The Mixed Blessing of Customer Feedback

Lessons on trusting myself @work

Four years ago, I was tasked with creating a new business unit. I remember my first week on the job, I was staring at a white wall as blank as my mind. I was thinking, “Growing a business was like nothing I had ever experienced.” It is so easy to doubt yourself. How do other leaders stay confident?

Have you watched a confident CEO speak at a keynote? It makes me wonder if there are internal battles to present with such confidence. Do they ever second guess themselves? I have always seen a fine line between being talking like a visionary and sounding delusional.

In my own growth into management positions, there were a number of times where I felt like giving up. Where I went to the wife and said, “I don’t know if I can do this.” I hope these stories help anyone else that might be going through similar things — and this one is learning about customer feedback.

On Customer Feedback

My first attempt at a new way forward was failure in the guise of success. I spent a month researching new ways to deliver education and came to the conclusion that security training was boring and needed to be ten times more interesting to keep a student engaged. People were not going to voluntarily take technical courses if it wasn’t enjoyable.

I researched a lot around the latest trends and developed a pilot that looked and felt like the Khan Academy videos. I wanted feedback. I showed the video to a customer and unfortunately for me, the customer was ecstatic saying this was “Just the thing they were looking for.”

Excited for this initial success, I spent the next month building more videos. Long story short, the customer never bought the training and worse, I ran into a ton of complications.

These videos were difficult to maintain. The subject matter of the courses change quickly. Videos were useful for math and science where fundamentals are established. For me, the smallest change would force me to re-do an entire 10 minute video. It was inefficient. Also, a video required me to be in the video. I would be pivotal to all content — in other words, a bottleneck.

I expanded my audience and more feedback came through. Some customers felt the videos were unprofessional, and others felt they were childish. What worked as fun videos for Khan Academy was failing as a professional tool for the enterprise. I misjudged the need. With my tail between my legs I scrapped the entire idea and was back at zero. It was hard.

On Targeting Your Approach

I learned that customer feedback can be a mixed blessing. Be too general and you can find yourself with answers to the wrong questions. People are also terrible predictors of the future. Be cautious if you are relying on a idea or vision to describe your concept because people can’t visualize something unless it is dead center, in front of them.

Discouraged after many more mock ups, I found myself again looking at the white wall. I decided that instead of building the latest, trendy product, I would take a targeted approach in solving my customer’s problems. I developed a process built around ensuring I could receive the right feedback from my customers — the ones buying my product and the students who needed training. I built the education around hurdles faced by enterprises when it came to training employees.

Two months later, I had a new product to demo built upon solving these pain points. I found that this targeted strategy completely changed the conversation. Instead of general questions such as “what do you think about the product?” we were able to focus on more targeted feedback. Challenges around training programs was something every customer understood. Our questions became, “Did our training help solve this pain point for you?”

On Listening vs. Arrogance

Being focused and identifying the right questions, in order to get the right feedback, helped grow our product and unexpectedly, our story. We became a product that solved training pain-points through researched methodology.

This helped me gain confidence in trusting myself and decisions about our product. As a leader, you need this. You might have a vision for this amazing product, but ultimately, finding success is your benchmark because it is the seed that grows your confidence.

During this process, there were many situations where my ego tried to take over, and I was trying to convince myself that customer feedback did not matter. I believe part of it was my frustration that no matter what I tried, the feedback I received felt unhelpful. When things don’t go right, it’s easy as a leader to act rash and let arrogance take over. This is a mistake that I had to keep in check.

For myself, hearing customers provide great feedback, that in the end was not applicable to their problems, made me understand that I was asking the wrong questions. Only once I could ask questions that aligned with our business, our story, did I get the right feedback to see that I was headed in the right direction.

Conclusion

To recap:

• Feedback can be a mixed blessing. Spend the majority of your time making sure you ask the right questions vs. collecting the wrong answers
• Customer is always right. But they don’t always know what they need. Don’t expect customers to see the future if you, as the visionary, can’t draw a picture for them. Be clear on your goals, and visual if possible.
• Keep that ego in check. When things look down, it’s easy to get arrogant. Review that the two points above are clear to your customers and if things still don’t look promising you should consider whether your idea is flawed.