Step 1.2: Centralize product feedback across sources and teams

As many teams know, the product ops process is highly collaborative and often requires alignment across multiple teams. Let’s walk through how to scale processes and create a single source of truth across your entire organization.

And because there are a lot of teams working to collect customer feedback, from product to support to UX research, it’s critical for org alignment to bring everything together in one, unified place. Here’s what it looks like in Airtable.

Use integrations to connect external tools to your base

Many organizations already have their own feedback processes in other systems or tools. Not a problem—integrations can be used to generate a 360-degree view of your customer by connecting data gathered from other tools to your base. Here are some of the common tools (and their respective integrations) that strategic product teams use to gather customer feedback.

Customer feedback surveying tools

Airtable lets you integrate with a number of third-party surveying tools that collect valuable information, like the customer Net Promoter Score (NPS) (i.e. likelihood of recommending the product to others).

For instance, Airtable supports a native integration to Typeform using the Typeform app in the App Marketplace that you can install in your base. This allows you to import feedback submissions from an existing form in your Typeform account or generate a new typeform from within an existing table. You can also connect to Airtable from the Typeform side via API, sending information from a typeform to your Airtable base. 

Additionally, you can connect data from any other survey tool into your base including Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, and many more. Simply integrate these by using email table sync as seen below, or via Zapier.

Ticketing and bug reports

Customers provide feedback to support agents via tickets or bug reports. These tickets are a valuable data source in understanding overall feedback trends, and the types of issues that most frequently affect customers and cause complaints. 

Many product teams use Zendesk to capture these tickets. Airtable supports a native integration to Zendesk that allows you to sync ticket information from a specific Zendesk view into Airtable. Our recommendation is that you first go to Zendesk, create a view with specific tags for the keywords you’re looking for, then select that view in Airtable to sync.

CRM

You can also integrate with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool like Salesforce to inform product priorities by linking feedback to specific customers, and thereby inform product priorities based on customer factors such as potential revenue impact, segment, etc. 

Step 1

One option is syncing Salesforce to Airtable; we suggest syncing over data like “accounts” or “customers” so you can associate customer feedback with certain accounts. The lightning bolt on the left-hand side of the table name indicates that it is a synced table.

Step 2

Once customer account information has been synced from Salesforce, you can link it to specific pieces of feedback using linked records.

Step 3

By linking customer account information with associated feedback, you can easily see associated feedback relevant to that customer when you open a record for an account. Conversely, if you open up a feedback record, you can see which customers gave the same points of feedback.

As shown above, feedback lives in many places. Sales might track customer feedback in Salesforce, while support gets product feedback via tickets in Zendesk. Airtable’s integrations with those tools allow for automatic syncing.

We’ve brought data from different sources into a single place using multi-source sync. Some of our synced sources include:

• Zendesk: Ticketing information that is enabled via external source sync (see section above). 

• Enterprise feedback: Feedback that is synced from another base (i.e. internal feedback from Sales and Customer Success).

• Customer feedback form: A customer-facing feedback form.

The key here is to maintain standard fields so data from different sources can be synced into a single table for centralization, visibility, and analysis.

Create a hub to make feedback accessible

Earlier, we showed you how forms can be used in Airtable to collect feedback internally and directly from customers. Here, we’ll share several best practices on how product teams typically aggregate and standardize the feedback collection process.

To manage multiple feedback forms across product areas, we recommend creating a feedback hub for easy access. A button field can trigger URLs or other actions in Airtable—and they’re a great way to get users to fill out forms. 

Here’s an example of a central hub with buttons that lead you to relevant forms. When shared with the larger organization, this hub of forms allows anyone to easily share feedback they have. This hub can also be embedded within different areas such as wikis or sites.

Sync feedback from other bases to your central hub

Feedback can also be synced and centralized from other sources. Oftentimes, the UX research team may be aggregating customer feedback within their own research hub. You can easily sync information from a research base into a product operations base via Airtable sync.

You’ll need a share view link from the research base first, which can be generated by heading to the top of the base and clicking the “share” button. Once you’ve opened the link, click “use this data” to create a synced table right in your product operations base.

Link customer feedback to specific product initiatives

Once all your feedback is in one place, you can use linked records to connect pieces of feedback to other key tables in your base.

Here, we used a linked record to create an association between customer feedback and product initiatives.

Linking records can yield powerful insights, like the number of feedback requests that are being addressed by a specific planned product initiative or feature. In the next step, we’ll dive deeper into how to find and analyze insights across your new feedback hub.