Learning about your product from customers
How did your enterprise customers implement your product, including workarounds and hacks
Hey PMs
Today I want to continue my discussion on customer feedback and input. A while back, I wrote about the importance of talking to customers and how you can leverage it to not just improve your product but the entire customer experience. Link at the end of this article.
There was one thing I missed.
But first a backstory.
Yesterday I repaired my kitchen faucet.
Water was leaking under the kitchen sink. 💧
In general I do most of the basic repairs at home on my own, and I have the the right tools to help me. So I went to investigate the cause of the leak.
There were potentially 7 points of areas where the leak could have happened. I started looking at each and testing them one by one. Anyway, it was easy to locate the source. The hose reel connection to the faucet was leaking. I pulled out the faucet all the way into the sink to locate that source. Problem solving technique - by elimination.
I had recently replaced both the faucet and the hose reel with parts ordered on Amazon. They were from different manufacturers but they seemed compatible. I had double checked the compatibility. A new faucet would have set me back at least $ 150 and possibly a plumber. The faucet handle and the reel costed my less than $50. (There is a pricing lesson here…for another post).
Back to now. Google and Youtube did not turn up anything useful. I thought I will have to buy a new faucet after all. Then I had an idea.
I went back to my order on Amazon from a couple of months ago, and I looked at the reviews to see if there was any defect in the product itself. I combed through the various reviews from other purchasers. One comment caught my attention. The reviewer said to swap the order of the aerator and the silicon gasket.
Duh! That would give a more snug connection with the ball joint. So I went down to the kitchen and did just that. There was no manual to tell me the order in the first place. So when I had originally installed the faucet, I used my own judgment in the order of these two critical parts. (The smallest parts are often the most critical.)
Voila. No more leaks. I tested for 5 minutes wasting precious California water.
No leak. And zero cost.
Your customers have implemented best practices for themselves
That’s when I realized all the times my customers had figured out various hacks and workarounds and techniques to make our product work. I was a PM for a complex CRM platform and because it was a platform, every customer could configure it to the way they wanted to. Even before, in my startup, iCharts, our customers had figured out techniques to make the product work for them.
You may have all the right integrations and best practices documented. But there is always something peculiar or unique to a customer wherein they have to change the “order of the gasket.”
It’s just the nature of the Enterprise B2B world. Nothing ever works out of the box. Ask customers who integrate CRM with marketing automation, or CRM order management with ERP. Even simple acts of uploading CSV still require hacks.
Learn how your customers fitted your product
So you are a B2B product manager, and hopefully talking to customers about ideas and challenges and friction points. But as part of your feedback, also ask your customers how they got your product to work, how they are using it. Especially integration with other apps in their ecosystem, if any. See what hacks they had to do. What worked or not.
If your team is not talking to customers on a regular basis or have a structure around, then I highly recommend you start this ritual. If you need help, reply to this or send me a DM on LinkedIn.
Just like the Amazon review was hidden and not documented in the manual or in the description, complex enterprise app almost always will have some hack or a workaround or a best method. Be it CRM, ERP, Supply Chain, HR.
If you have many customers (>50), think of all the nuggets hidden within them. So my suggestion is to add this question to your customer feedback and discovery process.
Ask:
How did they implement the product?
What integrations did they do?
What resources did they use ? e.g. manual, API reference documentation
Who helped them ?
What worked, or not?
Now, your customer success, onboarding and support team will also have these useful bytes of information. They are on the front lines and have readily helped customers to be successful in their implementation. Talk to them on a regular basis and find out what extra things were done for customers or by customers beyond the standard implementation process.
Capture these bytes of information on a regular cadence.
👉 Document these
👉 Create how-to videos
👉Train your support or success team
👉 Build a feature to prevent for future customers
Whatever your disposition, this is an important part of talking to customers.
Just the fact that you have a “hack” or a feature to help future customers with their “faucet problem” will help you provide the best experience which your customer will truly appreciate.
Here is the link to the previous article on how to leverage customer feedback.
Do you talk to customers? Do you have a process?
If not, let’s talk about building a robust customer feedback and discovery process.
Let’s start with a free 30 min intro call.
This is precisely why I created a 'Tutorials' section in my product's documentation.
Our B2B product is a framework meaning there are plenty of ways to use it to implement solutions; often stuff we haven't even thought of. When I speak to a customer who's done something cool, I document it in the tutorials section.