Your customers have suggestions

When you’re building a business, your focus is usually on your next customer: the one you hope to win over today. You spend time planning and researching and grinding to earn a new user, a new app download, a new something. This makes a lot of intuitive sense to people, but in the process, you might be overlooking something very important: your current customers.

As we strain to understand how to win over new customers, we often overlook what we can learn from our existing customers that would be applicable. Often, our current customers are the best representations of the “new customers” we are trying so hard to obtain. As big fans of the lean startup movement, we believe that it’s very important to learn as much as possible from your early customers.

Which brings us to our point:

Your existing customers have suggestions.

Every time one of your customers opens up your app and uses it, they interact with what you’ve designed. They experience your product and invest themselves in it just a little bit more. These customers are often the ones best prepared to tell you what to change or improve. For many of them, they stumbled across your application, made a split-second decision and decided to try it out. The ones who are continuing to use it can help you ensure that:

• You know what new customers will be convinced by
• You know what a new customer expects in order to use your application again

Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Well, I sell all of my apps up front, so once they’ve bought it, it’s up to them to use the app.” To you, we have two additional things to add:

• Your competitors care about their customers and your customers. Every day they’re trying to get an edge – if you’re lax about how you deal with your existing customers, they’ll figure it out.
• Customers who use your app regularly are also much more likely to talk about your app and recommend it to others.

Start listening to your customers today

If you’ve developed applications for iOS or the Mac, we’ve made it extraordinarily simple to start listening to your customers immediately. Sign up today to join the growing ranks of Apptentive developers deploying our communications systems and listening to customer feedback.

You don’t have to take our word for it though

Some other smart people talking about customer suggestions:

• Make it easy for customers to give feedback & suggestions