What?! Piss off customers?! Well I never.
Customer service in the social media age is paramount! You have to treat your customers like kings.
Well… maybe.
You can’t be afraid to piss off your customers first so that you can make the experience better later.
Good customer service isn’t about making sure that customers never get upset. That’s impossible.
Good customer service is about responding quickly, acknowledging their concerns and improving your product based on their feedback. It’s about genuinely caring about every user that comes to you.
In the startup world, we all care about our customers. A lot. They mean the world to us.
But what we tend to do is over-think our features and our entire product as a result. We think about the people who will be upset if they’re confused or feel like something is missing and end up unhappy.
We had this discussion recently at Feast when discussing the copy that should go on our homepage to explain how our classes work.
On one end, we want to make sure the product is as clear as possible so that people aren’t surprised when they sign up and pay for a class. They might be upset if they sign up for it and it ends up being different from what they thought!
Good.
I hope they get upset and they ask for a refund. We’ll learn a great deal from that.
That’s also an opportunity to gain an evangelist when we can come back and show them that we listened to their feedback, and made changes to improve.
But you know what?
They probably won’t get upset.
Because most of the time, we really over-think our products and how our customers perceive it. They aren’t nearly as needy as we think they are.
Keep it simple.
If you start at the absolute most simple point possible and solve a core problem, your customers will tell you what they want to know, what features they want to see, what information is missing…
But if you try to cover all your bases right away, you’ll end up overselling, and overwhelming your customer with information and features that aren’t actually that important to them.
A customer will often tell you what they want to see added.
They’ll never tell you what to remove.
Let them get pissed off. Let them tell you why. And then build a product they’ll love forever.
