Using customer feedback to convince management

Thanks for all your feedback on the doing surveys!  I stayed with Google Forms, and I've received a lot of suggestions for new tools!  I'll definitely be using them for future customer surveys.

Over the last two weeks I've collected feedback from prospective and current customers to understand how they are using our products.  The feedback proved some of my assumptions correct, and some completely wrong!  I love reviewing the feedback because it paints a picture about our users.

Now that I've compiled this data and have reworked some of the customer experience flows, I'm planning to present the ideas to our management team to get buy-in.  I've already had a few brainstorming meetings which will help to convince the team to support the new design.

I think the most compelling information we have is the data we collected about these customers.  Some of the information we collected (and this will vary depending on your industry) was:

• Website feature utilization
• How the customers found us
• What their involvement with our sales team was
• Purchase process (if they bought)
• What they'd like to see

We also asked leading questions to find out if some of the proposed functionality might be helpful (or if we were on the right track.


I strongly recommend all product managers (or project managers if you don't have product managers) collect this information before starting a project.  This information helps to:

• Understand how customers are using your product
• Create buyer personas
• Identify gaps in your products
• Improve your site or product
• Validate (or disprove) some of your assumptions

What have you done to convince your teams to support a project?  Do you find that they are receptive to customer data?