CHAPTER 11 Supporting Your Product
SuPPoRT aS a MaRKeT ReSeaRCh ToolOne customer well taken care of could be more valuable
than $10,000 worth of advertising.^3
— Jim RohnFor word about your product to spread, support doesn’t only act as a
marketing tool and talking point — it can also be a great place to find out
what people want from your product. You can spend a lot of time and mon-
ey doing market research, sending out and analyzing surveys, when an
excellent source of information is right there in your support channels.The more you engage with customers, the clearer things become and the easier
it is to determine what you should be doing.— John Russell, former V.P., Harley-DavidsonSometimes customers want to make suggestions or request features di-
rectly, so it is important to show you are open to comments and give people
ways to do this. We provide a feature requests forum that also affords other
customers the opportunity to read a request and comment on it, perhaps
adding a new use case or, at the very least, demonstrating that this request
is relevant to more people than the single user who proposed it.
Some companies take this a step further, using support systems such
as UserVoice^4 , which allow customers to vote for feature requests that have
been posted by others. I’ll talk a bit more about handling feature requests
later in this chapter.
In our experience, it is important to take note of non-explicit feature re-
quests; the times, for example, when you have to tell a customer that your3 http://smashed.by/care
4 https://www.uservoice.com/