Mark Cuban wrote an interesting post earlier this week on why you should never listen to your customers. Never listening is probably taking it a bit far. After all, customers are the ones giving you money in exchange for your product or service, so you should listen to their feedback and concerns. But I do think there are specific situations when you shouldn’t listen to your customers, which may go against everything you’ve ever heard, but hear me out…
Your customers are busy doing whatever it is that’s important to them. They don’t really care what features your product has. Only what problem it can solve or how it makes their life easier. When you ask your customers what features they want, you’re almost never going to get good answers. Customers can only think in terms of features they’ve seen before somewhere else and will only guess whether they’d be willing to pay for those features.
I’m working with a company that at one point had a product that was not only best in class, but also technically far ahead of its competition. It created a better way of offering its service and customers loved it and paid for it. Then it made a fatal mistake. It asked its customers what features they wanted to see in the product and they delivered on those features – Why You Should NEVER Listen to Your Customers (Mark Cuban)
Until customers can see something in front of them and how it works, they’re not really going to be able to visualize whether it’s something of value. We each bring our own personal experiences and opinions along when we’re asked a questions. How we visualize a certain feature depends heavily on our past experiences. Customers aren’t really great at predicting the future.
Surveys can give some valuable information and are ideal for doing some heavy-duty modeling of markets and segmentation. But surveys are only as good as the data received, which depends on who is asked and what they’re asked. Surveys can easily be mis-designed to lead results the way a company wants to see them instead of getting valuable feedback. Customers may answer questions the way you ask them, but not in the way you intend (or want).
Focus groups have fallen out of favor, mostly since a lot of customer sentiment information can be mined via social media. Another problem with focus groups is that they tend to produce group think. Customers will come to a group consensus instead of providing individual insights. Focus groups also tend to provide only information as good as the moderator.
Asking individual customers for feedback can give you some great insights. But you need to take whatever is said in conjunction with what others say and where you want your company to go. Customers aren’t always completely honest when asked questions directly, not because they’re being dishonest, but because they’re being polite. Solicit feedback from a bunch of sources and learn who gives the most honest responses.
As business owners, it’s up to us to decide where we want our company to go and how we’re going to get there.
Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happen. Listen to them. Make them happy. But they won’t create the future roadmap for your product or service. That’s your job. – Why You Should NEVER Listen to Your Customers (Mark Cuban)
Customers are definitely an integral part of the equation, but I think there are times when you need to take what they say with a grain of salt.
What do you think?
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