A question I often pose to clients is, “How do you connect with your customers”? The most common responses are, “There’s a support email address that customers can use to reach us.” or “We have a system in place that customers can submit feedback.”

These methods are fine for what they are…customer contact. What I’m really looking to find out is, how do your customers know you actually care about the same things that concern them? Another common answer is, “Well our product in and of itself helps them in their day to day work. That shows we care.”

No, this shows you identified a need and established your product to serve a market. Nothing wrong with this of course, but it’s still self-serving.

Consider the following scenario: We’ve conducted interviews with a set of key users for research on an existing tool. These users are busy managers who use this tool daily and are very familiar with what works and what could use improvement. Feedback is fairly typical around things like, navigation and response time. However, as part of any good research study, we probe to find out as much as we can about the individual. Along with feedback relative to the tool, a few of these users reveal something seemingly benign and common…their days are often interrupted by calls and meetings.

This bit of information has nothing to do with the tool, but it is actually a very useful bit of insight that, believe it or not, we can act on. Obviously we can’t do anything about the interruptions. However, we can help them quickly reorient themselves back into their workflow. Adding a “save state” function to the tool, that will put it to sleep. When woken up, an arrow displays next to the last element the user interacted with.

This is real empathy. This shows that your strategy to satisfy your customers is not just what your tool does, but what it does for them. Do you think this subset of managers interviewed would be unique in how their days typically play out? Definitely not. It’s even more unlikely that anyone would have shared the bit about their day through a contact email.

Showing your customers that what is important to them is important to you, this gets them talking. This gets them sharing and recommending you.