Part 4: Getting Your First Product Right When Customers Don’t Tell The Truth

December 10, 2009

Customer_Truth So you talked to your customers and you designed your new product or service based upon their feedback, yet the reception of your product among your customers isn’t what you had hoped it would be. What went wrong? As J.P. Morgan said many decades ago, “A man always has two reasons for doing anything – a good reason and the real reason”. Customer behavior hasn’t changed. The reality is that customers don’t always tell the truth. They’re not liars either. Often customers don’t want to be the bearer of bad news or they may be non-confrontational or they may engage in wishfulness – who wants to tell their boss it takes 2 hours to do something that he thinks takes 15 minutes!

I was in a customer meeting with a publicly traded software company that was just turning seven years old. The founder and CEO had come to ask his biggest customer for feedback on the company’s flagship product. The audience gave glowing reviews of the software and when he mentioned possible new features or products, the audience likewise gave positive feedback. As the audience exited the meeting, small groups muttered about how difficult it was to use some of the current features and how they’d never used many of the proposed ones. What happened? His biggest customer was an old, established giant of a company, where skills in office politics determined more of one’s career growth than performance. Employees learned that to thrive they had to temper their comments and be publicly upbeat and positive. The CEO of the software company wanted blunt feedback – the good, the bad, and the ugly – but what he got was quite different.

Actions speak louder than words. One way to circumvent the above behavior is to watch your customers’ behavior, and ignore their words. Send someone into your customers’ offices and have them show you how they are using your product or ask to observe them using your product. The truth of your product will be shown to you.

Talking to your customers regularly will give them the comfort zone to speak more freely. You will often gleam more information about your product from the side comments and one liner remarks than from the response to a direct question. Talking to your customers out of the blue puts your customers on their guard. Imagine someone you haven’t seen in 10 years calls you up and asks to borrow a lot of money. Are you going to loan it to them? Not likely, but if they are someone you see regularly, you might. It’s a good idea to keep you customers talking and talking.

This is why marketing is such a tough job. First, you have to get the customers to talk with you. Next, you have to extract the truth from your customers. Lastly, customers contacting customer service for help are not the ones happy with your product and service. They are often the most vocal, but they may not represent the majority of your customers. Do you ever call the IT department because you’re satisfied and happy with how your computer and connection is working? It’s not easy to determine what feedback is relevant and which is not. But when you are a start-up and your first product is your only product, it’s imperative you define, modify and upgrade your product based upon what customers truly want.