Turn customer care into your backup User Research tool
This article was first published on Medium on May 2, 2020
Who’s opinion matters most when it comes to your product? The CEO’s opinion? The Marketing people’s opinion? Nope. Neither. As long as your users and customers don’t enjoy your products, it does not matter what anyone else thinks. It must be your business goal to understand your customers’ needs as best as possible.
Photo by Petr Macháček on Unsplash
If you don’t test your products before release, at least collect feedback after.
You want to build a product that your customers enjoy and recommend to their friends and family. In order to do that, you could fully trust your gut. Many entrepreneurs and product managers think they know what their users want. And fail. Instead, many successful companies invest in User Research and invest money and resources into feedback collection before their product or individual features even go live. You want to know what does not work and fix your mistakes as early as possible, before you release a product that people don’t enjoy using. You reduce the risk of failing and you get a better understanding for your users for any decision you will make in the future. User Research gives you confidence.
Still, many companies do not include those people who are supposed to use their products into their decision making process. Since User Testings can be done on low budget, there is essentially no reason not to test. Still, many companies don’t (yet). And for those, I have a message: If you don’t test your products before release, at least collect feedback after.
Customer Care puts you in a dialogue with your real users.
User Research and Customer Care are the two sides of the same medal. While User Research actively hunts for feedback from the users, Customer Care is there for users who themselves want to provide feedback. Put together, you can generate highly valuable learnings for the product and engineering teams, and discover bugs early. That’s why we at Onefootball decided to merge User Research and Customer Care into one single team, embedded in the Product division. We are in daily interactions with designers, product managers and engineers.
Let‘s look at Mike’s email:
In fact, he only wrote you three sentences. But he opened you a door to a world of further exploration. Many companies just don’t walk through. They focus on providing a fast fact based answer and “close the ticket”.
Especially if you don’t have a dedicated User Research team in your company, Customer Care can be your first step into the direction:
Don’t just answer user questions, ask them questions back!
In order to collect first feedback from your users, all you need is a simple email address that your users can use to get in touch with you. If you want to build a more sophisticated setup, you can look at Zendesk, Usabilla or Intercom. Most companies do have some solution in place. But, and that is unfortunate, many companies only use Customer Care to answer the question from the user. But if you do not have any User Research professional in your team, you better use the chance to ask questions back.
