GONG RECIPE BOOK

Building Better Products with Customer Feedback

Ingredients: Smart Trackers, Library, Streams

What is it?

Access to customer feedback is essential for designing new product features and hearing what customers think about existing features or how they’re using them. However, as companies grow, the gap between product teams and those prospects/customers grows, with more of the interfacing with customers moving over to sales teams, sales engineers, BDRs, customer support/success, and so on. At the same time, product teams’ own customer interactions (e.g., interviews, focus groups, etc.) end up being few and far between, giving them a limited, spotty view of reality.

Who is it for?

With Gong, product teams, including product managers, product marketing managers, and executives, get direct access to customer conversations and voice of the customer, without having to beg sales reps to include them in calls. Product managers can use Gong at every point in the product life cycle to create a feedback loop that reduces churn and increases sales.

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How does Gong help out?

Gong provides out-of-the-box functionality that helps product managers understand customers’ viewpoint on products and features qualitatively and quantitatively, individually and as a product management team, including:

Elaborate search capability across all customer conversations. Product managers can search all conversations or focus on specific market segments, based on any keyword – for example, a search for “database integration” when a new capability is launched.

AI-driven search capability (called Smart Trackers) that lets Gong users teach the system to locate very specific concepts, regardless of the wording. Companies provide Gong with some examples of what they’re looking for and after a short round of tuning, Gong finds those concepts in past and new calls.

Feeds (called Streams) that let product managers be notified every time a new conversation arises covering a certain topic or concept. With Streams, Gong detects the concept and notifies team members about the conversation by email or Slack, so it comes right to them without them having to log in and search for it.

Slack integration. This pushes new calls in a Stream to a shared Slack channel. This lets product managers in organizations that use Slack heavily consume the conversations in Slack and add a layer of collaboration on the customer input.

A way to quantitatively measure the appearance of certain viewpoints within customer conversations and assess any trends around them. A Gong page titled Market Insights provides a quick way to quantitatively measure customer voice share based on keywords or concepts.

How does it work?

1. Set product teams up on Gong

Give product managers and adjacent roles (product marketing, user research, and product design) access to Gong and educate them about its functionality. Consumption-only users don’t need a paid license, so this doesn’t incur additional costs.

2. Create Trackers and Smart Trackers

Review calls to gather qualitative data on customer feedback, pain points, and needs, and identify concepts that are discussed in conversations. Set up Trackers (specific keywords) and Smart Trackers (topics, concepts), so Gong can be on the lookout for them.

3. Set up Streams

Create Streams around certain concepts to curate calls into a repository of product needs/feedback and update product teams every time a new call arises discussing a particular concept. Team members can subscribe to Streams and be notified by email or Slack, so they can review the voice of the customer directly, without having to dig for it.

4. Integrate Gong with product tools

Share valuable snippets from calls in your product systems. Integrate Gong directly into Productboard and Zendesk, or use low-code systems (e.g., Zapier, Workato) to send requests from Gong to any other platform you use.

5. Collaborate on customer needs

Encourage go-to-market teams to tag product managers in conversations that include customer feedback, and create hashtags that you can use to bookmark and keep track of feedback later on.

to create constantly updated repository of Organize calls on certain concepts into a repository of customer product needs/feedback

6. Track the impact

Set up an Initiative Board (Insights > Initiatives) with your trackers to see how they’re trending and being adopted. Use the Win/Loss tool (Deals > Win/Loss) to track the impact of a new product or feature launch on the win rate, including understanding how the discussion about certain concepts affects it.

Pro tips

With the Gong app, product managers can listen to calls wherever they are, as well as tag and comment to collaborate with the rest of the team.

Use the Call Library to create a repository of customer feedback and product needs, organizing the relevant calls into folders and subfolders for easy reference.