If you’re a company that cares about listening to your customer, there’s a good chance you’ve at least thought about adding a feedback widget to your product.
You’ll notice they’re particularly common in LLM products like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, where they appear right below the AI’s response to your prompt with a simple thumbs up and thumbs down:
What are your customers thinking?
One of the great things about website feedback widgets is that they help you answer that all important question: What are my customers thinking when using my product?
While you can send surveys, schedule interviews for deep dives, or tell customers to email you, few things are as convenient for them as being able to send you feedback in the moment while using your product.
That’s why so many companies have decided to build their own feedback widgets to embed inside their products.
As I’ve been researching and building Product Arrow, I’ve seen dozens of widgets across the products I use regularly and new ones I’ve been trying. And in doing so, I’ve found a few widgets that stand out as particularly beautiful, clever, or helpful.
Today, I want to share those with you, so you can consider adding some of their style or functionality to your product, too.
One of the most common frustrations with AI is not getting what you wanted. For every time we get just what we wanted (or more), it seems like we also get a mess of nonsense or things we know are wrong.
And sometimes that happens, because the job is literally impossible for the AI.
Other times, we didn’t write a good enough prompt. Going back to the drawing board, providing some examples, and giving more detailed specifics can help get a better result the next time.
Yet, sometimes none of that is enough, even if it *should* be possible.
“The square root of slop is slop.”
Some friends and I were talking about the state of AI and noticing how you can get plausible sounding ideas and analysis, but when you dig in, you see it’s completely wrong.
Sometimes that’s hallucinated entries in a spreadsheet that doesn’t actually add up correctly, despite looking great. Other times, it’s customer feedback analysis of thousands of entries, with a beautiful report and quotes, where you can’t actually confirm the underlying sources that led to the ranking of problems it offered. Or, it’s simply a report or newsletter draft that starts out sounding good before drifting off to classic AI generated slop.
As my friend put it, “If AI is just math at scale, then scaling noise just gives you louder nonsense.” Or put more simply and more memorably, “the square root of slop is slop.”
If you’ve ever submitted product feedback through a customer support widget like Intercom or Zendesk, you know how much of a lost, black hole it can feel like.
Yet, for many companies, that’s exactly where product feedback goes, never to be seen or heard from again.
It’s not Customer Success’s fault.
Customer support and success have important jobs. They’re helping fix problems, educate customers, clear up confusion, and catch bugs.
But triaging problems and being patient with frustrated customers is a totally different skill set than understanding customer needs and making product decisions.
It’s no surprise then that the feedback CS does receive often gets lost in the shuffle, dumped in a backlog somewhere, or filed away, never to be seen again.
What else are they supposed to do?
Let’s take a closer look at these misaligned incentives and responsibilities, and why they leave customers feeling unheard and product teams missing out on priceless customer feedback and connections.
“If you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.” – Ray Kroc, co-founder of McDonalds
“The more you engage with customers, the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” — John Russell, Harley Davidson
“Make something people want.” – YC
There are a lot of catchy sayings and aphorisms about listening to your customers.
And they’re right. It is *really* important to listen to them.
Yet, in practice, there are a lot of reasons that doesn’t happen. Or at least not as well as you would ideally like to.
And the cost is high. Building what internal stakeholders, “visionary” founders, or selfish PMs want instead of what the market is signaling wastes time, capital, and precious opportunity.
In a world where AI is helping us all move much faster, and the cost of building is rapidly falling, building the right thing has never been more important; you’ll either get it right, or someone else in the market will.
Based on conversations with PMs I’ve coached, those I’ve recently interviewed for my new startup, and speaking with friends, here’s the common blockers (and sometimes excuses) for why the voice of the customer isn’t heard as clearly as it should at companies of all sizes.
