In building a business it’s generally considered a good idea to listen to your customers. The idea is that if your product/site/service is a better fit with customers’ needs you will have more of them. As it turns out though, listening to customers is a lot easier said than done.
First, which customers should you listen to? Is it the early adopters or should you try to identify what you believe to be “mainstream” customers? This turns out to be very hard to answer. If you don’t keep the early adopters at least somewhat happy you may never make it to the mainstream. Or it could be that there is no real mainstream for your product, so looking for it might make you neglect the early adopters you already have. Conversely, if you only cater to early adopters you might build something that fills their generally more advanced needs but is too complicated for the mainstream.
Second, how should you listen to customers? Is it what they are saying about the product/site/service or what they are doing? Here too are conflicting pieces of advice. On one hand is the theory that for every one customer complaining about a particular problem there is a silent group of 100 or more having the same problem but not bothering to complain. On the other is the view that verbal complaints and even more so feature requests tend to be what users “think” they want as opposed to what they actually want need (thanks to tweetip for pointing this out). The latter can only be learned, the theory goes, by observing their actual use. Often what customers say and what they do conflicts.
Third, how should you reconcile listening to your customers with your strategy? This is often the hardest part. You have a strategy that you believe in. It’s difficult enough to not outright ignore any customer feedback that’s not on strategy. After all, you don’t want to be a flag waving in the wind and shifting with every breeze. But how can you tell that apart from your customers telling you that your strategy is actually wrong? What if you are trying to solve too hard a problem, when the customers really need something much simpler?
There are no easy answers to any of these questions. Being aware of some of the problems I described is a good start. Making listening to customers a priority and constant process as opposed to a one off exercise also helps. Involving everyone from customer support to marketing to development in the process is key. So is being systematic and not putting too much weight on isolated incidents, such as feedback from a board member :)
P.S. One of my favorite ways of listening to customers is a “listening lab,” which I will describe in a subsequent post. Much of my thinking on this has benefited greatly from Mark Hurst and the folks at Creative Good.
