What Do You Really Know About Your Customer Base?

In an excerpt from their book ‘The Customer-Base Audit,’ Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross ask critical questions to help you gauge how much you really understand about your customers’ buying behavior.

The Four-Letter Code To Selling Just About Anything

When Raymond Loewy arrived in Manhattan, U.S. companies did not yet worship at the altars of style and elegance. That era’s capitalists were monotheistic: Efficiency was their only god. American factories—with their electricity, assembly lines, and scientifically calibrated workflow—produced an unprecedented supply of cheap goods by the 1920s, and it became clear that factories could make more than consumers naturally wanted. To sell more stuff, … [ Read more ]

Jane Davis

When you’re adding new features, the question shouldn’t be, “Is this potentially useful to someone?” Instead ask, “How does this contribute to our users achieving their goals?” It’s very easy to “value add” your way straight out of product/market fit.

Jane Davis

Understanding how a person wants to view themselves is actually incredibly valuable. It tells you a lot about how you can mirror that feeling back to them with your product while still satisfying their actual preferences.

Jane Davis

Understand the why and the how behind user behaviors, identifying which ones actually demonstrate value and which ones are potential leading indicators of a broken experience.

Ryan Glasgow

There’s typically about eight different steps in the customer jobs flow of someone starting and completing an action. You can really apply that framework to any product that you’re working on and look at the steps that you’re solving today. Look at the steps that you’re currently not solving and think about how you can solve other jobs that are ancillary to your core product. … [ Read more ]

Ryan Glasgow

You can’t rely on your customers to figure out what to build. They can really only tell you what outcomes they’re looking to achieve.

A Framework for Getting Started With Customer Journey Mapping

How does a business start with customer journey mapping? Before attempting any customer journey map exercise, organizations must answer two questions.

  • Are we a customer-centric organization?
  • Is customer experience a measured focus of our business?

Assuming the answer is yes to those questions, the next step is to build out journey maps using the following general framework.

Gary Moore

There are three areas that degrade customer experience: commitments you make that you can’t keep, failures in the way you align processes and teams with the customer, and a lack of resources.

Meka Asonye

You get the behavior that your comp plan designs for. In the early days, I prefer to keep comp plans simple with two metrics, max. I also love plans that have a component focused on the entire customer lifecycle. For example, comping teams on bookings and retention can be a powerful way to ensure teams pursue the right users who will be longtime customers.

Meka Asonye

In order to truly serve a customer, you need to understand two things: What are their goals and what is standing in their way?

Anson Vuong

The idea that a strong customer relationship equates to a growing customer relationship is simply not true. Don’t mistake loyalty for growth.

Rick Song

“Why would a customer not want this?” is often a far more interesting question than why they would. When you’re working on a product idea, there’s a thesis for why you believe you’re right and it’s really easy to constantly confirmation bias yourself into believing it’s the optimal decision. But once you can also find the counterpoint, the scenario where you’re wrong, you can start … [ Read more ]

How Language Boosts Customer Satisfaction

Great customer service is the holy grail of sales. When customers feel satisfied, they spend more money and are more likely to come back. Happy customers write positive reviews online and share their experiences through word of mouth. But great customer service is also really hard. Shoppers complain that sales associates aren’t listening to them or are just going through the motions.

There is a simple … [ Read more ]

CEOs Need a Customer Experience Revolution—Not an Evolution

Thanks to digital technologies and digitally savvy customers, companies across industries can create a customer experience unlike anything ever seen before. CEOs, take note: this could be the biggest growth opportunity to come along in decades.

10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

These are one of the most used heuristics for User Interface Design. They were developed by Jakob Nielsen together with Rolf Molich in the early 90’s. The final set, which you see here, was released by Nielsen in 1994.

Mapping the Job-to-be-Done

The Job Map reveals a stable strategy to drive growth through innovation: get the entire job done on a single platform.

B2B Organic Growth Remains Elusive

Companies need a plan for transforming their current operating model to a customer-centric one. Many moving parts make up customer centricity — from having a clear customer engagement strategy to talking with customers to creating a plan of action.

Developing this model comes down to four phases, which Gallup has categorized as discovery, diagnostic, analytic and sustainment. Within each of these phases, Gallup has also identified common tasks … [ Read more ]