Should you listen to your customers or ignore them?
March 29th, 2010Do you do a Microsoft and ask what customers want? Or do you do an Apple and tell them what they want?
These are two sides of the equation that people often flip between or have difficulty deciding on what’s right.
The thing you need to take into account is the market state.
What is the state of the market?
If you’re the big player you want to listen to your customers, keep them happy, you have a lot to cater for.
If you’re the small guy you can’t compete on that basis, you need to figure out tangents which you can take the customer that help make you big.
This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 8:41 pm. 
March 31st, 2010 at 4:00 am
Although we are still small @iWantMyName, we like to think that we differentiate through highly personalised customer service. One day when we are large however, we will not have that competitive advantage.
As a web based service offering, we have lots of discussions in the office about what we see as the “minumum feature set” that will keep our customers happy but without over-burdening our tech guys. My marketing guy would love more features sooner, my chief tech guy is time constrained and his focus is primarily on implementing stuff that actually helps make sales happen.
Somewhere in between we manage to find a happy medium.