A customer feedback loop is the continuous process of collecting feedback, analyzing it for insights, implementing changes, and then closing the loop by informing customers of improvements. If you’re new to the concept, check out our customer feedback loop guide for basics.
In this article, we’ll explore real-world customer feedback loop examples to see how businesses listen to customers and act on their input to develop better products, services, and experiences.
By the end, you’ll not only understand these examples but also pick up best practices to resolve issues and boost customer loyalty in your own organization.
Let’s start.
Stripe, the online payments giant, wanted to ensure its leadership stayed in touch with customer needs. As the company grew, smaller startups sometimes felt overlooked, and there was a risk that pain points from everyday users weren’t reaching top decision-makers. Stripe’s challenge was to maintain a customer-centric culture and avoid decisions being made in a vacuum.
Co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison took a bold approach—he started inviting actual customers to Stripe’s bi-weekly management meetings. In each session, a customer joins for the first 30 minutes with about 40 Stripe leaders present. This invitation for “candid feedback” brings real user voices directly into Stripe’s boardroom.
Even though Stripe already had other feedback channels, hearing a customer’s story in person often spurred new ideas and investigations on the spot, Collison noted.
During these meetings, Stripe’s leaders actively discuss the customer’s feedback. Key issues or suggestions are noted and later translated into action items for relevant teams. For example, if a small business customer shares an issue about the onboarding process, Stripe’s product team can immediately dig in and plan improvements. The direct nature of this feedback means there’s little ambiguity—executives hear the customer’s voice unfiltered and can ask follow-up questions in real time.
Collison mentioned that even with many other mechanisms in place, this face-to-face approach “always spurs new thoughts and investigations.” In other words, it often reveals insights that might not surface in surveys or support tickets.
Because customers are literally “in the loop” at these meetings, Stripe closes the loop in a very personal way. Leadership thanks them directly and commits to looking into their concerns.
In some cases, Stripe has even followed up with those customers afterward to share outcomes or progress—effectively saying, “we heard you, and here’s what we’re doing.” This level of acknowledgment makes the customer feel valued.
One invited customer (the CTO of Cloudflare) even got a public invite from Collison on X (formerly Twitter) when he expressed interest, showing that Stripe is open to any customer input, big or small.
Stripe’s inclusive approach helps keep its culture focused on what matters—the user. Internally, it reconciles strategy with reality by ensuring leadership priorities align with customer needs. While measuring the direct impact of meetings is hard, Stripe’s business metrics indicate they’re doing something right.
In 2024, Stripe’s payment volume grew to $1.4 trillion—a 38% year-over-year increaset—and the company now serves half of the Fortune 100. This growth coincided with initiatives to stay customer-focused.
As one observer noted, “Love this. Keeps the culture focused on what matters.”
By regularly collecting feedback from customers and acting on it, Stripe reinforces trust and likely fuels customer loyalty among both its largest and smallest users.
Even a design-driven company like Apple can miss the mark. In 2021, Apple introduced a major Safari browser redesign in iOS 15 beta. The address bar moved to the bottom and floated over content, aiming for easier one-handed use. However, many users hated it—the new UI was said to be confusing and even made some websites unusable (the bar covered important buttons).
Apple quickly faced a backlash of negative feedback from its passionate user base, who felt this change hurt usability. The problem for Apple was clear: a well-intentioned design was causing customer frustration.
Apple gathered input through its public beta program and developer forums. Thousands of iPhone users were testing iOS 15 pre-release, and they voiced complaints through Apple’s Feedback app, forums, and on social media. Tech journalists and influential bloggers chimed in, too.
Essentially, Apple got an avalanche of direct user feedback and complaints in real time during the beta cycle. This immediate influx of criticism was hard to ignore—and Apple didn’t ignore it.
The Apple design and engineering teams rapidly analyzed the feedback data (bug reports, forum posts, tweets). They identified key pain points: users found the new Safari layout unintuitive and obstructive.
Importantly, Apple discerned that while some liked the bottom bar concept, many wanted the familiar interface back. In response, Apple acted within weeks. By the sixth beta release of iOS 15, Apple had rolled out an updated Safari design that addressed those concerns. They moved the bottom URL bar to sit below page content (so it no longer covered website elements) and—crucially—added a setting to allow the address bar on top, restoring the classic style. This toggle essentially gave users a choice.
Apple’s adjustments were a direct acknowledgment of user feedback. In the beta release notes (and coverage by sites like TechCrunch), it was clear that Apple is responding to user feedback and complaints.” By the time iOS 15 went public, users saw that Apple had listened: those who disliked the new design could simply revert it.
While Apple might not email every beta tester individually, the act of implementing the changes based on customer feedback is a form of closing the loop at scale. It signaled to customers, “We heard you—your input shaped the final product.”
The swift course-correction also got positive media coverage, effectively telling the wider customer base that their voices mattered.
Thanks to this feedback loop, Apple avoided a potential mass uproar on iOS 15’s launch. Customer sentiment improved once the fix was in place, and what could have been a lasting UX mistake became a story of Apple’s responsiveness.
The Safari example is just one of many refinements Apple has made via its beta program (from tweaking UI changes to fixing bugs and adding requested features). The measurable outcome here was customer satisfaction: by closing the loop before the official release, Apple maintained high adoption for iOS 15 instead of driving users away.
In the long run, this builds trust—users know that even if Apple tries a bold change, they’re willing to adjust course from feedback. In short, Apple preserved its reputation for quality by treating user feedback as a critical part of the design process.
Atlassian, the software company behind Jira, Confluence, Trello, and other products, found itself drowning in customer feedback as it grew. With over 250,000 customers using Atlassian’s tools, feedback was pouring in from all directions:
The sheer volume of qualitative feedback was overwhelming their research and product teams.
Worse, the feedback was siloed—different teams handled different channels, and there was no unified process to ensure every suggestion or complaint was considered.
Atlassian realized it wasn’t consistently closing the loop on feedback; customers sometimes felt like their suggestions disappeared into a black hole. In fact, research showed some customers believed Atlassian wasn’t listening and it was undermining trust. This posed a risk to customer satisfaction, retention, and Atlassian’s ethos of being customer-centric.
The challenge: how to systematically collect, analyze, and close the loop on an enormous scale of feedback in a timely manner.
Atlassian first established a customer listening program and a framework called CARE—Collect, Analyze, Resolve, Empower.
On the Collect side, they integrated all their feedback channels into a seamless system. They set up a public-facing feedback policy to be transparent with users about how feedback would be handled and how updates would be communicated back.
Essentially, they funnelled inputs from surveys (like CSAT and NPS), support interactions, community posts, and even social media into a central repository. Part of this involved using APIs and integrations—for example, piping in responses from an NPS survey tool and posts from their online community into one place.
The volume was massive (think thousands of comments per month). But Atlassian made it easy for customers to give feedback anytime, in-app or via forums, so they were collecting feedback continuously. The key was that no feedback would end up in a “dead end”—every piece would enter their analysis workflow.
Given the scale, manual analysis wasn’t feasible (they used to have researchers spending 6 weeks sorting one quarter’s survey feedback!). So, for the Analyze stage, Atlassian brought in a feedback analytics solution that is powered by advanced AI—Thematic—to automate and enrich their feedback analysis.
Thematic’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) grouped feedback into themes. Thematic also gauged sentiment rapidly. All these allowed Atlassian to see trending issues and common requests across all sources in near real-time.
They then refined these themes to align with their product terminology. The result was a live dashboard (via Thematic’s API feeding their BI tools) where product teams could slice and dice feedback by product, feature, region, sentiment, etc.
Atlassian’s teams didn’t stop at analysis; they moved to Resolve.
“Resolve” in their CARE framework meant prioritizing and taking action on key feedback. They mapped customer feedback themes to their product roadmap. If many high-value customers requested a feature, it got higher priority. They understood they couldn’t fix everything, but they made sure to at least address the important issues and decide on others transparently.
For instance, feedback showed users expected more AI automation in the tools (like natural language search in Jira), so Atlassian invested in those capabilities and was directly influenced by that insight.
Internally, they also used feedback data to trigger deeper research—if a theme emerged that they didn’t fully understand, they’d conduct follow-up interviews or surveys targeted to that issue. In short, Atlassian created a machine (with human oversight) to continuously turn mountains of feedback into specific product improvements and innovations.
The Empower stage of Atlassian’s CARE framework was all about closing the loop with customers. They recognized that a feedback loop isn’t closed until customers know their voice was heard. Atlassian tackled this in several ways.
They trained their support and community teams with insights from Thematic so they could update customers in conversations: e.g., “We’ve heard many of you request X, our team is working on it”—even if that customer didn’t ask directly, it shows awareness.
They also leveraged their community champions (power users) by sharing product team updates with them, so those champions could spread the word to other users.
A crucial element was communication at scale: Atlassian used marketing automation to email customers who had given feedback on a topic once there was an update. For example, if a user suggested a feature and it got added to the roadmap, Atlassian might send them a note or include it in a community announcement: “You spoke, we listened: here’s the new feature on our roadmap.”
They even openly let users know when a popular request would not be done (and explained why). This honesty—“we hear you but have chosen a different path”—is essential in building trust.
Additionally, Atlassian created public roadmap pages and release notes linking back to common feedback themes, so users could see the origin of a new feature in customer feedback.
Over time, users noticed that their posts on the forum would often be followed up by Atlassian staff with status updates, which is the loop closing in action. By making feedback and responses visible, Atlassian showed that no feedback disappears into a void. Internally, they also closed the loop by celebrating wins: sharing with the whole company when customer satisfaction improved or when a customer praised a response, reinforcing the culture of customer-centricity.
Atlassian’s infinite feedback loop, powered by AI and a solid process, led to tangible benefits.
The effect on retention is also important: when customers see their input leading to changes, they’re less likely to churn to a competitor. Atlassian’s program was so robust that it became an example in the industry of how to do feedback loops right. Mick Stapleton at Atlassian shared that without a way to manage feedback at scale, “we risk losing credibility”, but with the system in place, Atlassian was able to “deliver insights and a scalable feedback loop with our customers.”
In other words, they created an ongoing conversation that actively involves users in product evolution. The company even evaluated 36 vendors and chose Thematic as the best partner to help with this, showing how crucial the initiative was to them.
In summary, Atlassian transformed feedback from a source of stress into a strategic asset—boosting efficiency, customer happiness, and ultimately, product quality. It’s a great example of an end-to-end closed loop: collecting feedback, analyzing with AI, taking action, and closing the loop with personalized, scaled outreach.
Closing the customer feedback loop isn’t a one-time fix—it’s a continuous process. Here are best practices inspired by real-world implementations:
For a deeper dive, see our article on customer feedback loop best practices.
AI-powered software to transform qualitative data into powerful insights that drive decision making.
How do you know if your customer feedback loop is working? The best way is to measure both customer experience metrics and business performance outcomes.
For a better and faster customer feedback loop process, find the right feedback analysis tool.
The customer feedback loop works—no matter your industry. This article has shown you so. Whether it’s Stripe bringing users into leadership meetings, Apple adjusting Safari based on beta complaints, or Atlassian streamlining analysis with AI, the principle is the same: listen, act, and close the loop.
What sets these companies apart is their commitment to circling back to customers and showing that feedback leads to real change. That’s what builds trust and customer loyalty.
If you’re looking to improve your own feedback process, start small: pick one channel, follow up on responses, and communicate outcomes. Over time, make this habit part of your company culture.
Tools like Thematic’s text analytics make it easier to scale, but it starts with a mindset—treating feedback not as a task, but as a continuous opportunity to resolve issues, improve experiences, and innovate.
Want to see this in action? Request for Thematic’s feedback analytics demo.
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