It’s 2019, which means it’s time to update your marketing strategy so that your company becomes more customer-centric. Indeed, this should be a small business goal for many of us.
‘Customer-centric’ is more than just a buzzword. It means that you’ve listened to your customers and adopted your products and services so that you’re giving them more of what they want. And when you do that, sales will naturally go up.
Customer feedback helps you to implement better strategic decisions. In this article, we take a look at how to cultivate and use your customer feedback in order to create a customer-centric product.
Ask the Right Questions
You can’t use your customer feedback to create a customer-feedback product if the feedback is useless. To make your feedback useful, you need to first ask the right questions.
For example, let’s say that I decide to ask my customers to name five rival companies they would consider shopping with. Before I ask them this question, I need to understand why I’m asking it.
Any question you ask must provide the data you need to strengthen your products. Customer feedback shouldn’t be something we do out of vanity. It needs to be something we can use to make better decisions.
Identify Areas Where Your Product Can Be Improved
Loyal customers understand your product very well. In fact, they probably understand it almost as much as your product managers.
The businesses that are using customer feedback to improve their products know this.
Take LEGO, for example. Their LEGO Ideas initiative invites their customers to submit their own designs. If a project lands over 10,000 votes, it will be reviewed by the product managers and potentially turned into an actual LEGO product.
If you can make your customer feedback fun like this, you can leverage it to create customer-centric products you just know they’ll love.
Use Customer Feedback to Improve Your Product Roadmap
If you’re way about letting your customers come up with ideas for a whole new product, why not at least let them help with your product roadmap?
Remember that no one understands your product pain paints as much as your customers. They know what works and what doesn’t work.
To that end, it’s always a good idea to turn to your customers for suggested improvements and tweaks.
For example, there might be a feature that’s really obviously missing from your product or service, but which you haven’t spotted yet. Your customers will have spotted this, and you should invite them to point it out to you.
An easy way to solicit suggestions from your customers is to implement a suggestion board on your website. Here, your users can suggest possible new features that overcome particular pain points. Adding an upvote and downvote feature to the suggestion board will give you a good idea of what your customers’ biggest pain points are.
You should also engage in social listening, which is when you keep track of the conversations that are happening online about your business or relevant topics.
Look for a Niche
It might sound strange but some companies still don’t know what their true niche is. That’s not a problem — there’s still time to find it.
One of the best ways to find it is by taking a look at your customer feedback data.
Look for trends and patterns. Where do most of your satisfied customers come from? What niche can you see forming?
Once you understand where most of your satisfied customers are coming from, you can then work out ways to tweak your product that better targets them and improves the relationship.
Don’t Ignore Negative Feedback
While it can be tempting to ignore negative feedback and brush it under the carpet, it’s never a good idea. If a customer has taken the time to give you feedback, they obviously have an interest in your product.
Use negative feedback to improve your customer service. Talk to the customer, understand their problem and do your best to show them that you’re focused on delivering the best customer-centric product possible. Make them feel respected and cared for. The key here is to build a long-term relationship.
Set Customer-Focused Employee Targets
Unless your whole organization is on board with this, you will struggle to make proper changes.
It’s no surprise that employees focus on the rewards. If improved productivity is the metric by which you gauge their success, and for which you’ll reward them, your employees will look to improve their productivity.
On the other hand, if you shift the performance metric towards customer satisfaction, your employees will be focused on making your customers happy. They know that the happier they make your customers, the more they will personally be rewarded.
Setting customer-focused employee targets is a great way to get the best out of your employees so that they’re onboard with using customer feedback to create a customer-centric product. It’s important that everyone in your organization feels a part of what you’re trying to do. Shifting the focus to a better customer experience will manifest itself in your employees’ product related decisions.
Provide Value
Lastly, it’s so important that you work on providing as much customer value as possible. Lots of businesses work on their brand value, and while this is okay there needs to be room for customer value, too.
When creating a customer-centric product, never forget the value that comes from making your customers feel good about themselves and you. Offer incentives and rewards to loyal customers. Keep them happy.
Conclusion
Putting the customer first means putting your best foot forward in 2019. Using the tips in this article, you can use your customer feedback to your advantage. Listen to what they say about your product, understand their needs and wants, and adapt accordingly. The more customer-centric your product is, the more you will succeed.
