Leverage Positive Customer Feedback to Hack Culture

Early on in a startup, when times are really tough, when some inevitable negative reviews come in, it is really easy for your internal culture to starting leaning towards negativity. People start wondering whether the company will make it, whether they should continue working there, which all has a cascading affect on company performance. The worst part is when the startup is actually doing well, and is just experiencing the normal challenges of early growth. So how can you resolve this?

A hack we have found to be very effective is to implement a process of aggressively collecting and sharing positive customer feedback. First, we try to collect it everywhere — in support tickets, and by asking for reviews from our happiest customers, all of this on an ongoing basis. Then, each time one of them comes in, we post it into a dedicated Slack channel called “Positive Feedback” which everyone in the company sees. What you will notice is that employees start chiming in, celebrating each win, and congratulating any employees that were singled out by the customer.

All of this serves as both fuel and medicine for the startup. Fuel in that employees get fired up that the company has a purpose and is really solving customer problems. Medicine in that it almost completely squashes any underlying negativity within the culture. When fuel and medicine are flowing continuously it is extremely powerful.

So the key here is to create your own system to leverage all incoming positive customer feedback. If your company doesn’t use Slack, then print them out and have a quick 5-10 minute company-wide meeting about them every Friday. How you do it doesn’t matter, just make sure you do it.

Every startup needs both fuel and medicine anywhere it can get it. So do not let a single instance of positive customer feedback go to waste.