Retention, Part 28: Retention Starts With Retaining Your Team

By Sanya Weathers

If you have an unlimited budget, you can ignore this column. If you’re releasing a product on the coattails of a successful franchise, and if your company has a long-standing reputation for releasing great products when they’re done and not a single beta cycle too soon, great. You don’t need this advice. In fact, you could probably afford to keep a solid wall between your development team and your customers.

But if you’re trying to turn around a bad reputation, consider reading more. And if you have no reputation at all or are otherwise trying to get attention for your upcoming product, read on.

The key to retention is relationships with customers. If you’ve already got an established brand, your customers have a relationship with your brand. If you’re new to the space, or your relationships have  been poisoned by a bad release or worse, the quickest way to build relationships is to make it personal.

People love to root for underdogs. If there’s a David vs. Goliath scenario coming up in a tight market, there are tons of customers who will give David a lot of slack – and even more attention. Let people peek inside your doors with blogs and videos. Let them see how hard you’re working and how much you care. Faceless monoliths don’t work unless you’re already taller than everyone else. Down on the ground, people want to see what you look like, so show them.

Invite people to be your allies, and, you guessed it, to form relationships with your team. That positive energy will transfer to your brand.

This strategy only works if the customers perceive you as being worth a relationship. Are your employees buckling under the strain of trying to meet impossible deadlines? Are your employees normal, stable people with time to spend with loved ones? Are you respectful to your cube-dwellers? Do you consider low level developers to be disposable and mass layoffs to be “normal,” or do you consider all of your team to be in it for the long haul? If you run a video series for a year, how often will the faces change?

Players pick up on an awful lot of unsaid things in your blogs and videos. If you don’t have a clean, positive vibe coming from employees who are glad to be there, players will know, and you’ll be wasting your time trying to manage your own campaign. As I said, this doesn’t matter if you’ve got a big budget for marketing or a nationally known product. Those companies can hire a marketing/PR campaign.

But if you’re relying on word of mouth, you can’t have bad breath.