How Appcues closes the feedback loop with Canny

Appcues is an onboarding experience tool. Its main goals are to:

1. Improve end-user onboarding
2. Measure the impact of your onboarding efforts

Appcues lets you add all this to your onboarding flow (no code needed!):

• Guided tours
• Checklists
• Tooltips
• Customized and segmented messages

This helps teams expose users to their app's most important features faster.

We talked to Joey Muething and Lyla Rozelle from AppCues' product team. They both experienced Appcues as users first.

Joey joined Appcues as a product manager 2.5 years ago and is currently focused on integrations and analytics. Lyla first joined the marketing team and moved into a product-focused role later.

Problem

Before Canny, Appcues was already getting lots of feedback.

"We had a massive fire hose of feedback that went into Slack. Then, it ended up in the world's most annoying Airtable — unorganized with no way of prioritizing it." - Lyla

Overall, Appcues lacked the greater context of their feedback. They could manually quantify how many requests each feature got but couldn't go beyond that.

"Our sales and support teams were doing their best when passing on feedback. But we still ended up playing telephone. Inevitably, the true nature of the ask got lost, and we had to go back to the customer and clarify. This was a frustrating experience for both our team and our customers."

The product team realized their customers were indirectly asking for something like Canny.

"Our users started asking: 'What are other customers saying about this? Are they requesting this too? Or are we asking for too much?' When we read between the lines of these questions, we realized that they wanted a community where they could discuss these things and see what others were saying."

Appcues initially contemplated building a feedback portal in-house. However, as they outlined their needs, they realized they needed more than just a feedback tool. They realized that they also needed to:

• Prioritize and segment feedback
• Show progress to their customers
• Close the feedback loop
• Separate feedback between internal and public-facing boards

One of their biggest time-consuming activities was looking for potential beta testers.

“Simply finding customers who asked for a certain feature or users who asked for something similar was a huge time suck.”

Solution

Onboarding Canny

When Appcues found Canny, it clicked almost instantly. Their own software's installation process is almost the same as Canny's.

"It's very straightforward and quick. Our engineers looked at it and instantly knew what to do. The embed was also very easy."

Tracking Feedback

Now Appcues' users have a central place to leave feedback and engage with others.

"Our customers are putting their fire-hose mentality into Canny with upvotes and regular feedback. A lot of times, customers write their requests themselves. If they prefer us to write it on their behalf, we have that option too. We can always include a snippet from Gong, for example, to make sure that we're passing on the feedback exactly as it came."

The product team isn't the only department that benefits from Canny.

“Lots of feedback comes from the CX or the sales team. Sales tells us — we lost this deal because feature X is missing. But now they can create a new post in Canny or add an internal comment about this on an existing post. Alternatively, they can ask the prospect to upvote or comment on this post and get notified when it's built. This gives every customer a feeling that they're heard and valued.”

Integrations & more

Appcues didn't stop at just setting up a feedback portal. They added the following to get the most out of Canny:

• Canny's Slack integration to get notifications about every action on their boards
• A “submit a feature request” link in their main navigation
• A link to the same request form throughout their app (with pre-filled forms to make it easier for users)
• Our Salesforce integration to help their sales team track feedback better

The Salesforce integration plays a big role in how Appcues prioritizes feedback. Their team sorts feature requests by MRR (that comes from Salesforce). And they push votes and comments from Canny to Salesforce's notes section on each account. This helps the sales and CX teams give customers updates and just know more about every customer.

Managing data

There was one thing Appcues didn't expect to find and use in Canny — the merge feature. The product team can easily identify duplicated requests and merge them with one click. It saves time and helps the team keep their boards clean and organized.

Finding beta testers

Canny helps Appcues in one more unexpected way. Appcues is big on beta-testing features. And who's a better potential tester than a user who requested that particular feature? Now, finding them is quick and seamless.

“Finding beta testers is so much easier now. I just go to a specific Canny post, export the list of voters, and email them. This is much better than trying to go through all notes in each Salesforce account for example.”

Closing the feedback loop

Overall, both Lyla and Joey shared that their favorite thing about Canny is closing the feedback loop. Taking in feedback, keeping users updated, and notifying them about the changes helps them feel accomplished.

Results

Appcues' team feels much more at ease thanks to Canny. They're not worried about missing feedback, disappointing customers, or choosing the wrong features to build.

“It's easy to forget how bad the feedback loop could be sometimes in many SaaS companies. That's evident from the customer reaction we get. When a user submits feedback and we respond almost right away, they're really taken aback. “Wait, someone actually gets and reads this? I was expecting it to go into a black hole and never hear back,” — is a typical client response.”

Giving clients the feeling that they matter makes all the difference. It positively affects CSAT and NPS scores for Appcues and is often the deciding factor in customers' renewal decisions. Appcues customers often say: “The reason I'm sticking around is because you listen to my feedback.”

The team also keeps track of their top 20 feature requests (prioritized by MRR and number of votes). They call it their “temperature check.” They've noticed significant time savings and less confusion overall.

“Nobody is asking where they can leave feedback anymore. No one is wondering — has anyone else asked for this? What's the status of that? We're a remote company, so transparency is crucial. Since implementing Canny, things are so much more streamlined and all in one central place.”

The team has also increased the amount of feedback they're getting thanks to Canny.

“I got to attribute that to repeat customers. Before Canny, maybe they submitted feedback, never heard back, and never bothered to share their thoughts again. It's different now. There's very low friction — it's easy to communicate and share what's on their mind.”

We're happy to help Appcues connect with their customers better and save time. Get a free Canny account today, and you can do the same.