The knee-jerk reaction of many company execs is to silence the loudest critics their companies have. From the diplomatic to demanding, the approaches vary but the message often delivered to critics is the same: be gentle in your criticisms and generous in your praise – or go away. Even in 2010 when blogs get much more traffic that newspaper websites, more time is spent on the Internet than watching television, and Facebook and Twitter both have more users than some nations have populations, companies are still ignoring their customers’ voices just because they are not positive. What an opportunity to connect with customers and learn to improve.
Critics Can Be A Great Catalyst For Growth
The natural inclination of any one in marketing, product management or PR is to “fix” any customer criticism fast and even gloss it over. But what about digging a little deeper and looking for patterns and trends in critical comments? It could be possible that customers, and this includes channel partners, are seeing broken processes, innate weaknesses no one can see from the inside. It’s like having an early warning system of problems not visible internally that need quick resolution. Shutting down the critics is shutting down insight on how to improve.
Where listening to your most critical and passionate customers can really pay off is in the new product and service development process. A good friend works for the Walt Disney Company where she manages an area of their market and customer research function. It is astounding the depths to which Disney strives to understand where they have failed to live up to customers’ expectations. They are assiduous in trying to figure out where they did not deliver – what were the big disconnect points – and what could have been improved. There is a passion in that company to make sure every experience is a great one, and if they fail an equally strong passion to understand why. My friend tells me the story of how during a field interview a parent complained about mouse ears being too easy to bend and snap on the famous black beanies, and the feedback went all the way to supplier management. Today if you look at the mouse ears on the famous black beanies, you’ll see reinforced stitching and on premium models, double-width plastic as a result.
Open The Door, Don’t Shut Them Out
Reflecting on how seriously Disney takes criticism and the rapid changes they make as a result, the potential for using social networks to truth test new products became clear. Here are some take-aways from watching Disney capture criticisms and works very hard to redefine experiences daily.
- Go find your most passionate users, whether they are bloggers, the most vocal customers on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, and get them dialed into product development earlier than the beta testing phase. Find users who are passionate about your products to blog about them and also have insight into how the system is designed and produced. This takes some courage but imagine the benefits. These people spend much of their days thinking about your products, your company and the promises it makes, how well it keeps it promises or not. They’re your community and what a valuable foundation for early stage product feedback.
- Set ground rules for engineering, product marketing, product development and management to keep the peace. This is essential, because chances are your most passionate users are the extroverted type and don’t hold back very much. Getting some ground rules can keep the peace and keep it positive.
- Go after unstructured feedback and use online collaboration tools to scale globally. The payoff of having a collaborative platform to gather feedback is that your customer community begins to gel and get tighter, more cohesive when everyone can see each others’ comments. This could be exceptionally valuable as the feedback shared could bring a much more concise, focused direction to product development. At the worst you’ll get a clear signal if development has been on the right track of not prior to inviting users into the process.
- Make it Matter. Microsoft has a global online panel of approximately 60,000 who provide feedback on new products and operating systems. They have no doubt segmented this very large online panel to the most insightful contributors. Imagine the ownership these customers have when their features are included and how this just strengthens their commitment to deliver critical insights of value.
Bottom line: Your company’s critics could save your products from being mediocre and transform them to being great. Organizing the most passionate, critical customers can make a huge difference in the success or failure of your next software app, product or service.
Flickr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/xakaxunknownx/46196787/
Louis Columbus has over 20 years in the IT industry, specializing in product management, sales and marketing. Immediately before joining Cincom, Mr. Columbus was a Senior Analyst at AMR Research. He earned his MBA from Pepperdine University and completed the Strategic Marketing Management Program at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He has published 16 books on operating systems, peripherals and integration technologies.
Related posts:
