When my family goes out to dinner, we’re the worst kind of customer. You don’t want us to have a bad experience. Here’s why:
We don’t say anything. We don’t ask to speak to the manager. Our food could show up cold, we could get overcharged on the check, and the host could slam the door on our ass on the way out.
We wouldn’t so much as leave a negative Yelp review.
You’d just never hear from us again.
“Every flaw gets exposed”
I’ve been thinking a lot about customers because we’re in the middle of our Reforge programs.
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For those who’ve never launched an online program, it’s pretty simple. First, you record some online videos using someone else’s content marketing, host the videos on Wistia, create a five-email drip campaign, and Badabing! you’re all set. The hardest part is counting all the cash that rolls in…
Just kidding. Building an online program (that’s bigger than a lifestyle design business (#beachlife)) is really hard. Done right, it should take you months. I’ve spent a year and a half working on one program, only to kill it before launch. It’s brutal, even dare I say, heartbreaking, when you pour significant time, energy, and money into building something… only for it to sit on the shelf and gather dust.
But that’s not even the hardest part.
If you’re any good at building programs that people actually use, you know the masochism doesn’t really start until after the program launches, and live customer feedback starts rolling in. That’s when you learn that despite all your good intentions, all your carefully coordinated efforts and tiny design tweaks, that you still got it completely wrong.
Suddenly you’re staring into a concave mirror. Every flaw gets exposed.
Your customers will tell you the concepts you spent hours deliberating and diagramming don’t work “in my situation.” Sometimes they’re right and they’re true outliers. Most of the time they’re wrong, but it’s nearly impossible to change their mindset.
You’ll create 10 presentations over 792 slides and a 27-page bonus PDF. Someone will email you about the 4 typos they found and lament about your unprofessionalism.
You’ll spend 6 hours constructing a data set to help them perform cohort analysis — and they’ll completely skip over it. Half the students didn’t see it, and of the half that do, five will point out a discrepancy in the data, irrelevant to the case study at hand.
It’ll drive you crazy. You’ll want to scream.
But you won’t. You won’t fight, you won’t argue.
Instead, you’ll take a breath, and (again, if you’re any good) you’ll say:
“Thanks. Tell me more. What else? How else can we make this better for you.”
And you will genuinely mean it.
How to listen to your customers
I remember putting out my first course — it was about social skills — and how sick I felt as early comments and emails started rolling in. Each one felt like an overhand right delivered right to the chin. My stomach was flip-flopping so bad I had to force myself to stop looking, reading the feedback.
And that was just the positive comments.
It’s definitely gotten easier. But it’s never easy. Here are some suggestions for listening to your customers I’ve learned over the years:
Listening is a religion, not a tactic
Bake the desire to constantly hear feedback into the DNA of the company. Drill it from the top of the organization down to every member of the team.
Listening to your customers, no matter how painful or awkward that can be, must be your religion. Once that’s true, the tactics of how you collect feedback (SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, User Research Interviews) becomes irrelevant. It’s about giving a shit, not checking the box labeled “do customer research.”
My dad drilled this into all of the staff when we opened our first restaurant in Delmar, NY. “Just make it right,” was what he told us at every pre-meal. Do whatever you must to make it right. If that means 7 different mods to the entree, do it. If it means refiring the dish, then get into the kitchen and refire it. If it means comping the meal, don’t ask questions, just get it done.
He set the example. He’d visit every table, introduce himself, and tell the customer point blank: “Don’t like something? Let us know and we’ll fix it.”
It’s easy to obsess over the tools or methodology, but what really matters is giving a damn, and making sure that’s baked into the bones of every person in the org.
Become a counter-puncher
Effective counterpunching requires standing your ground. You don’t back-up, and you don’t back-off. Your job is to surprise and delight with how quickly you react. Fortunately, expectations are low. Because most companies suck at this.
If you have a pulse and notifications turned “on”, you can react faster than 90% of your competition. Prioritize speed and caring (see above), not coming across “on brand” or sending a grammatically correct message.
I mentioned at the beginning of this article that Reforge is currently in the middle of our programs. We run three programs concurrently, and each one has weekly content, forums, and multiple live events. We barely have time to get the course material out the gate, never mind respond to the hundreds of individual messages, emails, or questions that come through each week.
Yet Brian’s doing it anyway, responding to survey responses and customer support tickets faster than I can get to them. It’s simultaneously the poorest use of his time and the best thing he could be doing. The contradiction is what makes this game hard. It’s what makes the game great.
It takes 3 asks to get an honest answer
One of the first things that impressed me when I joined I Will Teach was the volume of feedback they took from their customers. Eventually, I realized it was just the modus operandi of the company: we collected pages and pages of comments, emails, and surveys… before a program ever even opened.
Then when the program opened, multiple people spent hours reading comments, Facebook threads, and customer support tickets.
A lot of the time, we’d ask the same or similar questions, in different spots: In a feedback survey, in a one-off email, or a phone call. Why were we wasting time asking the same question over and over again?
When I started doing customer research calls with Ramit, I finally realized why: Because people lie.
People lie. If you don’t make multiple asks, you’ll never get to the truth.
They’ll tell you everything’s fine… when they’re completely overwhelmed. They’ll say they will definitely buy… when they know it’s too expensive. They’ll say they’re too busy… when they just don’t think it’s worth their time.
These lies aren’t malicious. There are just a million reasons why it’s easier to fib than to tell the truth. They don’t feel like they have permission. They don’t want to hurt your feelings. They don’t want to look stupid, or like they’re being “difficult.”
Don’t take their first response at face value. Keep digging. Get to the truth. That’s where the gold is.
Corollary: If you’re going to dig, use the right shovel
The first restaurant I worked for in Los Angeles was a place called Ozumo. It was on the third floor in the center of Santa Monica Promenade. It was a big ole fancy place where a 4oz pour of sake sold for $35 a glass. And people bought them.
(Well, not enough people, apparently. Ozumo closed a few years back.)
I remember overhearing one of the other servers asking his guests, after they received their food: “Is everything tasting delicious?”
You lazy asshole.
If you’re going to ask, ask as if you really want to know what they think. Don’t use some NLP bullshit to get the response you want to hear, so you can check the box and pad your tips.
Make time for feedback
You’ve got a lot of other things you need to do. You’re already stretched thin at work. You’re getting pulled in so many directions. There’s enough to keep you busy.
Make time for feedback. This is a year-round endeavor. It needs to be part of your day-to-day, because your customers will tell you what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, at any given moment. They’ll tell you what you should build next. You just have to be listening all the time.
Make it as easy as possible. Schedule it into your calendar, include links to ongoing surveys, turn notifications on in all applicable apps (Google Business, Facebook, Yelp, etc.). Do whatever has to be done to keep your ear as close to the ground as possible.
Remember the good
If you take any ownership at all over your company, your product, your store, your art, you can probably rattle off at least 100 things that went wrong, off the top. But under the gun, you’d struggle to remember even 3 good things.
Always remember the good. It’s there.
This is especially important when working with a team. Recognize that other people put their time, energy, and heart into this. Even if mistakes were made (newsflash: mistakes were made) your job is to acknowledge what went right.
I’ve been on both sides of this (receiving the feedback and conveying the feedback) and there’s no substitute for starting from a place of positivity. Remembering the good fuels the psychological tank to get back on the field and start solving for the bad.
“Listen to your unsuccessful customers”
I heard Shaun Clowes, CPO of Metromile, former VP Growth of Atlassian, speak last night. He said something that really stuck with me (I’m paraphrasing here):
“Early adopters are great. They’re also dangerous. I try to never listen to my early adopters because they’ll do anything you ask. It’s more important to listen to the people who aren’t successful. Listen to them, solve their problems. That’s how you build a better product.”
Your customers will tell you everything you need to do. So listen to them.
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Photo Credit: Burnt
