What if I said there was something you were doing right now that was actively reducing your SaaS customer success? What if that thing you're doing was standing in the way of driving higher levels of engagement and was reducing the amount of expansion revenue you're generating while potentially increasing churn? ...
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Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
In my first startup marketing job I was given the task of attempting to call a couple hundred customers to try to rustle up a dozen or so customer references. That task opened my eyes to how important customer insight was for our startup's marketing efforts. ...
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Via: Rocket Watcher
Co-founder of RocketScope http://rocketscope.com a marketing |
So yesterday I got an e-mail from a WooThemes customer, which read: "Thank you for your answer! This confirms your superior support reputation." My immediate reaction was to smile, because the customer was happy, and this is something that we proactively strive to achieve at Woo. But then, I realized how easily that could've worked out differently too if the customer didn't have a great experience ...
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Via: Adii
Entrepreneur, co-founder of WooThemes and general creator of |
When companies talk about their new product or service, they talk about what it does. Features, bullet points, checkboxes. Maybe, if they're particularly enlightened, they'll shift a bit and talk about what problems it will solve. What normal people tell their friends about a product or service, they talk about what it replaces ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
When you're building a new product, you're often thinking about all the new things people are going to be able to do with it. Now they can do this, now they can do that. Exciting! But there's a better question to ask: What are people going to stop doing once they start using your product? What does your product replace? What are they switching from? How did they do the job ...
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Founder of 37signals. Co-author of REWORK. Credo: It's simpl |
I deliberately let this commonly repeated statement be the title without qualifying it. Of course statements like these, (this particular one made famous by Loyalty Effect) cannot stand by themselves regardless of how popular the Guru who said this is. Let us look at this closely. ...
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Via: Iterative Path
Practicing Effective Pricing |
Often if I give a talk or I speak with someone about getting their idea off the ground, the topic of how solid the product should be comes up. In particular, people very frequently wait far too long before launching. One of the key learning for me with Buffer was that the impact of problems people have and downtime they experience are directly tied to how we, as a startup, choose to handle it. ...
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Via: joel.is
Founder of @bufferapp, a smarter way to share. Focused on th |
Who doesn't love a good story? I know I do. Storytelling has been gaining in popularity in the business world. Following the trend, I've also been using stories to help clients understand user / customer experience better. A lot of times, I find that non-UX stakeholders find it more difficult to make sense of how a particular usability issue affects their bottom line. I've found that using storie ...
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User experience designer, software developer, Room to Read v |
This sounds pretty straightforward: Make sure your product is retaining your users, THEN work on growth. Don't work on growth until your product is working. However, it's an oversimplification. For fundamentally social products, it's hard to separate retention/engagement and virality. Turns out that for fundamentally social products, retention causes virality, and vice versa too. ...
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Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
We're all very well aware of Steve Jobs' contributions to technology and society. Without Steve, and Apple, we would all be using Motorola Razors or some other "cool" phone (ah, those were the days) or tablets would be just a failed Microsoft project.But there's one thing that Mr. Jobs has indirectly contributed to that I'm not a big fan of. ...
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Via: Treehouse Blog
Expert Teacher at @treehouse, husband to @hpremaratne, autho |
The best kind of visitor is the one looking to buy. She knows what she wants and has a credit card in her hand. Now it's your job to seal the deal. If you're dealing with a motivated customer, you just need to make taking action easy and present a competitive and compelling offer - and answer the magic questions. ...
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Via: ConversionXL
I make websites sell. Conversion optimization pro. Founder o |
The Single Ease Question (SEQ) is a 7-point rating scale to assess how difficult users find a task. It's administered immediately after a user attempts a task in a usability test. ...
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Via: Measuring Usability
Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used. |
Listening is hard - The most obvious reason why we focus so much on monitoring and jump into analyzing is that listening is hard. ...
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Via: Conversation Agent
Sr. Director Strategy, Empathy Lab. [Make sense. Make do. Ma |
The marketing funnel (sometimes called the purchase funnel or customer funnel) maps a consumer's journey toward the purchase of a product or service. Marketers spend a lot of time thinking about the stages of that journey and how to maximize the number who make it from one stage to the next. ...
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Via: Tom FishBurne
Marketoonist and Founder of Marketoon Studios (http://market |
Try asking your members this. Create the thread, turn it into a sticky thread, include it in your mailing list, add your own problem, and see what response you get. ...
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Via: Feverbee
Founder FeverBee Limited - Online Community Consultancy |
Profitability is one goal that most of the SaaS CEOs who ask me for help all share. Though, while they're all focused on achieving profitability, how that is measured varies from company to company. For the sake of this post we'll consider profitability to be achieved once the Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) have been paid back ...
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Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
When used appropriately, snippets can improve the level of service you provide to your customers, helping you to quickly handle the eighty percent of cases that require routine support, giving you more time to focus on the twenty percent of cases that might need advanced troubleshooting and a more detailed response. ...
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Via: Fog Creek Blog
Becoming a better version of myself. I do the CrossFit/Paleo |
A few reasons why I don't like Net Promoter (at least for us as a B2B SaaS provider) and think it shouldn't be used as a growth predictor ...
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Via: UserVoice
Head of Community @UserVoice in San Francisco, singer in the |
Wait what? INCREASED support requests? Isn't our goal at startups to reduce the support requests? After all, support requests means time taken away from developing code right? ...
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Via: Phil's Blawg
Startup guy, Founder of BudgetSimple, Soccer player, beer dr |
With the rise of social media, it's never been easier to conduct simple market research with a little bit of collaboration and creativity. Here are three simple ways that you can effectively use social media to gather market research without the resources, cost and time. ...
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Via: Likeable Media
social media enthusiast with a passion for health education, |
What *exactly* should you do when you want to raise prices, especially on existing customers? ...
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Via: A Smart Bear
Keyword, buzzword, half-truth, adjective, hey look at me! |
They raised their prices 10x and they made their customers HAPPIER! So I just had one of my quarterly Progress Check and Planning sessions with a Free Trial Dominator Premium Member - we'll call him "Larry" - who told me since they moved away from Freemium just 4 months ago to a Premium-only SaaS offering with a Free Trial they are now profitable and are on track to do $100,000 in revenue this mon ...
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Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
This has to be one of my favorite customer development tips: using Mechanical Turk to do customer interviews. Nick Soman, Founder of LikeBright, and I discuss how he used Mechanical Turk to interview 100 customers in 4 hours, and how that got him into TechStars Seattle. ...
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Entrepreneur-ish |
I've invested in hundreds of companies that have started from scratch and I've been though some crazy number of product launches, especially if you include all of the TechStars companies I've been involved with. These alphas, or betas, or v1.0 or v0.1 launches are exciting moments as they signify the transition from an idea to a product. And, it's at that point that the real work begins. ...
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Via: Feld Thoughts
I'm a managing director at Foundry Group. I live in Boulder, |
Was it as amazing as you hoped for? I don't mean kinda-sorta amazing, I mean riding in on a unicorn with rainbows shooting out of its eyes amazing. Probably not. And if it did, the product you bought before that certainly didn't. ...
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Lars Lofgren helps businesses grow their profits using onlin |
Maximizing revenue and keeping costs down is the name of the game in business school but don't forget the value of praises sung. Calculate that value and ask yourself every day, "Did I have the opportunity to create another fan?" ...
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Via: Spin Sucks
Chief Content Officer of Spin Sucks, Idaho expat in Chicago. |
I recently read this thought-provoking article from the very sharp Andrew Chen. He bravely tackles the prickly debate of startups with a business model vs startups without a business model. His conclusion tries to simplify the whole situation: yes, business model is important...it's just not that hard. ...
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Via: UserVoice
Head of Community @UserVoice in San Francisco, singer in the |
Many of us tend to get pissed the moment Facebook changes something, or Twitter adds promoted tweets, or Instagram sells itself, or Lore doesn't work. Count me among them. But are we entitled to get that upset? We receive these services for free and enjoy a multitude of benefits from using them. ...
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Via: Creativity Unbound
Marketer, Blogger, Believer in Sharing, Chief Innovation Off |
If you ask most companies, they are all on board. Nobody ever says they put their customers last. No one readily admits that customers are a necessary evil. Few people ever come straight and say that almost every business decision they make is all about sales and never about customers. Or maybe they do. ...
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Via: Richard R Becker
Rich at Copywrite, Ink. Editor, LiquidHip. CTO, CelebratingL |
So many marketers have this received wisdom about online surveys being a great alternative because they are fast and cheap. But there is an enormous benefit to doing online surveys the right way, making an investment in all segments of your customer base, and creating a virtuous circle between the desire to share information with your brand, and the desire to spread information about your brand wi ...
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Via: BrandSavant
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At the heart of what we do is The Hypothesis. Getting the hypothesis right is the first key to validating (or invalidating) our assumptions underlying our entire startup. If you get out of the building with a bad hypothesis, you won't hear anything valuable from your customers. ...
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Via: Lean Startup Machine
product manager/designer/foodie/musician/husband/father and |
If you don't form relationships, your customers will just want discounts. If consumers share values with your brand, you can spend less on messaging, less on discounting, and you're less affected by the turbulent economy. ...
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Via: ConversionXL
I make websites sell. Conversion optimization pro. Founder o |
The first question you want to ask your customers is usually not the question you want answered. For some reason, our first instinct is to ask a question that is one or two or three steps removed from the actual information we want. I can't tell you why this is, but I can tell you I've seen it every time I work with someone to get user research done. ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
"Marketing is about relationships" is a common phrase on blogs or Twitter. Unfortunately, it is also very misleading. Here are three reasons marketing should not be developing relationships and what marketing needs to do instead. ...
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Focus: Digital Media & Marketing for B2B. Belief: Marketing |
Anyone who works in UX has had experience of watching clients fight over "What The Users Want". Talking to your customers is one of the most important things you can do as an app developer/owner, so shouldn't it be easy? ...
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Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
Everyone and every organization makes mistakes. But if you can follow up those mistakes with a little (or a lot) of surprise and delight, you can not only erase the mistakes - you can create fans for life. How much is that worth to you? ...
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Via: Likeable Media
Father. Husband to @CarrieKerpen. CEO @LikeableMedia, social |
As I waited in line, I noticed a cashier who wasn't manning a register or getting food for customers. Odd thing during their rush, right? Shouldn't they be trying to help with the immense line? Turns out she was cutting up a chocolate croissant to put out as samples. The samples sit right next to the line. All the folks tapping their feet and checking their watch now had a new focus: delicious, f ...
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Via: UserVoice
Head of Community @UserVoice in San Francisco, singer in the |
The ultimate business metric is revenue but it's a lagging indicator. You can't do anything about last quarter's profits. You want to find some leading indicator of growth which is why the Net Promoter Score is popular. For many companies growth is measured by positive word of mouth and NPS tracks that reasonably well. ...
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Via: Measuring Usability
Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used. |
In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz's warns that giving consumers more product choices actually lowers their purchase satisfaction. Schwartz reasons that having too many options makes us fear missing out, which causes anxiety, analysis paralysis and regret. ...
I think that one of the hardest things about being an entrepreneur is figuring out who to listen to and when to take feedback on board. At the earliest stages there may well be precious few people who understand what you do well enough to provide constructive criticism ...
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Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
Let's split community feedback on your products/services into two types; prompted and unprompted. Prompted feedback happens when you ask members to give you feedback. Forum questions, surveys, focus groups etc are all prompted feedback. Unprompted is when it comes up in community discussions (or complaints). ...
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Via: Feverbee
Founder FeverBee Limited - Online Community Consultancy |
The idea that customers can't or shouldn't participate much in the innovation process is one barrier to creativity that companies are rapidly knocking down. Many firms are rethinking their businesses, envisioning themselves less as providers of internally-created products and services, and more as platforms that allow customers to create their own experience and value. This new view and way of ope ...
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Bill Lee is a business consultant and professional speaker w |
It was tough deciding to stop working with this customer especially because we could see that other companies were able to meet this customer's needs. They could do it and we couldn't. It is a tough, tough reality to face, but an incredibly valuable one. ...
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Via: vcdave
Investor, operator, and entrepreneur |
Eighty percent of startups develop products they never intended, driven by the markets they never intended to enter as dictated by the consumer. Never mind that the figure - 80 percent - was anectodal and unattributed. So what if this so-called 80-20 rule is right? What do you want to do? ...
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Via: Richard R Becker
Rich at Copywrite, Ink. Editor, LiquidHip. CTO, CelebratingL |
Feedback is going to define your company at some point or another, whether you want it or not. Every single company story is one of customer feedback. Apple heard (feedback) that computers (theirs, but moreso Microsoft's) were perceived as complex and confusing. So they re-focused on devices that simply worked and /seemed/ simple. Candy-colored iMacs weren't what Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak imagi ...
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Via: UserVoice
Head of Community @UserVoice in San Francisco, singer in the |
Too many "viral launch" strategies require a prospective user or customer to tweet or e-mail friends or post a badge on their blog before they have had a chance to experience any aspect of the service. ...
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Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
The occasional batshit insane customer email, which, if you care about your business, can be terribly upsetting, because you can't help but think What did I do wrong?? and your natural instinct is to engage and try to fix it. This is often a mistake. For starters, you often can't fix it, because the customer has a serious problem... and it's not your product. ...
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Via: UnicornFree
I put the Amy in anomaly. Bootstrapper, product crusader, Ru |
You need to admit to your customers when something goes wrong - because they value honesty more than they hate issues. People prefer honesty from their partners, their friends, and their companies. An honest company is one you can trust ...
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Via: UserVoice
Head of Community @UserVoice in San Francisco, singer in the |
It is an unfortunate fact that many startups talk to people like me (or their investors or their advisors or "industry experts") instead of talking to their users. ...
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Via: Users Know
Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J |
You can save money AND increase customer satisfaction. You can make higher profits AND create an awesome customer retention machine. Just by asking customers 5 simple questions (And of course, writing down, sorting, trending, and analyzing what you find out). ...
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Via: TerryStarbucker
Writer, Husband, Friend, Entrepreneur. I write about (and h |
Ever so often, I get asked a question like "Should I be worried about telling people my idea?" The question almost always comes from first-time entrepreneurs. It's a commonly blogged about topic among entrepreneurs and VC's, but I'd like to add in my two cents. ...
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Via: Nat Turner
Co-founder of Flatiron Health. Previously Co-Founder/CEO of |
When your company is small, it's easy to improvise to delight your customers. You know most of them. You remember them. And you know each member of your customer service team well (and could probably hit them with a paper airplane from where you're sitting). Joe from Company X wants a discount? Sure. Fred from Company Y is going to be in town? Have him come by for a beer! ...
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Via: UserVoice
Head of Community @UserVoice in San Francisco, singer in the |
In January 2010, I remember shakingFounder Collective's Eric Paley's hand after pitching Yipit to him for an hour and struggling to smile as we left his office. The meeting had been a complete disaster. Founder Collective wasn't going to be investing. Maybe nobody would. I remember thinking I had been so foolish for having been excited just a few hours before. ...
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Via: Bostinnovation
Co-Founder and CEO of @Yipit. Sharing lessons learned as a f |
Putting work in front of people for criticism is pretty hard. After all, who wants to expose something they've poured their blood, sweet and tears to criticism? Who likes hearing where they've gone wrong? But we need constructive feedback to improve our designs, our products. We need good feedback or we risk failure. ...
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Via: ZURB Blog
Editor @ZURB, Writer, Educator, and occasional Starship Com |
At Rackspace an employee on the phone with a customer during a troubleshooting session heard the customer tell someone in the background that they were getting hungry. As she tells it, "So I put them on hold, and I ordered them a pizza. About 30 minutes later we were still on the phone, and there was a knock on their door. I told them to go answer it because it was pizza! They were so excited." ...
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For most new high-tech products, the first customers are always "early adopters." The conventional wisdom is that early adopters are the ideal target for new products, to get business rolling. I see two pitfalls with any concerted focus on early adopters; first, the size of this group may not be as large as you think, [...] ...
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Via: Hot Sauce!
Veteran startup mentor, executive, blogger, author, tech pro |
I fear the long-term effect of all these acqui-hires is my potential customers saying "No thanks. I doubt you geeks will be around in 18 months” when I market to them." ...
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Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
Let's face it; it's no fun when someone complains. Some people, the saying goes, just like to complain. Best to give them what they want and send them away, right? Not really. Complaints can provide such valuable market feedback that you'll want to include strategies in your business plan for dealing with them. .. ...
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Via: Business Planning
All things social enterprise/social ventures, author Venture |
The greatest gift you can give an entrepreneur is creative criticism. The greatest skill an entrepreneur can have is critical listening. I was going to write a long post (and now that I have started writing, I will probably end up being long-winded) about how, as an entrepreneur, you have to cut through the positive ...
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Via: Learn to Duck
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Forrester recently released a report on the rise of the Chief Customer Officer. The emergence of a C-level role with authority over customers' interactions has caused much hand-wringing within the UX community. It's like the job (we think) we're made for has been stolen from us. ...
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Via: Johnny Holland
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An optimal price is one that is accepted but not without some initial resistance. It is your job to both set that price and convince the customer... Pricing is considered more art than science but in the next series of posts I'd like to explore tactics for demystifying how to set and test pricing. ...
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Via: Swombat on Startups
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Yes, you "know" that your power users are different (more vocal, more active, more tech-savvy, more exploratory) than your mainstream users. But do you know HOW MUCH different they are? Chances are, they're not 10% more active. They're not 20% more expert. It's probably more like 100%. 200%. 500%. ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
I had a big realization yesterday: I don't know anything. I'm talking about Airtime for Email. I know that people are interested in it. We've had almost 100 businesses sign up since launch. I know it's a validated idea - we have paying customers. Knowing that kind of thing just tells me that I should keep working on Airtime. But the problem is that I have no idea WHAT I should be doing. ...
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Via: Dan Shipper
UPenn junior. Co-Founder at @UseFirefly. Jets fan. |
If you can't measure the customer experience, you can't manage it. Improving the customer experience starts with measuring. But you've got to be sure you're getting the right measure (or usually measures) to manage. ...
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Via: Measuring Usability
Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used. |
In this talk, Jonathan leads us through his years of experience with user modelling, some formal and some less so. What he has learned and is keen to impart is that too often we don't think of "users" as real people. He gives the example of the Google image search for "user" in which the first page of results returns an army of featureless icons. These aren't people, he explains. "This monochromat ...
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Via: HackFwd Blog
We're experienced tech entrepreneurs looking to support and |
New product startups rightfully begin with a heads-down focus on creating the ultimate product – whether it’s a new technology, a new look and ease of use, or a new low-cost delivery approach. Most then add customer service at the rollout, but very few really understand what it means to be truly customer centric, and [...] ...
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Via: Hot Sauce!
Veteran startup mentor, executive, blogger, author, tech pro |
How do you measure how much your users like your product? This is one of the essential question that every founder needs to answer to make the right decisions - to move the product ahead. In some lean startup related discussion I stumbled accross the idea of asking your users if they were sad if the used product would vanish. As the lean startup is all about validating assumptions based on data ...
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Via: connex.io Blog
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Your product will change. You’re going to have to communicate those changes to your customers. How you do this can make the difference between “a few angry Tweets” and “death threats from your community” That last point may bear repeating — 9 times out of 10, it’s not what you changed that makes customers angry. [...] ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
Negative feedback hurts. It’s easy to take personally and get offended. It’s easy to dismiss too. But negative feedback is a lot better than no feedback at all. The worst thing for a startup -at any stage- is crickets. ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
Many of our users still don’t realize that there are almost 20 additional actions you can reward-enable using ... ...
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Via: PunchTab
Silicon Valley marketer, Auntie to 5, animal lover, left and |
More companies are adopting the Net Promoter Score as a means of measuring client or customer delight. It’s becoming the currency– more important, if truly indoctrinated, than any bottom line. Delighted customers are promoters, advocates for your brand who potentially cost less and do more than legions of sales and marketing teams combined. It’s a win win theory at at time when b ...
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Via: Bostinnovation
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Whether it’s a business or personal interaction, multiple studies show that as much as 50-65% of the communication is nonverbal. That means that people who are addicted to text messaging and email may be sending only half the message, and receivers often misinterpret even that half. Yet the use of text messaging for business purposes continues to grow, in concert with more of Gen-Y enterin ...
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Veteran startup mentor, executive, blogger, author, tech pro |
One of the things that many businesses fear about being online is that they will open the door to people publicly criticizing them, their products, or their services. But it doesn’t matter whether your business is online or not – if your customers are online, then people will still be talking about you! I have [...] ...
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I am a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusias |
The holy grail of marketing is loyalty. Every marketing plan includes a flow chart on how to migrate consumers from awareness to trial to repeat to loyalty. Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts even defines a brand as “loyalty beyond reason”. Yet many brands approach loyalty primarily through loyalty programs and loyalty cards that bear little relationship to true loyalty. It’s “loyal ...
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Via: Tom FishBurne
Marketoonist and Founder of Marketoon Studios (http://market |
While a global presence is necessary for any organization hoping to connect with customers around the world, placing reliance on one prevailing strategy is just the beginning. In any web strategy, including social and also mobile media, localization is king. ...
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Via: Social Media Today
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Solis |
“No problem” is almost universal in service industries today. “Can I get a refill?” “No problem.” “Could you transfer this money from my checking account to my savings account?” “No problem.” “Thanks.” “No problem.” It may seem innocuous, but it … Continue reading → ...
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Via: TheBlogOfAJKessler
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For a long time, there were niche communities of “lo-fi” camera enthusiasts: people who enjoyed photos taken on old cameras that had interesting ways of filtering shots. The iPhone app Hipstamatic popularized lo-fi filters, selling over 1M copies. Because Hipstamatic lacked sharing features, many users took pictures with Hipstamatic and then shared those pictures using othe ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
A cried a little on a plane last week. It wasn’t due to a delay, an uncomfortable seat, or peanut salt getting in my eye. It was because I saw a shining example of “social business” at work in the real world. Mid-way on a Southwest Airlines flight home from a speaking engagement in Ft. ...
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Via: Convince & Convert
Hype-free social media strategist & keynote speaker. Tequila |