Developing a scalable customer feedback strategy with Squarespace’s Rapha Fontes

After Squarespace launched in 2004, its sole employee for several years was founder Anthony Casalena, who steadily built up his website building business by maintaining an intense focus on customer satisfaction and feedback.

Now, almost two decades later, the publicly-traded company continues to place great importance on customer feedback. Raphael Fontes, senior vice president of customer operations at Squarespace, joined Conversations with Zendesk podcast host Nicole Saunders recently to explain how—and why—his company integrates customer feedback into product development.

“Even if you create the process or feature, you still need to walk in your customers’ shoes and experience it yourself,” Fontes said, who notes that being in tune with where customers are as your business scales can be a challenging process.

Fontes describes Squarespace’s success as being rooted in a host of factors that keep customers in the spotlight: a focus on design, being able to strike a balance between fixing bugs and developing new features, and empowering the support team to see its work as powerful and impactful.

Stay tuned for the next episode of Conversations with Zendesk (October 18), which will feature journalist Jeremy Kinglsey of the Economist, who will discuss AI regulation and transparency.