The success of your startup may depend on listening to your users. You’ll find out how they found you, what made them buy your product or service, and what they enjoy about your company, of course. But you can also discover other important aspects of their experience that can help you succeed.
Listen to your users to improve your product or service
Like every other ambitious entrepreneur, you think you have a good idea what the market wants and needs–and how your business will satisfy it. But developing your new product or service in a vacuum may doom your chances from the start. Listening to potential users helps you see where your ideas diverge from reality, so you can narrow the gap.
If you listen well, your users can actually help you build a product that will be better and more useful in their lives. They can also help you get it to market faster, with less money spent on development. Listening to your users helps you prioritize which product features and services to develop first–reducing your burn rate and minimizing wasteful cash burn.
With careful application of what you learn from users, you can iterate your concept quickly before spending anything at all on development. Every development dollar you save gets you that much closer to making a profit.
Listen to your users to help customer retention
Like any new entrepreneur, you’re ceaselessly asking yourself how to get more new users to adopt your product or service. Just as important is getting better at keeping the users you already have–increasing your customer retention.
Two key metrics will tell the story of your startup: 1) are you retaining users? and, 2) are you converting them? [VB] By reaching out and listening to your users, you increase their engagement with you, your company, and your product or service. This helps you figure out better ways to keep your customers, and to keep them buying from you.
Listen to your users to enhance customer service
Listening to your users helps enhance your customer service in important ways. Getting their feedback helps you learn how your product or service functions in the real world. This helps you better design your product or service to avoid customer difficulties to begin with. And a well-worked feedback loop between you and your users promotes continuous improvement in your product or service.
Your users can even help build your frequently asked questions (FAQ) page. By listening to your users continuously, you’ll learn what questions they have and add them for other users to see. If they are regularly having difficulties with one aspect or another of what you offer, maybe you’re not explaining it well enough. Continuous user feedback helps keep your content fresh, up-to-date, and clear.
