Retention, Part 38: Get the Customer Involved

By Sanya Weathers

It’s long been established that the best method of retaining customers is to form a relationship between the company and the customer. But a healthy relationship isn’t a one way street. Showering people with gifts builds a bond, all right, but it builds the kind of bond that can be snapped whenever someone else offers better gifts.

Another thing we know for certain about customer retention is that people who are invested in the product are more long term consumers. Generally, the investment is time. The more time poured into a character or profile, the more reluctant customers are to abandon the product. (Making it clear how much money has been poured into a product is counterproductive. Sometimes the sight of that bottom line figure shocks people right out of the computer chairs.)

Now, take the two concepts and combine them. A healthy relationship requires a two way street, and investment powers retentions, equals involving the customers.

Doing so productively requires nothing more than willingness on the part of the company to listen, and an employee to oversee the process. Enter the community manager!

Here’s the how to:

– Identify the problem you want to solve. This sounds like a no-brainer, but unless you’ve spelled out exactly what you’re trying to accomplish, your customers may end up wasting quite a bit of time trying to figure it out – or spending time barking up the wrong tree. That’s not the right way to start off.

–    Define the parameters of what you need to solve the problem. See above about barking up the wrong tree. The force that your customer base can exert is tremendous. Apply it in the right place.

– No tokens. Don’t waste your time or your customer base’s time by inventing fake problems to solve. They will know, for one thing. Customer involvement only works to build relationships if your need is legitimate and their help is necessary.

–    Promote the collaboration. Whether you’re trying to track down a bug, or get a lot of data on the value of 1H/s weapons, or decide on new items to build, or prioritize a feature set, you want as many participants as possible. You also need to avoid skewing the results by only hearing one sub-group’s feedback. Which bring me to:

–    No polls. Don’t bother using a poll to try and build involvement. They’re too easy to skew… and by that, I mean your skewing the poll when you write it, let alone what happens when a dedicated sub-group of users decides to campaign for one of the options. Forget it. Polls have their place, but not in this context.

–    Promote the results of the collaboration. Don’t forget to promote the results – if your users working together were finally able to help you isolate a bug, post that information along with the fix in your patch notes. Write press releases. Blog. Celebrate your new relationship!