The most challenging aspect of working in a fast-growing company is how quickly things change. As soon as you build and operationalize a process or program, customer needs evolve and internal demands shift accordingly.

That happens regardless of how quickly (or not) your business is growing. So the secret to how we measure customer perceptions within the Salesforce Success Cloud is in how we’ve designed our feedback process to change with the needs of our customers.

Here’s how we do it:

We have an ‘Always On’ approach to feedback collection.

The process of collecting a large volume of feedback, synthesizing it, drawing conclusions, and acting on it requires a lot of lead time. So much so that aspects of the work can be obsolete by the time it’s done. For that reason, we take an “always on” approach to listening. The surveys we use to measure overall customer perceptions about their Salesforce relationship are continually triggered based on where a customer is in the life cycle. The result? We have a constant inflow of data that gives us a continuous pulse on our customers.

We built flexibility into the system. 

While we certainly need to collect consistent feedback so we can observe trends over time and identify new themes as they emerge, we need to deploy changes as quickly as customer needs and internal priorities demand them. So we designed our surveys to evolve by establishing a base set of questions that never change, and a small number of rotating questions that give us almost instant access to new customer input and insights. We can deploy new questions within minutes, and immediately begin collecting customer input on a brand new topic.

We put our “cards on the table” for the rest of the organization. 

Transparency is king at Salesforce. Our products are built with the intent of giving an organization a 360-degree view of our customers. Customer feedback is pushed into Salesforce in real time, and a series of dashboards give Salesforce teams and leaders instant access to what customers are telling us.

There’s no “black box” work that happens before we reveal feedback to the rest of the organization. Account teams receive emails the moment their customers submit feedback, and workflow logic recommends follow-ups based on particular scenarios. My team categorizes and codes open-ended responses as they come in, and that feedback is immediately searchable — by any Salesforce employee — using our Customer Voice Catalog. Our colleagues have access to all of the tools my team uses in our research and analysis. It’s how we maximize the value of the feedback customers provide, and how we encourage customer centricity throughout the organization.

So, regardless of your business or industry, change is a given. So building almost instant agility into your listening architecture will ensure you don’t miss a beat when new opportunities to understand your customers arise.

This post covers the architecture of our listening process. If you’re interested in understanding the principles that guide our listening strategy, check out my previous post “A Philosophy for Listening.”