Every customer call, no matter how mundane, can be a powerful opportunity to reconnect yourself and your development team to your customer. Outside of research calls where we get to show exciting new products, there can be many customer calls for things like hearing feedback from a frustrated customer to assisting with a tough sale. The bias may be to treat these as functional meetings, with the goal to end the call with as few action items as possible and get back to work. However, even though these calls aren’t exciting research calls, they still have a lot of value. By using some tricks to make exciting notes from these calls, we can make the call more informative and virtually bring the customer back with us to share with stakeholders and our Team. For a new Product Manager learning to take engaging notes is an important skill, and hopefully these techniques make it easier. Taking enhanced notes like this leads to a great first impression as well, especially if your development team typically has little customer interaction.
First, make your notes pop with visual elements. I like to include two main ones. First, if you’re a B2B product, grab a copy of the customer’s company’s logo off Google and include it at the top of the notes. This helps you and your Team remember that you’re working with real brands, and it’s very exciting when the logo is well-known. The second image I include is the customer’s face from LinkedIn. By inserting their profile picture, you reinforce that your customers are real people. It especially makes it more engaging for your Team or stakeholders who read your notes, and is an easy and unexpected addition. It seems like magic to them when you somehow got the customer’s picture from a phone call.
For the notes, they can be simple, but focus on a couple aspects. First, record any action items, to ensure you don’t forget to do any follow-up. The second is to capture the customer emotion and feedback. I like to be profuse in my note-taking, and later go back and highlight a couple items in particular that either have actionable feedback or are particularly powerful statements. Like an executive summary, they’re the two or three things I’d want my Team to read. It may be an emotional statement about the product, or a neat idea, or a workaround they’ve come up with. I look for items that will spark creativity in the Team and inspire compassion for the customer.
Be sure to save your notes in a searchable place. Google Drive is great, and you can make a folder that’s shared with your whole Team. I also like to put the date and customer name in the file name to identify them later. Be sure to notify the Team of the new notes too, as they will rarely proactively check Google Drive.
If you’re training a Product Manager or may be in the future, these notes will be a great resource for building their customer empathy and for reference when talking about why a feature was built.