Let your customers love ️you ️️❤️ by listening to them
Why listening to customers is critical for your business
“One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say.” — Bryant H. McGill
Every person committed to building great products and companies knows that listening to their customers is important. But our motivation to do so often fluctuates.
I hope to increase your motivation to prioritize this important activity by reminding you of the ways customer listening can drive value. In my observations, we know listening to your customers is valuable, but we don’t appreciate the many ways listening can be used to improve company performance. We founded Unbird to help product teams listen, and I’d like to suggest three ways I have seen listening to customers benefit businesses: improving your product, customer relationships, and customer stories.
1–Improve your product
This is the most obvious benefit of listening to your customer, but its worth noting the different ways listening to your customers can improve your product.
A) Identify “bugs”
Customer feedback can act as post-release QA, helping you identify “bugs” in your product/experience. I use this loosely to mean anything in your product or customer journey that is not working as you designed. In addition to pointing out issues you may or may not be aware of, customer feedback can also provide valuable context behind why a certain issue is happening. But I would argue that you should rely on this form of feedback the least because it should have been caught internally before making your customer experience it. While you will always ship a product with bugs, surprises here point to a failure in your product development process. Though fixing these issues is important, it’s also critical to answer why the product was shipped with a serious unknown issue.
B) Highlight user experience improvement ideas
Second, sometimes your product is working as designed, but your design could be better. User input is invaluable to help you identify where assumptions made during the design process were off or when important considerations were missed. Metrics tell you what, but feedback can often tell you how and why. Addressing these issues helps you optimize your user experience designs so they are more intuitive, fast, fun, etc.
C) Get ideas to increase value
Last, customer input can give you ideas on how your product can deliver additional value. While these often come in as “feature requests,” you should drive this type feedback beyond simple feature requests to understand the core “whys” behind the feature request. These whys typically elucidate the “job” your customers hire your product to do and the rich context (circumstance, goals, evaluation criteria, barriers) behind this job. Gaining a deep understanding of why a customer hired your product and how they use it will open up opportunities for creating additional value through your product. Of course, some customer feature requests are just awesome on face value and are worth considering.
2–Improve your customer relationships
The YouTube video called, “It’s Not About The Nail” (please excuse the unfair gender stereotype) illustrates the point that sometimes people don’t expect you to solve their problems; listening and acknowledging them is good enough (at least initially). By giving your customers ample opportunities to contact you and share their problems, experiences, and thoughts, and then responding, you build a relationship and make them feel cared for.
Let me share two stories that illustrate this: I have been requesting the same Evernote feature for years. I’ve posted on their community forum, tweeted, contacted them directly through support, and done everything else I can think of—even writing a public Medium article about it. I understand that Evernote can’t accommodate every feature request, but I want to know I’ve been heard. In all my efforts, not a single person at Evernote has ever acknowledged me, and I’m still mad about it. 😡 Compare that to Audible. I made a crazy request: that they add a 4x speed play option (3x speed is starting to sound slow). They responded personally to my request and explained that they have looked into this feature but can’t figure out how deliver it while maintaining acceptable sound quality. Both Evernote and Audible still haven’t built my requested features, but I love️ Audible ❤️ and am on the verge of abandoning Evernote 🙅, despite having 2669 notes on the platform. Eric Ries says, “Metric are people too.” I would add, “Feedback are people too.” Meaning that each feedback tweet, comment, conversation, etc. represents a real person with real feelings who need to feel heard and validated.
There’s another more concrete benefit from listening: the data customers give you through feedback interactions can often be a leading indicator of important business outcomes such as attrition and referrals.
3–Improve your stories
While helping an Unbird user analyze customer feedback, I came across a beautiful story of how a customer used their product to find a long-lost family member. The story made me think, “Maybe I should work here!”
As Brené Brown suggests, stories are data with a soul. Powerful customer stories infuse meaning into your organization: they motivate and inspire employees. They can be used to help craft your overarching narrative of why you exist as a company, how to position yourself against competition, and how you make the world better. Listening to your customers gives your organization a repertoire of customer stories.
Many touch points and channels are typically required to gain a full picture of your customers and utilize each of these improvements. Each listening channel (surveys, app reviews, interviews, support) has specific benefits and drawbacks. But listening across multiple channels can be very difficult at scale. That’s why we built Unbird: to help companies better listen and understand their customers across all open channels without having to only focus on one or close any down. But of course, even if you have lots of feedback in only one channel, you can still use Unbird to better understand your customers 😃
