A Tweak A Day Keeps The Queries Away

Some issues just get ignored or fall down the list depending on the priorities you set for your working week.

Getting the basics fixed and working becomes a necessity when users start to complain about an issue you once believed, “no one will notice or care” about.

Constant tweaking on those smaller less critical (but still annoying) UX / UI bugs will help to reduce the overall queries and will help with retention for those customers not willing to complain but who just jump ship anyway.

So try to make a list of the lesser smaller issues and call it your Tweak List. Then tackle one or more of the tweaks each day.

I actually immediately added a new issue spotted by a customer to the Tweak List and went at it right away. Then solved the issue in less than 1 hour. The customer was amazed and gave high praise and is now a avid promoter of our service.

Nice if you can get it!

Customer Review Widget

 

A Tweak A Day Keeps The Queries Away

How existing customers can help you grow

So, it was 8am this morning I got a ticket support email from a customer that we had promised to deliver a feature for.  Not good!

I realized that  I should have knuckled down and got the job done within a few days but being over 1 week later the feature was already travelling further and further down our priority list.

The feature wasn’t as crucial as others but I noticed that the customer pressure I had on my mind, and the thought of possibly upsetting a current customer or possibly even losing that customer led me to focus much more and get it completed in much shorter time.

I was more Agile and I got a buzz from the anticipated kudos I would get from the customer loving their newly added feature. Added just for them! Don’t misunderstand me, the feature was of benefit to all our customers, but to that customer it was theirs.

This has real benefits for me too. I got the job-done satisfaction of creating a new feature (adding value) to our service and therefore adding value to all our customers.

I now have a new eager advocate for our business who is more loyal to our service than before, because they were satisfied, but also more importantly because they contributed.

That contribution or vested interest is super important for generating sustainable growth. So the customer in question then becomes a promoter of your brand or service, who would more readily recommend you to their peer network and beyond.

It’s so simple it’s brilliant. But as developers & entrepreneurs with limited time, we need to be careful of feature creep and be careful of over promising when you can’t deliver.

So what do I propose then?

Let’s say you have a plan for introducing a range of new features and updates to your SaaS service or product. Just send them out on an email to customers and ask them to vote on which ones they would like to see implemented.

Then work through the most important or the most popular ones, but get them all done anyway. The voting process will have an effect of creating the vested interest I spoke of earlier. Like any of the reality voting TV programmes – people will have their favorites and they love to be right! So let them be right!

Later on, thank them for suggesting the feature and tell them when it’s done!

Customer Review Widget

How existing customers can help you grow

Make New Features Worthwhile

When we first setup Testimonial Robot it was to fix a problem I myself had encountered. Reducing my own pain led to a batch of immediate signups within the first couple of weeks of launching the beta – with no advertising!

Within a few months our beta Free version was getting too many signups and we decided to remove the free version so we could offer a premium service to our paying users.

The support requests would come from Free and Paid users but mainly the Free guys were in more of a hurry to setup it seemed. As a bootstrapped startup you sometimes have to choose whether non-revenue generating traction or slow steady growth with revenue is better. We chose the latter.

With our goal focused on SME businesses online we want to add features that ONLY add value. Our newest features are the Share Requests you can send out from the dashboard to reviewers.

The new features are starting to prove popular as we can track results via Sendgrid reports of our daily volumes.

Adding the new features, making them sticky and providing a clear benefit for the customer is working and our signups are starting to pick up pace as a result.

More social features will be added in the coming weeks also to provide even more value to our customer base.

You will be rewarded with extra traction if you focus on delivering value for your current customers.

We will be tracking our future feature additions as diary entries on this blog so we can learn from them.

Have a great day,

Gary Plowman

Make New Features Worthwhile