Wendy Lea the CEO of Get Satisfaction gave a presentation at the DMGT Technology Summer School on “The voice of the customer”. There were some great points on how they have infused passion for their customers into a customer driven development process. As their business is based completely on capturing customer feedback it was great to see how they have infused their company mission throughout everything that they do. I have collated the main points I took from the talk below.
- “Listen -> Engage -> Iterate” is their mantra for development
- “Advocate -> Discover -> Buy” is a common loop for new customers
- You need to create and curate a community for product development (Facebook, Twitter handle)
- The Cluetrain Manifesto – “The connectedness of the Web is transforming what’s inside and outside your business — your market and your employees.”
- Create systems of engagement mashing in your external and external systems
- Conversations created by real people, in their natural language are very powerful and discoverable
- Bidirectional conversation can help that flow
- Join the conversation:
- Embrace customer conversation
- Open these conversations
- Collaborate
- Apply actionable insights
Embracing the above thoughts into a customer driven development process is something that really got me thinking on how we might be able to apply this at Metro. Apart from the old letters page newspapers traditionally are more of a one way dialogue. I have been thinking of ways that we could apply some of the above and simple feedback forms are something we are going to begin trialling soon as we make further changes to Metro.co.uk.