If you read about the strategy of successful tech companies today, it’s all about having “obsessive customer focus” (Jeff Bezos’ 2016 Amazon annual shareholder letter). You’ll hear that “whoever gets closest to the customer wins” (Drift), and that companies want to “solve for the customer” (HubSpot culture code). Ultimately, the question isn’t about whether you’re focused on your customers, but how you go about evaluating who they are, what they’re trying to accomplish, and how they’re interacting with your product. I recently started using a workflow that gives me a continual stream of feedback, allows me to go back and forth to dig deeper and clarify important questions, and then also easily share the results with my team. It also required no effort from our engineering team to setup and didn’t require additional budget.

I work at Reforge, and we’re an education company. We offer programs for those located in SF, but we also have an equivalent online-only experience. For a bunch of our key initiatives this year, I felt that I didn’t fully understand what brought people back to our web app after some time away, and I wanted to dive deeper to improve it. Rather than do a one off survey, I setup a campaign that runs continuously to deliver this feedback on a daily basis.

Using Segment to create our list of “alumni” to survey

When I arrived at Reforge we were already using Segment, and we ended up buying their personas add-on. I’m a relatively happy customer (and happy they just raised $175 million), but used it because we were already paying for it. I’m a big fan of using the tools available to you.

Segment has a feature called Audiences that lets you create lists of people. Since most of our important data attributes and events were already flowing through Segment, it was very easy to define small segments or large swathes of our user base through a simple editor. While I live and breathe SQL, sometimes it’s really nice to build it out in a GUI. Here’s what I built:

The nice thing about this is that when someone enters this audience, it means that they’re an alum, they’re not in our most recent cohort, and they have viewed our online material. The cool thing is that you could specify anything about the users that you have available (role, country, seniority, depth of engagement, type of user, organization, etc).

A feature of Audiences is that you know when someone enters the audience. The way I’ve structured the audience, this will mean that they came back to our site and it has been more than 90 days since their last visit – otherwise they’d already been a member. So it’s a cool way to know when someone has come back.

Send the list of people to Zapier

Segment then allows you to send this information to any of their supported destinations. I sent this information to Zapier:

Segment tells Zapier that the user has come back to our site, and Zapier then writes it to a google spreadsheet. This is what our looks like:

What you can see here is that a user from HubSpot named Kieran has revisited how to build a qualitative growth model. I am also using a Segment API to pull in their first name and the title of the last page they visited, in case I want to include that in my outreach asking for feedback. Segment is continuously sending data about people coming back to Reforge, and each time it happens Zapier is writing it to a Google Spreadsheet for me.

Email the people revisiting the material

I then have another Zap that takes the rows from this spreadsheet and emails the person from my personal G-suite account.

You can see what it looks like if I look in my sent folder within gmail (and you can see that people have replied to the email from Gmail’s threads):

Via this workflow, I’m automatically emailing people that are coming back to our site asking them what brought them back. I love getting a continual stream of this feedback. Because it’s in Gmail, I can go back and forth with them to clarify what they mean and to dive deeper to understand. If you have a huge user base, you can easily filter down the number of people you email with another step in Zapier (mod their user id by a number to make sure you don’t email too many people at once).

Collect all of the feedback in a Google Doc

At this point I’m automatically emailing everyone from the segment I care about, and I’m able to go back and forth to clarify any questions that I have or dig deeper. Rather than copy and paste their responses into a google doc to share snippets of feedback / soundbites, I hooked up another Zap to automatically pull in their feedback and put it in a google doc.

When the feedback emails come in, I setup a gmail filter to automatically apply a label to the email. I use Zapier to look for new emails under that label, and I exclude any emails from me (my replies to them). Zapier then puts the emails as a spreadsheet row in a google sheet:

Then I used a couple of simple formulas to combine all of the emails from a single user into a single row in another spreadsheet:

I separate the replies with a ———, so the above row represents multiple emails back and forth with this person. You can see that my first question was about uses cases, and then the third one was about the ones that come up frequently.

Column A is set to be “=UNIQUE(Emails)”. That means that there will only be one row for each email address I have feedback from. The formula for column B is “=ARRAYFORMULA(TEXTJOIN(CHAR(10) & “——–” & CHAR(10), TRUE, IF(Emails=A2,Response,””)))”

Array formulas are really cool, I’ve only had the need to use them a couple of times but I am always so impressed with their functionality. Basically this formula tells Google Sheets to combine all of the emails from users (remember, each row is a single user) together with the “——–” separator.

This is pretty powerful. Now I have a spreadsheet that has the entire conversation with someone in a single spreadsheet row, and I can share that spreadsheet with my entire team. We can then add columns to categorize feedback into buckets for easy filtering / reading.

Why I love this approach:

• I get to read feedback from a critically important segment of users every day. I can define multiple segments to run simultaneously. The only limit is the limit on emails I can send from my Google account (2,000 messages), and the number of emails I have time to respond to.
• I get to follow up with them in my main email tool
• Their feedback then gets pulled into a spreadsheet automatically that I can share with my team members, categorized, and filtered.
• While this isn’t the easiest thing to put together, this is so much easier than it used to be: writing complex SQL by hand, setting up a cron job to run this, writing a custom Gmail script, and then store this information in some database / google sheet). This is so much easier. If you have read this far and are thinking about building this – let me know I’d love to try it out first.

Is there an easier way to accomplish this? Let me know, I’d love to switch to it.