Nowadays customers are transcending from their current role as buyers and becoming more involved in the development of your product. 

Constantly tweaking your product to find your product market fit is the most important aspect of the entire business, as a founder of a startup or a new business, you could be wasting your time chasing after certain aspects thinking they will perfect your product while in reality they will rarely or never be used. 

You might’ve noticed that all ecommerce websites have integrated a live chat option; it doesn’t only help customers facing problems, it also helps you develop your product, customer experience, website layout, logistics and pricing. Customer service is often an overlooked aspect of the business, with many people thinking it’s there to solve an issue for the customer not taking full advantage of that great opportunity in hearing what the customer has to say. Considering it’s 7 times more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones, you should definitely start listening to you customers. 

However, the objective here is to gather unbiased feedback not positive ones as Bill Gates once said “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”. 

Use social media to collect more data: The best part about them is that they’re immediate, whatever emotion the customer is sharing with you, you get to reply back to it on the spot, not only that but you can also begin to filter your biggest fans and award them for their contribution of helping your business become a better version of itself. 

Follow up: Many companies will opt in for a phone call to ask the customer about their opinion, we see it as intrusive though, so the better option is to follow up with an email survey. 

On Site Activity: Using google analytics is also a huge opportunity, it provides important insights without any personal effort from your customer by tracking his behavior on the website such as the bounce rate, time spent on a page and drop off pages. 

For example, if people reach a specific page on your ecommerce website and don’t complete the action, it might be because the call to action button simply wasn’t attractive enough or the product catalogue doesn’t emphasize quality. 

Whatever the method is, it’s crucial that you have a unified way of tracking and analyzing that data as by time it’s bound to get bigger and over whelming. 

While most companies can argue that they do listen to their customers, the majority of which do not. Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It’s true that innovation sometimes require certain leaps of faith and it’s a true that it worked for Ford but nowadays not asking users what they want can certainly affect your product’s lifecycle.