: While I’m generally not against having an AI notetaker on my calls, I try to read the room, and when I feel that I would get more honest feedback if it was just me and the customer “off the record”, I turn it off. You can also just ask if the customer would feel more comfortable without the notetaker.

Separate the signal from the noise

When you start collecting feedback at scale from users, prospects, support tickets, user groups, and internal stakeholders, it can get noisy fast. Everyone has ideas, and everyone has “must-haves.” Obviously, trying to implement everything leads to a bloated product that loses focus.

Imagine you start getting feedback like this from multiple content contributors across departments:

“We need more design flexibility on our pages.”
“Users wants more layout options without going through the web team.”

This can quickly trigger alarm bells:

Should we allow drag-and-drop layouts?
Do we need to revamp the entire templating system?
Should non-technical users have full control over design?

But before diving into solutions, pause to ask: What are they actually trying to do?

You conduct a few interviews and review support tickets. This could look like this:

Most users aren’t asking for pixel-perfect design control. They just want to add a call-to-action or rearrange content blocks.
Others are frustrated because they don’t understand how to use existing layout options that are available but maybe not easy to find.
A few are working around limitations by pasting formatted content from Word or Canva, which breaks accessibility standards.

The signal may be “Non-technical users want to feel empowered to make their content look professional, but the current tools are hard to find or unintuitive.” But the noise could be “Requests for total design freedom, when in reality, that would lead to governance chaos.”

This separation will provide more clarity and lets you implement the right set of features and enhancements without overcorrecting or deviating from your product philosophy.

In summary:

Look for patterns: What themes come up repeatedly across roles and industries?
Use jobs-to-be-done thinking: What core problems are people trying to solve?
Prioritize based on impact vs. effort and alignment with your strategy.

Great feedback isn’t just a list of requests but set of clues that need to be interpreted carefully.

Close the loop

The easiest way to encourage feedback? Show people it matters.

Let users know what changed based on their input (these are huge wins for you and them!)
Thank them personally when their insight led to a fix or improvement.
Involve your customers in early access programs and beta testing.

Picture this. A customer filed a support ticket for a use case that your product could not support at the time. Now, months later, you have a new feature that can help the user do what they need to do. You send them a personal message, thanking them for their feedback and informing them that this new feature is now for use in beta. Ask them to test it and let you know how it works dor them. Who knows, this may even result in a user story for your next blog post or webinar as a real world example of how customer feedback drives your roadmap.

Be curious, not defensive

When someone tells you your product didn’t work for them, or that they chose a competitor, it’s tempting to explain or defend. Resist the urge.

Instead, get curious, dig deeper, and ask more questions

The most valuable feedback doesn’t stroke your ego. The best products are built by people who know how to listen with open minds and strategic intent.

Supercharging Customer Success: how AI lets you do more of what matters

From strategic advisor to renewal champion, from ad hoc support provider to educator, and empathetic ear, as a Customer Success Manager (CSM) you often wear many hats. In a role where responsiveness and proactive engagement are crucial, time is your most precious asset. That’s why ChatGPT and other AI tools can be transformative in increasing productivity and impact, as they can free up a significant amount of time, so that the CMSs can focus on providing maximum value to their clients.

Here are some ways in which CSMs can use AI, particularly ChatGPT (along with a few shoutouts to other tools) to stay ahead and organized and provide personal service and attention without losing their minds.

Prepare for customer calls

Every CSM worth their salt spends a good amount of time reviewing a customer’s account prior to a meeting with them. This includes renewal dates and amounts, usage data, and, most importantly, reviewing the activity history and summaries from past meetings. ChatGPT can come in handy when it comes to synthesizing the information and creating an agenda prior to reaching out to set a customer call. A sample prompt: “Based on the summaries of the last four meetings with this client, create a three-point agenda focused on new users, feature adoption, and potential Services project.”

In addition, you can use ChatGPT to gather pertinent information about the customer that may not be directly related to your product or services. For example, you could ask it to identify a couple of newsworthy items, detect policies, industry changes or events that could affect the customer, or get a summary of the customer’s high level strategies.

A couple of ideas for prompts:

“Summarize the top 3 news stories from the past 6 months about [Customer Name] and highlight anything relevant to digital transformation or leadership changes.”

“Here’s [Customer Name]’s 2025 strategic plan. Extract the top 5 goals and suggest how our platform could align with each?”

A quick word of caution: watch for potential pitfalls like hallucinations or misinterpretation, particularly when summarizing nuanced meeting content.

Turn meeting notes into follow-ups

If you don’t already have an AI tool to automatically join your calls and provide notes afterwards (we do, but I still prefer to take notes manually with my Remarkable and then convert them to text), ChatGPT is great at rewriting notes and organizing them into action items. It also makes it a breeze to send follow-up emails. Simply ask: “Turn these meeting notes into a summary email for the client, with clear action items and deadlines.” Use the time you save to handle the action items and tasks assigned to you. If your meeting was extensive and included a number of different stakeholders, you can even ask the tool to write separate, personalized emails based on each person’s or group’s priorities, challenges, questions, and interests.

Create customer-facing resources

You probably have a plethora of resources available that you can share with customers, whether that’s white papers, your knowledge base site, product documentation, pricing sheets, or marketing one-pagers. But sometimes, your customer needs something more custom, which is where ChatGPT (and other tools, such as Google’s NotebookLM) can come to the rescue. A simple example: You have a customer who has been remiss in updating their software, so now they are a few versions behind. They ask you to give them a summary of the most important features and security enhancements that have been implemented since the last time they upgraded. Instead of combing through pages of release notes, you can simply copy the URLs of the notes and ask ChatGPT: “Summarize the key features of these releases, specifically as they pertain to security and usability. Put them in chronological order and add the benefits of each new feature.” Or you can ask the tool to eliminate jargon and simplify an array of rather technical articles into a summary for non-technical users.

Make tailored communication scalable

In order for you to serve all of your customers in a highly personalized way, it’s important that you have time to do so, and that, as counterintuitive as it may sound, involves making communication more scalable. For example, you may start an outreach campaign for selected customers in order to tell them about a set of features that they don’t seem to be using. You can have ChatGPT craft a few different versions of our email depending on their profile (number of users, SaaS versus on-prem customers, or industries. Similarly, you can use ChatGPT to plan quarterly business reviews for customers that are similar to each other based on the aforementioned criteria. This approach will make it easier for you to detect patterns, too. Here is an example prompt: “Write an email to our customers in finance to offer a QBR in which we discuss how [our product] has helped them with [initiative/goal] and discuss if and how [change in the industry] will affect them. Make the tone professional but friendly.”

Highlight proactive insights

ChatGPT can even process usage metrics and support ticket data. Simply upload your data from Mixpanel, Hotjar, Amplitude or whichever tool you have in place and ask it to provide insights for you to use in your next meeting with the customer. Those could be red flags (for instance if the customer is not using a large percentage of features, or you see declining logins) or potentially areas for expansion. A sample prompt: “Analyze this summary of [Customer Name]’s usage and tell me about trends I should ask about in my next meeting with them”. If you have a fantastic support team (like we do at Hannon Hill), you can also upload support tickets and summaries over a certain time frame and show your customers how (and how quickly) you’ve helped them or helped their end users.

Facilitate internal collaboration

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, there’s no such thing as over-communicating when it comes to your customers. I am a firm believer in keeping team members from every team in the loop. But not everybody has time to read multiple paragraphs of meeting recaps or long threads of emails. Use ChatGPT to create the right types of information for the right audience in the right channels.

A few examples:

“Summarize the transcript of this meeting into a Slack message for the product team that breaks the customer’s feedback down into: wishlist, complaints, and praise.”

“Draft a CSM onboarding brief for a new team member taking over the [Customer Name] account. Include company overview, implementation status, desired outcomes, success metrics, key stakeholders, risk factors, and next steps.”

“Summarize the latest renewal conversation with [Customer Name] for internal tracking. Include renewal likelihood, objections or blockers, contract value, timing, decision-maker insights, and follow-up actions.”

Using ChatGPT or other AI tools is not a replacement for highly personalized, high value interactions with your customers. It should free you up to do more of what matters because AI can be your bionic arm to help you be more efficient, reduce the busy work, and do things that AI is just better at than humans are, which is processing large amounts of data. The goal is for you as the CSM to drive value, build loyalty, and be a highly valuable partner.

What about you? What are your tips for CSMs when it comes to using ChatGPT?

customer communication involves all departments

There’s no such thing as over-communicating when it comes to your customers

If there’s one thing I’ve been saying at nauseam in internal conversations: There’s no such thing as over- communicating when it comes to your customers.

We’ve all experienced first hand how some organizations treat customer communication like a one-lane road, owned and operated solely by the customer success or support team. But the truth is, our customers don’t experience our companies in silos at all, so why shouldn’t operate that way? When you open up communication across teams and create visibility into what customers are experiencing and sharing, you can build a culture that’s not just customer-friendly, but customer-obsessed, which is a much better place to be in.

Here’s why I think it matters, and how you can start fostering a that culture.

Create a dedicated Slack channel

Nobody wants more meetings, so you can start with a cross-functional Slack channel for customer insights. This can be your internal hub for things like:

Good news: big wins, unsolicited praise, successful launches
Red flags: early signs of dissatisfaction, usage drops, missed expectations
Complaints: even if they’re tough to hear. You need to share what’s really going on without sugarcoating.
Challenges and blockers: recurring issues, misalignments, confusing parts of your product
Aha moments: when a customer uses your product in a brilliant, creative, or unexpected way

Don’t restrict access to the channel. Invite Sales, Product, Services, Marketing, and Leadership, and really anyone who touches or impacts the customer experience. You might be surprised by the insights that come from someone who isn’t a Customer Success Manager. A marketer may have seen a trend. A developer might immediately understand the root cause of an issue that the customer is reporting. An account executive might chime in with helpful background from the buying journey. If you’re worried about overloading your team with messages, just make it clear that not everything requires an acknowledgement, let alone a response.

Make customers a part of the weekly conversation

Sharing updates in Slack is a good start, but not everyone looks at those updates all the time, and you don’t want to miss the opportunity to drive change. Make some space in your weekly company updates or all-hands meetings for a quick customer snapshot. It doesn’t need to be a full write-up or polished presentation, just a few minutes to surface recurring themes, such as

Are multiple customers asking for the same functionality?
Did a recent update excite users or confuse them?
Are there usage patterns indicating onboarding gaps?
Were customers not aware of a newly implemented feature or a service that you offer?

These patterns should inform roadmap conversations, onboarding optimization, and sometimes even hiring.

In addition, encourage your team to stay informed and curious about what’s going on in your customers’ world that may not have anything to do with your product or service. We share at least three articles about our customers every week in our weekly updates, because it makes us appreciate everything that our customers do and how they make the world a better place.

Break down the walls between roles

One of the most impactful things you can do is give everyone the opportunity to interact with customers, especially when they can add unique value. For example, let your engineers sit in on customer success calls. Encourage your marketers to attend quarterly business reviews. Invite your product leaders to join customer onboarding calls. Empower your sales reps to loop in implementation developers earlier in the sales process (if they have the bandwidth, of course).

The point is not to flood your customers with too many touchpoints, but to bring more clarity, more empathy, and more value to every interaction. When customer knowledge lives in silos, things tend to fall through the cracks, issues get repeated, feedback loops can break down, and your teams make assumptions based on partial or outdated information.

But when customer communication is shared, celebrated, and acted on:

Product decisions feel less speculative
Marketing becomes more relevant
Support becomes more proactive
The team starts speaking the customer’s language
Empathy grows

You can create alignment not just on what you’re building, but who you’re building it for. Make everyone listen to your customers. Because when your whole company becomes part of the customer conversation, you build stronger relationships, better products, and a clearer sense of purpose.

What about you? How much communication about your customers is too much?

Making customer count a prime metric

Net Revenue Retention (NRR) has been a key indicator of business health in SaaS for a long time, and for good reasons. It tells you how well you’re expanding within your existing customer base. But while NRR is a highly valuable metric, it can also be misleading, because it may mask challenges, especially when it comes to acquiring new customers. That’s why you may consider shifting your focus to something more fundamental: the number of (good-fit) customers.

Don’t over-rely on NRR as the main indicator of success

A high NRR can make a company look successful on paper, but if customer acquisition is stagnant, focusing too much on NRR might make you ignore signs of trouble. In addition, relying too heavily on expansion revenue within an existing customer base creates a ceiling on growth. Eventually, there’s only so much revenue you can farm from our current customers, no matter how much value you add.

While retaining and expanding within your customer base remains important (Hannon Hill‘s retention rate in the last two years exceeded 97%!), sustainable long-term growth depends on consistently bringing in new customers. By prioritizing customer count as a key metric, you ensure that your business remains viable and competitive.

Why customer count helps paint a truer picture

Of course, it’s not all about customer count, and we all know that getting a new customer signed just for the count without considering if they fit into your ideal customer profile is a flawed approach. However, let’s look at some of the benefits of identifying the number of customers as a key metric.

Driving new business and competitiveness
Expanding your customer base means actively selling your product to new organizations. This not only generates new revenue streams but also reinforces the value and relevance of your offering in the market.
Building a more expansive customer community
More customers mean a broader range of success stories, testimonials, and case studies. A thriving customer community adds credibility, strengthens brand advocacy, and enhances your ability to attract even more customers.
Enabling better product decisions with diverse feedback
A growing customer base provides a more diverse set of perspectives, use cases, and challenges. This variety helps you make more informed product decisions, ensuring your platform evolves in a way that benefits a wide range of users.
Ensuring long-term sustainability
A business that prioritizes new customer acquisition (again, only if the customer is a fit – don’t pursue bad fits, as this is a lose-lose scenario) is better positioned for long-term success. Over-relying on upsells and expansions can create an illusion of growth, but without a steady influx of new customers, churn and market saturation will eventually limit progress.

Of course, retention still matters – a lot

This shift in focus doesn’t mean retention no longer matters. Keeping existing customers happy is still critical. However, retention should support, rather than overshadow, the primary goal of increasing your customer count. A balanced approach ensures that you continue to provide value to your current customers while also expanding your reach.

At the end of the day…

Ultimately, long-term success in SaaS isn’t just about getting more revenue from your existing base by providing more value, but it’s about continuously bringing new organizations into your ecosystem. By making customer count a core metric, you may better position yourself for sustainable, scalable growth.

What are your thoughts?

How to use ChatGPT for your startup

There’s no content shortage regarding AI in general and ChatGPT in particular. And there certainly is a healthy level of skepticism and trepidation but also a sense of excitement about the possibilities. If you’re looking to leverage its capabilities for your startup, where you may need to be scrappy and don’t have the resources to buy all of the expensive enterprise software you want, ChatGPT can be a game-changer. Let’s take a look at some use cases.

Analyze sentiment

For the most part, prospects and customers are quite polite and not always easy to read. Your sales reps and customer success specialists might be optimistic by nature, report what they consider positive feedback, and might not want to dig deeper into the real sentiment of their prospects or customers. That’s why companies like Gong include AI-based tools that analyze sentiment. However, if you’re on a tight budget, ChatGPT can be a viable alternative. For example, you may get an email from a prospect telling you that the project has been delayed and to bear with them. Ask ChatGPT: “Look at this email from a prospect for [describe the product]. Is this prospect a serious buyer?”. Similarly, if you’re in Customer Success, you could ask, “Look at this email from my customer. Are they completely happy with our products and services?” It will give you an analysis that might help you get an objective view, which can help you make strategic decisions. You may even take it a step further by generating transcripts of your demo recordings or your meetings with existing customers and ask ChatGPT to analyze sentiment or even the distribution of talk time, which will likely provide good teaching moments.

Help with tone

One of ChatGPT’s biggest strengths is to analyze and write for a specific tone. For example, when you send a customer a response to a complaint or even if you just send them a renewal notice, you could ask the tool to write it in a friendly, empathetic tone. Compare your current version with ChatGPT’s response, and you may be pleasantly surprised. You may also use it for responding to Support tickets, inquiries from prospects, or for handling challenging communication with co-workers. Remember that you don’t want to rely on the tool to mimic your sincerity and personality. Use it as a learning tool to improve your interpersonal skills.

Create customer surveys

If you’re just getting started building your Customer Success department, you might need some help asking your customers the right questions that will give you action items. Be as specific in your ask as possible and include the type of persona that will receive the survey and the type of product or service you provide. Note that ChatGPT’s first response might be more generic than you would like, in which case you can ask it for either a more in-depth first questionnaire or a follow-up questionnaire, as seen below.

Generate content ideas

Coming up with fresh content ideas can be harder than actually writing a piece of collateral. ChatGPT can crack your writer’s block. You can simply ask, “Give me content ideas for…” or start with titles, add the desired characteristics, and go from there. The more specific you are, the more usable the results will be. For instance, instead of saying, “Give me titles for blog posts on marketing”, go deeper with “Give me humorous titles about email marketing. My target audience is the marketing manager of a small to medium-sized business”.

Generate content for demos

If your business requires any demonstration to customers or prospects, whether it’s a website, landing pages, or emails, you always want the content to be as realistic as possible and targeted to your prospect instead of relying on “lorem ipsum”. ChatGPT can save you a ton of time!

Practice your demos

If you have junior sales reps on your team, you will likely spend much time coaching them. You might know your target personas exceptionally well, but your reps may not. Why not empower them to practice their demos using ChatGPT? Teach them the right prompts, such as “Pretend that you are [describe the buyer persona]. I am showing you my product, which is [describe the product]. What would you like to know?”

These are just a few ideas on using ChatGPT to your benefit. The key is to be mindful of how you’re using it, to learn how to give it the right prompt for what you’re looking for, and to keep learning, just like ChatGPT keeps learning.

What about you? How are you using ChatGPT?