How Canva closes the CX loop: 4 key steps

1. Gather customer feedback

In order to empower every customer, Canva focuses on gathering as much feedback as possible—whether it’s about their product, customer support, or something else.

“We do not repel feedback,” said Rob. “The key is to collect as much signal as you possibly can.”

Recently, a number of customers had reported an ongoing issue: the desire to switch more easily between their Canva accounts. They heard this via numerous channels: live chat, email, and in conversations with their customer support team.

That took them to step two.

2. Analyze and prioritize customer feedback

As their customer base scaled to the hundreds of millions, Canva needed a way to analyze and prioritize the feedback that was coming in.

“Thank goodness for AI,” Rob quipped. “Thank goodness for tools like Zendesk that allow you to categorize and log customer feedback and customer experiences without a lot of manual intervention needed to stack and organize.”

With the account switching issue, Canva leveraged Zendesk AI to analyze and categorize the feedback coming in. Then, due to the volume of feedback requests, they prioritized finding a resolution.

3. Take a collaborative approach

Canva ensures that every team understands and appreciates not only how important closing loops are, but also how critical it is to work together to close them.

“We allocate a certain percentage of our capacity in engineering to closing loops,” Rob shared. “We allocate a certain percentage of marketing’s time to sending emails to customers about closing the loop. And so on.”

In the case of the accounts issue, the product team took the lead creating a roadmap and scoping the work. But others got involved, too. Buy-in was sought from leaders to move forward. Users were brought in to test—which required further iterating and refining from product. And once the problem was solved, Canva leaned on marketing to tell people about it. (Hint: you’ll learn more about this in step four.)

4. Communicate to customers when you’ve closed the loop

Herein lies the most important step: telling customers you’ve solved their problems.

“You can’t close the loop and not tell your customers,” Rob said. “Customers need to know you’re listening to them and trying to solve their problems.”

In 2024 alone, Canva closed one million loops. That’s one million issues resolved—and one million emails sent to customers to let them know their feedback mattered.

“The amount of goodwill you get back from your customers and community is mind-blowing. But more importantly, the product got better. And we actually responded to things that were causing problems for customers. That’s how you build a product at scale for customers.”