Why we might ask customers what – as users – they might like to tell prospective buyers in advance about our company’s product.
My thanks to the reader who emailed recently to report that they’d just undertaken a speculative feedback exercise which proved to be far more successful than they anticipated. They sent a message to a few dozen customers who they had good relationships with, and asked them what – as users – they might like to tell prospective buyers in advance about the company’s product. These buyers would be, of course, other people in the same job role as them; contemporaries who they would never meet but who they’d instinctively want to help.
From the responses, the reader’s company received some useful ideas for marketing content, but also a couple of useful pointers about frustrations with the product that as the supplier, they hadn’t come across. What a result.
The chance to help
I suspect the exercise worked because the recipients of the request were not being asked to ‘provide feedback’ (which is getting irritating nowadays), but were being given the chance to help contemporaries in the same position. To make a consumer analogy, no, I’m not interested when Marks & Spencer ask me to rate the delivery of the socks I just ordered. But I might be a little more willing if asked to help other sock buyers by suggesting ways they could get the most out of the delivery options being offered by the retailer.