My Customer is My Partner: 5 Powerful Customer Engagement Programs

When you’re a startup trying to establish product/market fit, you have a lot of questions. Go-to-market strategist Brian Gladstein shares five tips for better connecting with the one group who has all the answers: your customers.

I grew up in southern Connecticut, not far from a unique, family-owned, and somewhat legendary grocery store called Stew Leonard’s. As a kid, going there with my Mom was always a treat — there were singing animatronic cows and characters hanging from the ceiling. It was like an amusement park and supermarket rolled into one! Even as I kid I remember the sign that greeted everyone walking through the institution’s front doors:

Rule #1: The Customer is Always Right

Rule #2: If the Customer is Ever Wrong, Re-Read Rule #1

Stew treated his customers like partners, and even the youngest of us understood that.

Now it’s years later, and as a product manager and an entrepreneur I know the truth: customers are plenty wrong. They think they want something and what they actually need is something else. They tell you that they love a feature and then never use it. Instead of recognizing and embracing the potential of a transformative technology they’d typically rather complain about details like the color of a button.

Not only are customers wrong, they’re wrong so often that many people think the policies Stew Leonard placed in his entryway simply don’t apply to technology businesses. But here’s the thing — there’s a lot that customers are right about:

• They know the market better than you.
• They understand their pain points and the true alternatives available to them better than you.
• They know how important the problem you are solving is, relative to all the other problems that need solving.
• They know why they are really making their buying decisions.

 

Stew’s rules certainly apply — you just have to know how to apply them. After all, you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

5 Customer Engagement Programs to Implement Now

I’ve put together a list of five fantastic customer engagement programs that are designed to build true partnerships between high-tech companies and their customers (the kind Stew Leonard established with everyone who walked into his store).

1) Regular Customer Health Checks (Done by Everybody in the Company)

Just spending a few minutes on the phone with your customers can have an enormous impact. It typically doesn’t take much for them to open up and share all sorts of information. Don’t be surprised if you rescue a customer about to switch, or if you learn a few surprises about your competitors. Even better, watch as your employees start to understand your customers like never before. For best results, get everyone involved — from the junior engineers up through executive management. It’s an all-around win-win.

2) Executive Sponsorship of Key Accounts

You don’t want to disappoint your most important accounts. So show them that you take your relationship with them seriously by assigning an executive sponsor. Have each member of your executive team take on a handful of accounts as a sponsor — they should take a special interest the status of the account, make themselves available to talk with the customer team at the account, and can even be brought in to help solve a problem.

For a special bonus, have them record a 30-second welcome video personalized for your customer. Things like that stand out, creating a solid foundation of mutual trust that will last a long time.

3) Stop Surveying and Start Asking Real Questions

Every week I get a dozen surveys in my inbox asking me to provide feedback on a company’s service – and I rarely answer them. However, when someone asks me what I think about my industry or my vision, I’m more than happy to oblige. Stop asking customers how they think about you and start asking how they think. You can build an incredibly powerful community for firsthand market research that will deliver a wealth of knowledge and insight.

4) Supercharge Your Beta Testing

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a product manager needs to test some beta software so she contacts the last five customers who participated in a beta test and asks them to take a look at the product two months before the launch (when there really isn’t time to make any changes).

At Rapid7, dozens of customers are asked each month to participate in product feedback sessions where they are connected directly with product managers to talk about their user experiences, check out new concepts, and work through challenges together. This aggressive approach to soliciting feedback has done wonders for their product planning efforts.

5) Create a Thought Leadership Panel

Are you struggling with steady thought leadership content? Tired of fighting with engineers to write the same stories over and over? Your customers represent a wealth of untapped thought leadership. Create a panel where you gather 20 of them together on a regular basis. Treat them like gold, and in exchange they can provide you with amazing content about industry trends, use cases, innovative solutions to challenging problems, and much more. You’ll find that suddenly your content means something again — because it is coming directly from the community that wants to read it.

Photo by Rishad Daroowala