Listen to your users' feedback
with a feedback portal

Why is listening to customers important?

Customers are the lifeblood of any product, and their requirements never stop evolving. Anything you spend time building today, is to make sure your customers get value out of it, and that they are happy with the feature you just shipped.

What if there is a way for you to automate what the customer needs the most? What if the customers know when you are building the feature, and possibly how long it is going to take you to ship? What if, you can increase your customer retention ten folds?

This is where listening to your customers becomes very essential for any business. It is the most important activity that a product manager can do to ensure that the product is built in the right direction, with less time and effort.

5 reasons why you should listen to your product users

The best product managers in the world are exceptional leaders. The most exceptional leaders in the world are super good listeners. They listen to their customers, their feedback, their struggles and so much more, gather all the data, and then make a data-driven decision on what to build next.

To connect with customers, one must actively listen to them, paying careful attention to their needs and determining how best to assist them in achieving their objectives.

1. Understand your customers better

Actively seeking and analyzing customer feedback, product managers can gain valuable insights into their customers' needs, preferences, pain points, and challenges. The information that you collect from these data points, helps you make an informed decision on what feature or fix you can build next for your product.

Not proactively listening to your customers can lead to a product with feature bloat, unhappy customers, and ultimately a failed business. Not listening to your customers exposes you to the risk of a competitor building a better product than you with their customers included.

Let me quickly jot down three reasons why understanding your customers and users is important than ever before:

1. Customer needs has a direct impact on your product development. If you are not building your product to serve your customers, who else are you building it for?

2. Cultivate a loyal customer base. Understanding your customers allow you to build a loyal community around your product. Even when you are sailing through a storm, they stick with you and cheer you to come back up again.

3. Huge competitive advantage. When you invest your effort in listening to your customers, and understanding the way they think, it gives you the biggest competitive advantage over your competitors. You can build a product that your customers love, and your competitors can't.

2. Build a product that your customers love

The best way to build a product is to build something your customers love. It is important that 100 customers love your product than 1000 customers who just like your product. Building a product with a loyal customer base is proven to be the most successful growth strategy for businesses that last long in the industry.

3. Increase your customer retention

Customer retention is more likely when they receive continuous value from your product. By listening to your customers, you can develop a product that aligns with their needs and preferences, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, actively listening to your customers is the most effective strategy to improve customer retention rates.

4. Reduce your customer support costs

Offering a self-service portal to customers not only empowers them to resolve their issues on their own but also reduces customer support costs for the business. By providing customers with the ability to report their problems through a self-service portal, they can easily track and monitor the status of their tickets and get quick resolution to their queries. This means that businesses can allocate fewer resources towards customer support, as customers are able to handle many of their issues on their own.

Moreover, a self-service portal reduces the number of phone calls or emails businesses receive for customer support, freeing up the time and resources of support staff to focus on more complex issues. This also leads to shorter wait times for customers needing assistance, as support staff can prioritize and resolve issues more efficiently.

Additionally, a self-service portal can improve the overall customer experience, as customers appreciate having the ability to resolve their issues on their own terms. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

Overall, providing a self-service portal for customers not only reduces customer support costs but also improves customer experience, satisfaction, and retention, making it a win-win for both businesses and customers.

5. Increase your customer lifetime value

Listening to users and incorporating their feedback can have a significant impact on the customer lifetime value (CLV) of a product. Customer lifetime value is not just one metric that you can focus on to improve the score. It is an amalgamation of activities and data points that helps you understand the value of a customer to your business and the other way around.

By listening to users, businesses can better understand their needs and preferences, and can develop products or services that are tailored to meet those needs. This can lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction, which in turn can result in increased CLV. Satisfied customers are more likely to continue using a product or service, and to recommend it to others, leading to higher retention rates and a larger customer base.

Listening to users can also help businesses improve the user experience of their products or services. By understanding how users interact with a product, businesses can identify pain points or areas for improvement and make changes that enhance the overall user experience. This can lead to increased engagement, higher customer retention, and ultimately, increased CLV.