Text-Em-All is a mass messaging platform that delivers personalized, informational, and emergency messages to large groups
Nailing down product priorities? Tough. Nailing down what customers really want? Even tougher. We've all been through the dance of feature requests, interviews, calls, and email surveys—but those can be slow, have low response rates, or require manual digging. 🫠 Text-Em-All wanted a faster, simpler way to surface customer desires at scale.
Ron Kinkade, Head of Marketing at Text-Em-All, was already using Appcues to prompt product feedback—so he layered on surveys to his existing flow to capture more insights and data from their customers.
“We had been using Appcues to deliver a monthly message to our customers asking them to submit new ideas or vote on existing ideas in our Feedback Forum. When I learned about the ability to survey users this seemed like the perfect opportunity to expand that flow. At the same time, we happened to be sorting out what our product/dev priorities were going to be for the upcoming cycle. The survey feature in Appcues gave me the ability to get quick insights from our customers on what they wanted us to focus on.”
Ron started by turning his former single-step Flow (with a link to their feedback forum) into a multi-step survey Flow.
He determined the top 6 features they should ask customers about by combining a list of potential roadmap items with popular requests already on their feedback forum.
Next, he created a 3-step survey with Modals that asked users which of the 6 features were most important for the Text-Em-All team to work on, and for open feedback on problems the team should prioritize.
The last step ended the survey with a link back to the feedback forum and the ability to schedule time with their product team.
Within 24-48 hours, their product team received over 1,000 responses—making it clear they needed to rethink their roadmap priorities. This was a huge win for Ron and his team to better understand exactly what customers cared about.
“For one of our feature ideas, there was a lot of internal skepticism about the demand from customers. The survey quickly showed us that demand was overwhelming and we were able to shift focus and start working on delivering value. Using the survey, also gave us the opportunity to reach out to specific customers and explore the response they gave more. This opened the door for our Product team to get even deeper insights into what and how the problem needed to be solved.”
Customers want to help—you just have to give them the opportunity to. We love this approach because it allows users to give exactly as much feedback as they want/have time for. The product team was able to better understand what their customers wanted, which shaped the roadmap to better fit their needs. Win, win!