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Every company wants great relationships with its customers. The question what does it fancy truly turn your reference to customers into a superpower? Let’s start very simply.
The most obvious (and most common) thanks to deepen a customer relationship is to invite customer feedback in order that you’ll improve your product. you are doing NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys. You found out focus groups. You conduct user testing. you are trying to spot bugs. you are trying to gather , categorize and prioritize new feature requests. All goodies to try to to . If you are not doing those things, you ought to start. It’s good, clean living.
Next, there’s a good better thing to try to to . Don’t just get feedback on your product, get feedback on your entire customer experience. What’s it like evaluating your product before buying? Was it easy to work out pricing? Was a conversation with a sales person necessary? If so, was that conversation enjoyable or dreadful? What do customers believe the invoice emails they get from you? Are they clear? How do they feel about your support? Is your sales team helpful or aggressive when looking to upsell existing customers? Is your experience ok that when the customer changes jobs, they take you with them to their new gig? If you are not collecting feedback and seeking answers to those sorts of questions, you ought to start. It’s better, cleaner living. Once you begin getting good at this type of customer feedback, there’s another level to realize . And, it isn’t about “collecting feedback”. The inherent limitation with collecting customer feedback is that it’s all about you. How your product can recover . How your business can recover . Nothing wrong together with your goal being to form your business better. that’s a fine, understandable goal to possess .
But, so as to really build that deeper connection and understanding, it cannot be about you. indirectly .
The next level goes beyond collecting customer feedback and connecting to a customer’s hopes, dreams and fears. Remember, customers are people too. How is your customer doing? Are they OK? What’s work been like? What’s life been like? What problems are they trying to solve? what’s keeping them up at night?
Now, you would possibly have this question in your head:
“This is often all well and good, but how is all that relevant to my business?”
It may or might not be relevant to your business. But I guarantee you it’s relevant to the customer. and that they are relevant to your business. You may find that response a tad too abstract and not sufficiently satisfying. So, let me expand thereon .
Let’s say you are looking to identify new market trends before others. Find new adjacencies to expand your offering. Identify an acute market need. the simplest thanks to do these sorts of things is to know your customers. Like, really understand them and what is going on on in their lives.
The ability to deeply connect with customers during this way may be a super power.
Does it scale? No. But, it doesn’t got to . albeit after 100 conversations you uncover only one transforming insight, it’s worthwhile . And you’ll . It’s just a matter of your time .
At my company, HubSpot, we believe that we’re not just here to create software, we’re here to create careers. So, we actually attempt to probe truth needs of our customers. We ask ourselves not just what our software can do for them, but what our company can do for them. That mindset has served us well — and that i think it might work for you too.
