The CLAP System: How We Turn Feedback into Insight

Have you seen the movie Erin Brockovich?

I really enjoy it. Maybe because the whole thing unfolds in Central California and reminds me of growing up in dusty farm towns, or because Erin is a relentless do‑gooder with zero respect for “the way things are done.”

Either way, there’s one scene I replay whenever I need a kick in the pants about customer knowledge:

Lawyer: “Erin, you don’t even have phone numbers for some of these clients.”
Erin: “Which number do you want?”—and then she rattles off birthdays, medical histories, and water‑quality stats from memory.

What made Erin Brockovich dangerous was she was a walking, breathing, living CRM of her clients.

She knew their names. Knew which kids had rashes. Who drank bottled water and who didn’t. She wasn’t collecting case numbers, she was capturing reality.

That wasn’t software. That was a practice.

Today, you don’t need a yellow pad to know your customer; but you do need a system. And most of us are missing it. We’re swimming in feedback, but learning nothing from it.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The Problem: Anecdotal Evidence Won’t Cut It

Every team has a gut feel. “We hear this a lot.” “I think users are confused.” “People keep asking about X.”

But those hunches rarely align. Support hears pain. Product hears feature requests. Marketing hears gaps in the funnel. Founders hear urgency. And unless someone is connecting the dots, nothing changes.

This is what happens when feedback lives in silos.

You don’t need more tickets or longer surveys. You need structure. Because until your evidence is tagged, reviewed, and shared—it’s not insight. It’s noise.

The Opportunity: Driving Insight at Every Level

Insight isn’t a department. It’s the result of disciplined, deliberate attention to feedback at scale.

When customer signals are structured and visible, support becomes more efficient because they’re not starting from scratch with every ticket. Product teams stop building in the dark and start planning with clarity. Marketing dials in on what language truly resonates. And leadership makes sharper, more confident bets about what’s next.

Everyone benefits when feedback is treated as shared infrastructure—not a support afterthought.

At GiveWP, we’ve built this habit into our process for years. Feedback gets logged into dedicated boards, tagged with themes, and reviewed regularly to drive prioritization.

Our public roadmap is fed by these signals. It’s not a wishlist—it’s a listening post.

The Solution – The CLAP System, Your Quiet CRM

CLAP is a practice. Not a platform. Not a SaaS subscription. A simple discipline:

Capture your customer feedback and sentiment

Don’t rely on memory. Don’t hope that trends will emerge organically. Create a habit of capturing every meaningful customer signal—whether it’s a pre-sale question, a complaint, a cancellation reason, or a feature request.

Even if it’s manual at first, get it in writing. If it’s not recorded, it didn’t happen.

At Liquid Web, our WordPress product brand teams still record every refund reason manually in a spreadsheet. We’re looking for more ways to automate that process across our 7 different brands, but the manual effort has still proven to be highly valuable to be able to say with more authority what product pain-points are driving customers away.

Spreadsheet tip: Start with columns for Customer Type, Topic, Intent, Channel, and Quote. Use something like Notion, Airtable, or even Google Sheets. Click here to get a copy of my Refund Report template.

Label what matters about the feedback

Raw feedback isn’t helpful until it’s categorized. You need to use tags that reflect intent, not just the surface-level topic. One customer might be confused about pricing, another might be missing an integration they expected, and someone else might be frustrated by a rough onboarding experience. These aren’t just technical issues—they’re signals about how your product feels to real people.

The more consistent your labeling language, the more clearly those patterns will emerge. And again—automate what you can. Gravity Forms and HelpScout together allow form-level tagging, so you don’t have to sort it all manually.

Pro tip: Use tools that structure your inbound signals from the start. For those of us who use Helpscout, Gravity Forms has a powerful HelpScout add-on. It creates tickets over the Helpscout API, not a simple email notification. This enables you to auto-tag support tickets based on form inputs, reducing triage friction and increasing data quality.

Analyze trends

Set a rhythm. Pick a time—weekly or monthly—and review your labeled feedback. Ask yourself what themes are growing louder, which ones are fading, and what’s catching new users off guard. Longtime customers often speak differently than new ones, and those shifts tell you something important about your onboarding and long-term value.

This isn’t just about counting up complaints. It’s about listening for stories. Insight doesn’t come from sheer volume. It comes from recurrence, timing, and tone.

It’s helped us flag upcoming churn, spot language mismatches, and even catch competitor positioning shifts.

Pitch product improvements

This is the step most teams skip. Don’t just observe. Recommend.

Take the insights you’ve gathered and turn them into proposals that can actually get traction with product or leadership. Every pitch should include a clear summary of the issue, specific evidence from real customers (tags, quotes, and ticket counts), a thoughtful recommendation for how to fix it, and a sense of how this change will impact users and reduce friction.

Download: Product Pitch Template — a one-page doc to move from problem to proposal in minutes.

We’ve used this exact format to ship impactful, low-effort product wins driven entirely by customer feedback data collected by our support, account services, and customer success teams.

Start Small, Stay Curious

Whether you’re just starting your product business journey, or already on your way but aren’t happy with your current feedback practice, this article was for you. I hope you feel encouraged that you don’t need to buy into an expensive CRM. You just need to start practicing CLAP.

Capture every signal. Label it with intent. Analyze it regularly. Pitch what matters.

This is your Quiet CRM. It doesn’t create noise for your teams, but it quietly changes and improves everything you do.

Try this today: Open your last 10 support tickets. Label them. Analyze them to find the common thread. Patterns are patient. They’re waiting for you to notice.