Why Customer Feedback Matters
Customer feedback is not just valuable; it’s essential. Whenever our customers interact with our platform or share their thoughts, they play a direct role in improving PortPro. We listen closely because how customers experience our product informs what we improve, prioritize, and develop next.
When we think about product marketing, we’re not just thinking about selling features. We’re thinking about market trends, challenges, and problems we can help solve for drayage trucking companies and brokerages. This type of “input” is coupled with our founders' trucking family background, our team’s direct industry experience, the technical domain expertise we’ve developed, and what we have learned from our success thus far in building solutions for our hundreds of customers.
Our product marketing team is focused on helping customers understand why certain updates or changes matter and how they can positively impact operations.
How We Listen and Collect Feedback
Our feedback loop is designed to capture and act on customers’ input, and we’ve built out a robust process to ensure that we listen every step of the way:
Direct Conversations with CSMs: Our Customer Success Managers (“CSMs”) are not just here to support customers; they gather insights about what’s working, what’s not, and where improvements can be made. This helps us identify friction points and areas for enhancement.
Surveys and Targeted Campaigns: We conduct regular feedback surveys and often do product trials to ensure our solutions align with real-world needs.
In-App Feedback: We pay close attention to our customers’ direct experience by analyzing usage patterns and performance data with special tools to identify potential problems. We also look at features that may not be fully used.
Webinars and Trials: We don’t just use webinars to educate; we use them to listen. Gathering real-time customer feedback helps us validate our assumptions and make necessary adjustments before we launch nationally.
What Happens to Customer Feedback at PortPro?
Feedback alone isn’t enough – and how we apply that feedback matters more. Our team works in a “product feedback loop,” where we take customer feedback and apply it across all departments for continuous improvement:
Product Team: As a product-led organization, our ideas generally start with Product. They document how a feature should behave, its priority, why we need it, and how it will impact other features while working with the engineering team to ensure everything works as expected and “does the job” for our customers.
Engineering Team: Beyond doing the technical development, Dev is critical for helping to cement new features and fixes, testing features, and making sure that we hit our product roadmap delivery goals.
Marketing Team: My role as Product Marketing Manager is to work with the rest of our marketing team to take these products, understand how they apply to our customers, and then craft communication for them with videos, marketing material, and in-app usage guidance. We refine these communications based on feedback from our customer-facing teams, marketing data, and product usage analytics.
Customer Success Team: They manage relationships and ensure customers get the most out of our platform. They often work with product and marketing teams to produce Knowledge Base articles and how-to videos for new features. While circling back to the customer to keep them updated, this team also collects and prioritizes feedback, passing learnings back to both business and internal teams.
Support Teams: Tasked with answering customer questions, prioritizing, and solving issues in line with our operating processes allows this team to also collect feedback in the form of commonly asked questions and friction points. All of this is logged and shared, too.
Sales Teams: Beyond core customer feedback, we also talk to many other companies that share their own needs, use cases, and preferences. The results of these conversations and feedback collected are also added to the loop.
The entire feedback loop process repeats endlessly, passing feedback and analysis through each internal and external department. As a result, PortPro gains a more robust understanding of what the market needs, how to share that with our market, and where to devote development resources next. The coolest part about the entire process is that it leads to more PortPro adoption, usage, and data and analytics to improve and serve customers even better.
AI & Our Customer Feedback Loop In-Action
Customers always expressed to us the need to save time, reduce errors, and improve efficiency. And the question we always pose to ourselves is: How can we continue to deliver on this customer value proposition?
Based on research and conversations with the market, we felt AI-powered solutions were likely the best approach. We understand where AI is heading and validated how it could improve our customers' businesses beyond it being a buzzword.
Through our collective knowledge, expertise, and feedback loops, we strategically implemented this emerging technology where our customers needed it most - creating our AI-powered, Embedded Email Inbox (“EEI”). Our approach addressed customer concerns about how critical and sensitive their email inboxes are.
As a result, we decided that syncing and integrating (NOT replacing) Outlook or Gmail inboxes was the right way to deploy this technology. Our customers needed to know that this wouldn’t interfere with their existing email inbox and didn’t entirely break their standard workflows.
It was on our Product Marketing Team to make this clear. We knew we needed to emphasize that we are NOT an email service provider, nor are we seeking to replace their email inbox. Instead, we’re just making it easier to work and manage customer communications and at the same time, making sure we were showing off the features that our EEI can do that other providers don’t do (i.e. integrating directly with the TMS and reducing manual data entry from emails).
Here’s one small sample of how we did that and what the product marketing output ended up looking like in our EEI promo video:
