Ensuring customer success is a cross-functional effort. It requires your teams to listen, understand, and align around customer needs.
The challenge?
Allowing everyone, not just customer-facing teams, to listen to your customers directly.
We had a chance to sit down with Shareil Nariman, Head of Customer Success at Arrows to understand how his team uses Grain alongside tools like Threads and Notion, to share the voice of the customer and align everyone around real customer needs. Let's dive in!
Building Customer-Centric Roadmap with Product Team
Product managers rely on customers to understand and prioritize what to build next. But, in reality, PMs can’t engage with each customer individually.
Shareil and his team use Grain to record, clip, and share insights and feedback from their customer meetings.
“Our product team loves Grain highlight clips as it allows them to hear what customers want and why—without having to join every customer call”.
Unlike a Zoom recording, a meeting recorded by Grain can be quickly turned into digestible clips that are easy to share anywhere. Shareil agrees, “the recording itself is powerful, but the ability to create clips and stories and collections of content makes Grain incredibly valuable.”
On top of sharing relevant clips individually, Shareil also stitches together a group of highlights to create a Grain story. For instance, when the customer success team comes across an interesting use case from a customer, they convert the hour-long call into a few-minute story for PMs to watch.
“Grain clips are basically customer data”
During his weekly calls, when the product teams want to know what customers think about a specific feature (for instance, Settings), Shareil jumps into Grain, searches for the relevant moments using keywords and #tags, and plays the video or a story (if it’s been already created).
Improving Product Experience with Engineering Team
Unsurprisingly, customer success teams come across product requests, issues, and bugs more than others. The trickiest part is to curate the issues with all the necessary details so that engineers can understand, process, and ship updates and improvements.
With Grain, the customer success team at Arrows, clip issues and bugs reported by customers and then add them to a Notion database. Grain highlight clips allow product and engineering teams to hear directly from the customers, ship the right product updates, and ultimately, deliver a better experience.
Rallying Everyone Around the Voice of the Customer
“Grain makes sure that everyone has access to what our customers are saying and not just customer-facing teams.”
Besides collaborating with product and engineering teams, Shareil leverages Grain to share customer insights with everyone in the company—including marketing and sales.
How?
#Voice-of-the-Customer Channel
Customer insights are typically clipped and shared in a dedicated Slack channel. “Most of the insights go into #voice-of-the-customer Slack channel so that the whole organization has visibility into them”, adds Shareil.
Customer Threads
Shareil also writes up Threads about specific customers or topics on Threads.com where Grain highlights and transcripts are included to add context and enable others to listen to the conversation.
Show and tell over Zoom
Every week, the whole company gets together for a “show and tell” where everyone gets to share their work and highlights of the week. A product manager might show the feature they are working on and an engineer might show the code they shipped recently.
Shareil, being on calls with customers all week, pulls up Grain and plays highlights for the entire team to watch.
“If I have something that I really want everyone to pay attention to, that’s how I’ll show it instead of sharing it through other channels.”
Collaborating with Customer Success Team
Even if you’re in the customer success team, you probably aren’t talking to every customer. With Grain, you can listen to customers who you haven’t met. As every customer call—sales, customer onboarding, QBRs, reviews, or research interviews—at Arrows is recorded using Grain, Shareil has the opportunity to catch up with insights from customers he hasn't personally interacted with.
When he meets with a customer, Shareil can skip asking the same questions and build on top of what the customer has already said.
Customer Success is Company’s Success
With the help of Grain, Shareil and his team use insights from their customer conversations to influence the roadmap, improve product experience, and align cross-functional teams around the voice of the customer.