Customer pain is an inevitability if you own a business. Pain isn’t the problem, it’s how your manage and respond to pain that can help your business flourish or fail.
When you are a start up, your life is chasing pain, you need to support your customers to build solid relationships and have fantastic references to help build your business larger. The problem I see in most companies that find success and grow from small to medium and beyond…is they keep the same “chasing pain” mindset they had as a start up.
You are now in a vicious cycle of the loudest customer, or subset of customers, is getting all the focus and your focused on chasing pain. You lose sight of the much larger percentage of customers who are happy now, but still want to see the product improve and innovate. Over a year or two years, those happy customers now become a risk because they feel ignored.
As you grow, it’s important to start developing and holding customers accountable to your standards. If you set standards and everyone from CEO to the support person know them and communicate them, it’s much easier to tell a loud customer that we are on it, but we have to stick to our plan.
I hope this was helpful! Thanks for being here! Take care!
