Recent geopolitical and market turbulence has forced go-to-market leaders to step back and ask an important question: Are we focused on what really matters?

For any business, especially right now, there’s one right answer to focus on: your customer. Staying close to customers isn’t just a smart strategy, it’s essential for survival.

At Clozd, we’ve seen this reality play out across hundreds of companies.

When the ground feels shaky, the best thing you can do is anchor your organization in the voices of your customers. And as we’ve helped companies understand why they win and lose deals, many of our customers are applying the same principles across the full customer journey—from implementation to customer success check-ins to renewal.

Here are three ways deep customer feedback can help you stay focused, especially in uncertain times:

1. Go beyond the checkbox

Too often, customer feedback becomes a box to check. Quick surveys and surface-level scores might give you a signal—but rarely the kind of signal that changes the way you operate. Especially in volatile markets, you need more than a score. You need context.

This is why rich, qualitative feedback makes all the difference. When you talk to customers directly, you hear their words, tone, and nuance. You get the why behind the data. And that’s where the real opportunities (and risks) usually lie.

We’ve made collecting that deep feedback easier with Flex Interviews. They’re our way of helping teams collect in-depth buyer feedback at scale, in ways that are more manageable. It can be a challenge to schedule a 1:1 call for each customer. Asynchronous video or audio interviews make it easier to connect with your busiest customers on their own time. Those insights, combined with AI-powered summarization and analytical tools, can reveal patterns that are easy to miss in survey scores or deal notes.

And this isn’t just helpful for win-loss analysis. We’ve seen teams use Flex Interviews to gather feedback during onboarding, renewal, or when customers churn. 

2. Build infrastructure that encourages participation

Asking for feedback sounds simple, but getting meaningful participation from your customers can be challenging. It takes thoughtful outreach, consistent follow-up, and a clear process.

That’s why some of the most successful teams we work with lean on Workflows—a feature built to streamline how feedback programs run inside Clozd. Workflows helps you automate your customer outreach, track participation rates, and make smart adjustments over time.

For example, when running a win-loss program, you may want to prioritize outreach to a specific customer segment. With Workflows, you can set custom rules for when and how outreach happens. The platform handles the process automatically—no more guesswork, no more tedious manual effort. And you’ll have a real-time view of your pipeline so you can spot gaps or bottlenecks before they become problems.

The more you can remove the friction of running your program, the more time you have to focus on what actually matters: uncovering critical insights and acting on what you learn.

3. Make sure your insights are shared

Even when teams gather insightful feedback, there’s a common trap: It gets siloed. Someone hears something useful, jots it down … and it never sees the light of day.

To get real value from customer feedback, it’s critical to close the loop—and make it easy for people across your company to act on what you learn. That’s where Smart Tags come in.

With Smart Tags, teams can automatically track and surface mentions of specific keywords, like a product feature, a competitor, or a critical theme, and receive real-time email alerts when those topics come up in interviews. That means feedback doesn’t sit in a document. It shows up right where people are working.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Your product team subscribes to tags for each major feature set. Any time those features are mentioned in buyer interviews, the PMs responsible will be notified instantly.
  
• Your sales team sets up tags for top competitors. They get fresh, real-time intel whenever buyers compare vendors—no digging required.
  
• Your marketing team watches for terms like “ease of use” or “brand perception,” helping them refine messaging with actual buyer language.
  

The best part? You can tailor Smart Tags to whatever matters most to you. And because it’s all automated, you’re not stuck combing through transcripts. You just get the signal—fast.

Staying anchored in what matters most

To borrow a line from Warren Buffett: “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”

In other words, moments of uncertainty expose whether you’re really connected to your customers—or whether you’re just coasting. The companies that thrive in times like these aren’t the loudest or the flashiest. They’re the ones doing the quiet, consistent work of staying close to their customers and building real value.

Flex Interviews, Workflows, and Smart Tags are critical features that help teams anchor themselves in customer feedback. They’re part of a platform built to help you understand why you win and lose—so you can make better decisions at every stage of the customer journey.