How Akiflow organized their feedback and started winning back churned customers

Akiflow is a productivity tool that helps you stay organized. Naturally, feedback organization is top of mind for Stefania Martinello, Akiflow’s product manager.

Stefania works closely with developers and designers to bring new features to life. She also collaborates with marketing to communicate Akiflow’s value. With 15 teammates and thousands of customers, it’s a lot of work. And a lot of feedback.

“My primary goal is to ensure that Akiflow continues to provide value to its users. To make product decisions, I need to be sure about users’ pain points.”

But how can you really know what your users are thinking? One of the best ways is to ask them directly.

Problem

Before Canny, Stefania was onboarding users one by one. To track their feedback, she used Notion.

“As you can imagine, this quickly became a mess. I really needed to keep track of all the feedback. Plus, feedback was coming from various sources – email, Intercom, one-on-one calls, and so on.”

Because Akiflow is a small startup, Stefania’s role involves customer success and support too. So, she talks to customers every day and receives feedback and ideas from them.

“I’m obsessed with feedback. Someone taking the time to tell us how we can improve – that’s invaluable.”

Clearly, Stefania and her team at Akiflow value feedback very much. So tracking it well, making sense of it, and using it to improve is essential.

“I was horrified of losing track of feedback. I immediately knew that I needed a system to collect and prioritize user feedback.”

As the amount of feedback grew, managing it became more and more challenging. Stefania needed a better solution.

Solution

Aside from Canny, Akiflow tried other feedback and product management solutions. Nothing worked as well as Canny, though.

Akiflow relies on Intercom for customer communication. Automatically tracking feedback from Intercom (via our integration) was a major ask.

“From the very beginning, we wanted to stop relying on our gut feeling and use data. We wanted to collect feedback, prioritize it, and engage with users. We looked for a tool that could do all that and found Canny.”

Now, Akiflow is a feedback powerhouse. Stefania took feedback prioritization to the next level with the help of Canny’s roadmap prioritization feature.

“One feature I was surprised to find is prioritization based on MRR (monthly recurring revenue). This lets me see how many paying customers are requesting a certain feature.”

Thanks to this feature, Akiflow was even able to bring back lost customers!

“When we first started, we didn’t have a mobile app, and many customers were churning because of that. We built the mobile app, notified churned customers through Canny, and saw many of them come back. They gave Akiflow another try specifically because we notified them about the mobile app they requested earlier.”

Everybody wants to bring back lost customers. Akiflow achieved that by using Canny.

Sometimes, you can’t build every feature that customers request. Other times, building a feature takes longer than expected. Canny can help in these situations,  too.

“If there’s a problem, and we’re still working on a fix, we see users talk about it inside Canny. They recommend workarounds and help each other. That’s the beauty of having a community.”

Results

Canny doesn’t just help the Akiflow team. It also enhances the user experience for Akiflow’s customers.

“Our users truly appreciate seeing that we take every piece of feedback into consideration. I love seeing how excited users get when I change an idea’s status to “in progress”. They also appreciate our transparency. They love knowing what’s coming to Akiflow.”

To quickly keep customers in the loop, Stefania uses Canny’s Slack integration. Whenever a user adds a new comment, Slack notifies Stefania. She can then immediately engage with them and help resolve any issues.

Stefania also enjoys seeing all the changes automatically reflected on the roadmap. She doesn’t need to manually go back and forth between tools anymore. This saves her a lot of time.

Finally, Stefania updates Akiflow’s changelog (in Canny) every time they release a new feature (about every month). Seeing thousands of views on each changelog entry makes her very excited – she knows that her work doesn’t go unnoticed and that their users really care.

“Canny really fosters a sense of community for our users. They see that their feedback is really shaping our tool.”

Stefania measures the value that Akiflow gets from Canny in a few different ways:

• Number of feature requests
• The implementation rate of suggested features
• Overall customer satisfaction

Stefania recommends that other product management teams fully embrace Canny, just like Akiflow does.

“Canny isn’t only streamlining feedback management. It also builds a trusting relationship with your user base.”

See how Canny can help your team too – get a free demo here!