How Do You Engage With Your Customers?

One of the most important issue to me is customer services. Do you make your customers happy? Do you listen to your customers?

Being a software company, the base of everything is your customers. By ignoring what your customers are saying is terribly dangeous. Such, for products, I want to engage the customers, invovle the customers and  be on top of the customers requests because utlimately, when they are being requested, there is a need.

While due to our size, we obviously can't accomodate everyone's needs, but a system should be in place to mange the priority and importance of the requests. In addition, involving the customers while you make design decisions not only save you the time, but also help you target the most immediate issue that you should be focus on.

Such, I think these system should be setup to market your product

1. Blogging.
   
   Blog your design process. Interface designs, workflow designs, implemation, resuablity, business scenarious. These are the things that matters to the customers and such should take priority.
   
2. Feature Requests and Voting System
   
   There should be a section dedicatd to feature requests from customers. These are the things that customer want and so shall them catch your attention. The issue is sometimes it's hard to distingues which ones are more important to the community and due to your limited available, you can only do a few at a time, such a voting sytem should be enoucraged and used by the users. Have your customers decide, which feature request is the most popular ones and use it to your benefit.
   
3. Forums
   
   No place to dicuss your product issues than an open area where anything goes. Remember, critism is the mother of your success. When you hear critiism, these are the exact things that you should be fixing.
   
   This is the place where you should keep your eyes on every few hours and every day. Engage in dicussions with your customers will give you a better sense of managing your priorities.
   
4. Case Study
   
   To help your customers understand the benefit of using your product, you should have case studies and demo it to them how your product is used. This will help your customers understand THEIR needs and if your product suits them well.

These are just some of the thoughts I have in my mind right now. I feel there are other better ways though. I'll blog them later when I think of them.

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