Why We Record Customer Meetings (And You Should too)

At Grain, we record every customer meeting by default. And, it serves us well. Today, from product to design to sales, every team uses insights from recorded customer conversations to make informed decisions and deliver a better experience.

It’s just not us. Over the years, we’ve seen countless examples of other companies learning to record and leverage insights from their customer calls. 

But the benefits of recording customer calls aren’t apparent. In particular, most tend to overlook how it ultimately enables teams to deliver a better experience to their customers. In an attempt to shed some light on why customer calls should be recorded, we’ve shared how it helps us and other customer-centric companies.

To Focus on the Conversation

Having a record of your conversation with customers allows you to stay present and engaged during your meetings. When you record, you know you’ll be able to revisit and extract insights from the call—on your own time. You don’t have to take detailed notes, capture screenshots of your Zoom, or worry about missing out on important information. You can just focus on the call. 

Internally, none of us take notes. We use Grain (no surprise!) to record, transcribe, and index customer calls—so that we can review, clip, and share insights later. So does Zapier. 

Zapier’s sales team started recording their customer calls using Grain to stay focused on what customers need.  

“It [Grain recording] allows me to focus on the calls, focus on the customers, and focus on what they need”

- Steeve Vakeeswaran, Head of Sales and Expansion at Zapier.

To Share Customer Learnings

Every interaction with your customer is an opportunity to learn and improve. But insights and valuable feedback shared over customer calls don’t end up in the hands of the right teams. 

Even if you choose to take text notes, they often don’t get the job done. Notes are difficult to find, share, or act beyond the call. They can’t capture the complete context and more importantly, they could be biased as you aren’t sharing the raw data but your conclusion. Customers’ voices are usually lost somewhere between good intentions and bad execution. 

On the other hand, recording your customer calls enables you to share the voice of the customer directly. For example, Roberta Dombrowski, VP of User Research at User Interviews uses Grain to record, clip, and share insights from her customer calls.👇  

We have a dedicated #voice-of-the-user Slack channel at Grain where customer-facing teams regularly share nuggets from their calls and tag relevant crew. 

To Deliver a Better Experience

It’s easier to make the case for a bug fix or a product improvement when you record and share the customer's struggle in their own words. By choosing to record, you’re saving time, reducing ambiguity, and decreasing the time to resolution—and as a result, delivering a better customer experience. 

Behzod Sirjani, former Head of Research and Analytics Operations at Slack uses Grain to clip and share feedback in real-time to get an answer while he’s on the call with the customer.👇

To Create Walk-throughs and Training Materials

You wouldn’t be available to help your customers around the clock. And, your customers probably wouldn’t be willing to hop on a call every time they need help. When you record customer meetings and then share the same back with your customers—they can revisit and get the information they need without having to call for new meetings. 

We go a step further by turning full recordings into digestible video clips so that it’s easier for customers to rewatch and share with their team. From training videos to product walk-throughs, you can spin off several assets from your existing customer conversations and make reviewing easier. 

To Inform Product Roadmap

How often does feedback from customer calls make it to the product roadmap? 

For most companies, the answer is “not as often as it should be”. Here’s a secret. Sharing the voice of the customers is how you can successfully collaborate with your product team. To put it another way, recording enables you to advocate for your customers.  

“It [voice of the customer] strengthens the relationship between customer-facing teams and product teams because you're not saying “Hey, this feature could be beneficial”. You're actually showing them what customers exactly said.”

- Steeve Vakeeswaran, Head of Sales & Expansion, Zapier.

For instance, the sales team at Parabol uses Grain to record sales calls and turn customer feedback and insights into highlight clips—which are then included in Parabol’s public roadmap/backlog. Endgame takes a different approach. Customer insights are shared in a public Slack channel for product and engineering teams to process and make decisions.👇

To Democratize Customer Knowledge

To reiterate what we said earlier, every customer interaction is an opportunity to learn and improve. Enabling your teams to record their calls helps you collect and leverage customer data in an unprecedented way. 

Sales and customer success teams can record their calls to build a library of customer knowledge. Researchers can record their user interviews to set up a research repository. This means, everyone—from stakeholders to individuals—can discover and retrieve customer insights to make better decisions. 

What was previously accessible to customer-facing teams becomes available for all.    

Closing Thoughts

As simple as it sounds, recording your customer calls is arguably the easiest way to deliver a better product and customer experience. You can run better meetings, capture and share insights, inform product roadmap, and rally cross-functional teams around real customer needs. 

Want to be customer-centric? Start by recording your customer calls.