How to Stop Failing Your Customers: Reduce Ambiguity
Oct 19, 2023
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Micah Peterson, Chief Product Evangelist at ProcedureFlow, shares tips for reducing ambiguity for customers and making knowledge repositories more consumable. The podcast also discusses the importance of leveraging user feedback, reducing confusion in customer interactions, and prioritizing the right things for product development.
Fostering relationships with customers during weak points in processes is key for better customer success.
Incorporating subject matter experts and actively seeking customer feedback can enhance product improvement.
Deep dives
Prioritizing Customer Needs and Feedback
Mikea Peterson emphasizes the importance of incorporating customer feedback into the product development process. He highlights the value of subject matter experts and encourages their active involvement in improving the product. Peterson also discusses the importance of saying 'no' to certain feature requests in order to maintain focus on long-term development goals and strategic vision.
Simplifying Complex Processes
Peterson shares insights into how his company simplifies complex processes through their unique approach to knowledge management. By transforming standard operating procedures into user-friendly flowcharts, they enhance usability and improve the communication of critical information. Through their platform, users can navigate and execute processes in real-time, providing confidence and efficiency in their work.
Adapting and Scaling the Product
Peterson discusses the challenges of scaling a product while catering to different customer segments and evolving business needs. He examines the need to balance feature development with expanding into new markets, integrating with partners, and addressing internal customer requirements. Peterson highlights the importance of making strategic decisions that align with the company's long-term goals and serve the majority of their customers.
Effective Prioritization Frameworks
Peterson shares his experience with prioritization frameworks, starting with a simple Excel sheet and eventually adopting a more robust tool like ProductBoard. He emphasizes the significance of factoring in effort, market impact, customer requests, and internal considerations when making prioritization decisions. Peterson also highlights the value of transparency and open communication in aligning stakeholders and achieving consensus on product priorities.
This episode features an interview with Micah Peterson, Chief Product Evangelist at ProcedureFlow, the next-generation Knowledge Management software designed to help companies visualize and navigate processes.
In this episode, Micah shares with us:
His simple but actionable tips for reducing ambiguity for customers
What it takes to make consumable and democratized knowledge repositories
Looking at customer obsession in a whole new way
And so much more
Host takeaways:
Kyle:
Be aware of where your processes break down: The rubber really hits the road where the links in our processes are weakest. Learning where those weak links are and educating our employees on how to navigate those sore spots through fostering a relationship with our customers during those moments is key to better customer success.
Leverage your SMEs: Your community of users can help improve your products. Get their feedback and better understand what you can do better through their direct feedback.
Don’t be afraid to say “no”: When we think of customer obsession, the words “yes” “of course” and “always” tend to come to mind first, but Micah encourages us to think of the 99% and to say no to updates that don’t serve the bigger body of customers or the future of the product.
Lukasz:
People will focus on confusion, so don’t be confusing: Standardizing and removing ambiguity out of the conversation forces customers to focus on the flow, on procedure, and on the business at large.
Always ask, is this the right thing?: Prioritizing what we really want to achieve when all we want to do is what’s easiest, because oftentimes what’s easy is a distraction and not adding anything to the product.
Prioritize requests: When we can provide various perspectives on dimensions by looking at different markets, we can then put on the weights in a more strategic way. Because when we can rationalize scoring, it allows us to cut across dimensions and ease any tension between the managers in those markets.