How To Keep Your Customers Interested In Your Product
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As a creator of a product, it’s likely that you’ve spent months – possibly years – working hard to create a product that you can feel proud of. You’ve worked to ensure that your product is the best version of what’s on the market right now, and you’ve done everything possible to maintain it so that people will fall in love with it. The more that the customers fall in love with your product, the more that they will recommend it to others and you can watch it fly off the shelves. You’ve put everything into it that you possibly can, and you can finally put it onto the market.
The thing is, most customers aren’t too worried about what goes on behind the scenes to make an amazing product. They haven’t seen the nights that you’ve spent worrying about the design and functionality of your product. They haven’t seen how hard you’ve worked and the only difference to them is how your product compares to the competitor; and this is going to be confirmed in the customer experience. Many businesses don’t think hard enough about how the customer experiences their product, only how the product will sell. You can guarantee that your company will be defined based on the experience that your customers have with your product, which means you can’t afford for the experience to be anything less than excellent.
Customers will switch brands and go elsewhere if they have a bad experience with your product or the way that you handle product issues. Concentrating on the experience that people will have with your product will mean you can make things positive. You can model the way you tackle customer issues on the way that your competition does things in the industry. You can’t rip off their ideas or do things the way that they do, but you can certainly have a positive attitude about the way in which you handle complaints and product or software issues. The whole point of your customer experience is to have people fall in love with the product, thus falling in love with the way that your company practices. So, how do you get from unsociable hours spent poring over Agile testing guides to perfect your product and make sure that it doesn’t break, to customer satisfaction? It’s not an overly long road, and below you’ll find out exactly how to do it.
Move With The Customer
The way that you progress your product or software is largely going to depend on what the customers enjoy about your product and what they demand. If they want upgrades on the product you’ve made, or given you feedback about what they would like to see done differently, listen to it. Customers can and do outgrow a product: just look at Apple. They’ve gone from the brick of an iPhone to the sleek, larger models with a better interface than before. Sure, the battery still sucks, but everything is in progress.
Social Media Response
A big part of your product marketing strategy will rest on the success of your social media campaigns. Customers will interact with you in more than just your online web chat, feedback forms or calling you for advice. They’ll Tweet you, Facebook message you and catch you in your hashtags and you really should be responsive and take notice of these messages. Companies that take time to get back to customers, or not at all as the case may sometimes be, are those that have fickle customers. You want loyalty and customers want to give it to you – let them!
If It Ain’t Broke…
One of the biggest reasons that customers call companies is to complain. There’s very much a trend in complaints for new products and most companies dislike these. Of course – you’ve put your all into a new product and someone somewhere is whining about it. You have to own the fact that there are billions of people out there and a small handful who don’t like what you have on offer aren’t going to define what you have done. However, you do have to look at the trends. If you’ve got more negative feedback than positive, then you need to think about the ways that your product is functioning. No one wants a product that is continuously breaking – which is why products go through rigorous testing before they make it to the shop shelves. You need to constantly evaluate your product to ensure that it’s perfect and stays that way; working products make for happy customers.
Best Practices At Work
You will hopefully have a sales and retentions team working for your business to ensure that new enquiries are being turned into paid customers. With this team, you need to have a blanket ‘best practice’ policy. Create a brainstorm and list all the things that make for excellent customer service. Then, implement this policy across all teams so that your company has the consistency that you need. This’ll help your staff to optimise the way that they retain customers and keep them coming back for more.
Inform Customers Of Changes
As a business, you will be excited every time you decide on a new upgrade. Do you know who else will be excited? Your customers. They will want to go on the ride with you, especially if they’ve been loyal to your product from the day it launched. Do a huge campaign on social media whereby you tease the changes you may be making, or simply adding to the brilliance that you already have. Your customers will want to count down the days to the launch with you, and you can drum up excitement in the local press and on the radio. People love to queue up for new products, and you should make yours one that is worthy of queueing for.
Customer-Focused Actions
Your company culture should surround your customer already, but if it hasn’t so far, it’s time to make changes. Just because you’ve made a sale, it doesn’t mean that you should stop engaging with your customer. Adding customers to mailing lists to keep them engaged with your products and the changes is a great way to inform them of the ways that you want to better what you’re already doing. You can offer feedback surveys and forms before you release any changes, which makes customers feel like they’ve had a say in your new product ideas.
Review Culture
Every customer has a unique response to a product. We are fortunate – or not, depending on how you look at it – that we have a review culture now. People talk, and we all listen to each other. We don’t eat out or buy a product without looking at the reviews first. Your sole job is to ensure that those reviews stay positive, encouraging and make people want to know more about you.
In the end, what matters is that you understand that the way people experience things is a big deal. You should be certain that no matter what, people love to stick with familiar things that they buy. Take the time to understand where people are coming from, and you will always be able to give them what they want. Don’t be afraid of a bad review – just learn from it and move forward, cultivating a loyal following of customers along the way is a positive thing your product needs. Don’t just make something with bells and whistles on the end. Make something people want.
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