Hi Ai Ching Goh,
Thanks for your questions 
- Yes, I still speak directly with our customers. I still believe this is one of the most valuable things I can do as a CEO. It’s so easy to stop doing this since we got both an outbound sales team, inbound sales team, customer-success team, managed service team. All these teams also talk to customers and I could just get the condensed version from them, but it’s never the same as actually listening to the customer myself.
How this works today is that an email is sent to all new customers from me where I ask: “Why did you choose Sleeknote?”. We get around 100 new customers each month, and typically about 20-30% answer this email. Everyone who answers my email, I answer back personally.
Other than this I do what I call “Customer Pulse” every 6 months. Here I send an email to all our customers and ask them: “If you were in my shoes as CEO of Sleeknote tomorrow, what would you do as the first thing?” Again, I answer personally everyone who answers my email.
Today we got 2.150 customers, so it takes some days to answer all these emails. But again, I feel it’s extremely valuable because we always have the customers’ ideas and wishes fresh in mind when we do big decisions about our strategy, product roadmap, etc.
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Hmm, no we don’t have a specific research team. We got a Product Team where we do a lot of user research e.g. usability testing, looking through screen recordings of our app, etc.
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Great question
Since I ask every new customer why they choose Sleeknote, I have a pretty good feeling about this. It’s mainly because we offer to completely customize the design of the popups and at the same time we offer an advanced rule-engine with tons of targeting options, so our customers can create popups that are personalized and non-intrusive.
I hope my answers make sense. Thanks again for your great questions 