[ASK IH] How do you collect feedback from your customers?
[ASK IH] How do you collect feedback from your customers?
I've been taking a dive at how people are querying their audiences and customers lately, as I evaluate better ways to do it myself.
Basically, how do you get your customers to tell you in an ongoing way what they think of your product? What do they love? What do they hate?
If this leads to looking into new features, how do you validate that other customers have the same pain?
For B2B stuff, I just try to get the occasional beer with the ones I get along well with, and treat them as a representative sample of the rest. If I'm travelling somewhere to sell, then I'll try to arrange some social time with the (potential) customer as well, just chat a bit and get to know their goals/frustrations/etc a bit better. If I'm entering a new industry and don't have customers yet, I try to go to where they are (either a physical place or an online place) and get chatting with them.
This sounds like a good reminder to always create a personal relationship and not hide behind technology (something I sort of do reflexively)
I've also gotten lucky a fair number of times via google/twitter alerts for people talking about my stuff, but without actually using the links/mentions/tags. It's usually when something bad happened and they want to vent, so it's a good opportunity to hear what they're really thinking when they don't think anyone is listening. And then you have an opportunity to do some proactive customer support and get into a conversation from there.
Having been involved in product intelligence, there is no substitute for asking your customers directly - A good way is also to create a "feature page wish" and ask users to add features they'd like to see and vote . If you already have good traction, perhaps people are commenting on your product? maybe on reddit, etc.. community/comments are a always a good source of insights. But ideally, I would suggest going back to your users, tell them you are contacting a small number of them to create a "customer panel" where they will be able to share their thoughts with you, helping build your roadmap.
I love this idea of a customer panel. Thank you for that!
Generally I look at analytics. Are they coming back? What step in a process are they getting to but dropping? Are they not spending enough time in one location (you think)?
The love/hate part is a little harder unless people have an issue.