How Pipedrive Improves Its CRM Using Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is an important part of almost any process imaginable. We talked to Pipedrive’s Product Manager, Ksenia Chaynikova and Research Team Lead, Paula Koppel to examine this statement and discuss how Pipedrive uses Survicate across multiple teams to deliver a product that meets their needs.

Let’s start with Pipedrive. Could you describe your service?

Ksenia Chaynikova:‍

Pipedrive is a sales CRM that makes selling simple. We’re on a mission to make salespeople unstoppable. Pipedrive keeps things moving, stops tasks from falling through the cracks, and kills the tedium of admin. Pipedrive is designed by salespeople for salespeople to make sure sales activities remain targeted, ambitious, and realistic.

Today, over 75,000 customers in 170 countries across 100 industries leverage Pipedrive’s award-winning software to manage their sales processes.

Why have you decided to survey your customers?

K. C.:‍

Primarily, we wanted to gather insights about the processes sales professionals use via customer interviews. We can combine this information with data we can extract from Pipedrive product usage.
Internally, we have decided to use surveys when we want to profile our customers to pick the right interviewees, when we want to use the MaxDiff method to prioritize customer needs, or when we want to collect a rather large amount of background information about salespeople and managers.
And yes, of course, we’re using Pipedrive to keep track of the communications with our customers and document all the research findings!
We also distribute surveys to customers at a specific point in their life cycle to help us identify a particular behavior trigger. We understand that the customer journey doesn’t concentrate exclusively on the product’s features usage.
We need to understand the reasons why a prospect wants to start using a CRM. Is there something wrong with the sales process? And most importantly, what prompted the user to start looking for the CRM in the first place?
The same thing applies to the whole customer journey. We’re not exclusively asking our prospects about certain parts of the problem they need solving. Instead, we want to analyze the stages in their sales process and their entire team's performance. I think the customer journey should be scrutinized and studied from this perspective. There is so much you can learn about how the product will be used.

Why is user feedback important in product management?

Paula Koppel:

Feedback about our most up-to-date product is very important in helping us understand key strengths and weaknesses. Feedback about mock-ups and prototypes is crucial to building the right things in the right way.

In the long-term, researching how salespeople and their managers work and what they struggle with is the most valuable knowledge. Because feedback comprises only the existing design/is about something that is already there. Researching how they work to identify how we can improve their workflows feeds our innovation.

Were there any ‘aha’ moments, when a user directed your attention to some issue you didn’t previously know about?

P. K.:

There is definitely more than one, but there is a certain instance that springs to mind. Late last year, we used the MaxDiff method to understand what the main user needs are when salespeople are on the go (on their way to meet a customer, heading to the office, etc). Simply, our product managers want a more intimate understanding of what salespeople need in their mobile apps.

Until then, we had thought about improving reporting views in the mobile app. The results of this survey made us realize reporting is not a critical use case for the mobile app. Instead, salespeople are most concerned about accessing and quickly entering information about their leads and customers.

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