Startup success secret: How to get customers to give you the info you need

Editor’s note: Joe Procopio is Chief Product Officer at Get chic and founder of lehrstartup.com. Joe has a long entrepreneurial history in the triangle that includes Automated Insights, ExitEvent and Intrepid Media. He writes a column every Monday on startups, management and innovation as an exclusive part of WRAL TechWire’s Startup Monday package.

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – The more you can tailor your product’s user experience to each customer, the more valuable your product is, the faster more sales will come to you.

Here’s the problem

There can be a very fine line between a great customer experience and a terrible customer experience. Most of the time, the difference is whether you can get the information you need from the customer to be able to deliver what they want.

The more information you need, the harder it is to get.

If the customer only needs a hammer, sell them a hammer. If they need a screwdriver, show them a Phillips head and a flat head and let them choose. If the client needs wedding photography, financial services, or a job, suddenly there’s a lot of information you need from them just to find the right thing options in front of them, let alone making the sale, let alone making them happy.

Here are the symptoms

There are all kinds of tools to get detailed information from your customers. You probably do at least one of them. None of them work well because they all attack the symptoms of the problem rather than the root cause.

These are the top four patches I usually see.

1. do it for her

This actually works for a while, but it’s just a white cure for a symptom of the problem. You can definitely get the data you need by having your team talk to the customer and enter it by hand, or by asking the customer to refer you to a place where the same team can do most of what you need , can scrape together. Not a terrible solution until you try to scale it.

2. Bug them automatically

What I’m about to say may go against conventional wisdom, but I’ve learned that the more reminders you send a customer to complete data entry, the more you push them away. They see your second or third reminder, delete it immediately, and then make a mental note to delete their account with you, which, to be honest, they usually never get to.

3. Automate it

Yes, you can write really fancy code to automate any manual or scraping process you use today, but it’s expensive and usually just a technical patch that also attacks the symptom.

4. Cure the symptom

If you want to get persistent, just turn off all employees from entering customer data, stop sending reminders, and hope customers realize that your product or service isn’t going to work unless they give you some basic information as it should. Do not do that. I guarantee you that the result will be fewer customers.

To solve the problem, you need to understand that you are not trying to cure customer apathy. Customer apathy is only a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

Here’s why

It’s not the customer, it’s your methods. They don’t show enough value to the customer to motivate them to work for that value.

And yes, you’re asking them to work for it.

Let’s look at it from the perspective of your own company.

If you have a large client that you are confident will bring you unexpected revenue, you will work for that client. If they need information from you, you will bend over backwards to get it to them as soon as possible. However, if you think a customer is just fishing and unlikely to buy, you won’t put as much effort into it.

I know we all like to think that we give equal attention to every customer, but we prioritize because we have to. Therefore, when we see the reward clearly, we go far beyond. every time

Your customers are no different. Your offer must show them the full value of your product and motivate them enough to do whatever it takes to unlock that value.

Here’s the solution

Do you show the full value of your product or just hint at it? This is a classic product marketing topic.

When your company can’t reach a customer but can’t get information from them, it’s usually a sign that you’re giving hints about product value (customers are interested) but not fully arguing (customers aren’t interested enough to work for it ). Value).

Conclusion – If customers don’t give you even minimal information, ie they don’t give you an email address or phone number, your product probably has no value, let alone show it off.

But once you’ve got the customer “in the store,” so to speak, there are a few ways to address the value exposure issue.

First, think about your messages in terms of notices or ads. For example, there is a big difference between these two statements:

“Fill out this form to save on TVs”

and

“Fill out this form to save 50% on TVs.”

One suggests value, one shows value.

Then think about the timing of your information gathering. No one ever walks into a retail store and is greeted by a clerk like this:

“Welcome to BestBuy. Can I see your credit card for a moment?”

How much value is shown before you start asking for information?

Then think about the information you need, prioritize it, and ask for it in chunks.

Here is an example

I’ll cite my current start-up Spiffy, mobile on-demand vehicle care and maintenance, where I’m product manager, as an example. We had some internal discussions about our method, but it works.

To get a mobile car wash, download our app. When you first open our app, we don’t do the standard process of asking you to sign up or sign in first, and then asking for your location, vehicle, and credit card. No, you can go directly to our services menu with prices and start ordering. Then we collect information along the way.

Have you opted for the mobile car wash? Well, we need to know where you are. Brilliant. Now tell us about your car so we can wash the right thing. Big. What day and time do you work? You’re done, we just need your credit card.

We get a lot of other information along the way, but by then the customer has already realized the value because in their mind we are already on our way to wash their vehicle at their preferred place, date and time.

We distribute the information gathering process to make it less of a gate and more of a give and take. This required a more complex app strategy that split our UX into logical parts that served the client’s interests, not our own.

How to implement the solution

Execution starts with one of my favorite strategies for developing and selling a product. Start asking why.

The only way to reconcile the value proposition with the request for information is to ask why the information is not being collected. You can ask your customers directly what the ideal way is, or if that’s not possible, ask them yourself.

Walk into your offer as your customer without knowing anything about your product and ask yourself why you would do what you are asking your customer to do.

Do you offer instant access to value?

Do you prioritize what information you need and when?

Do you promise (“save”) or state facts (“save 50%”)?

Then ask yourself why you’re doing it the way you’re doing it.

Do you expect the product to sell itself?

Is your priority closing the sale or showing the customer enough value to close the sale?

Are your competitors hiding a white “do-it-for-them” model in their pricing?

Here’s the reward

This is not a magic bullet solution, and it requires experimentation, trial and error, and failure. The good news is, once you’ve found the right balance and redesigned your product and offering to implement that balance, the processes will be fully repeatable.

And that’s where growth happens.

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