{"id":2477,"date":"2017-10-11T19:14:52","date_gmt":"2017-10-12T01:14:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=2477"},"modified":"2017-10-10T19:26:58","modified_gmt":"2017-10-11T01:26:58","slug":"talking-to-your-customers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2477","title":{"rendered":"Talking to your customers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favorite parts of The Food Corridor is talking to customers.\u00a0 As the main technical force there, it&#8217;s a great opportunity for me to interact with folks whose lives my work is (hopefully) making better (and sometimes making worse).<\/p>\n<p>The two main ways I do this:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>I do customer service.\u00a0 We have zendesk and a common email inbox and I take time away from developing to answer emails.\u00a0 This gives me a feel for the rough edges of our product and helps me build empathy for our users (&#8220;why couldn&#8217;t they see that you just click here and then here and then&#8230; oh, that&#8217;s why&#8221;).\u00a0 It also has led to a number of bug reports that make the product better.\u00a0 I also answer phone calls from our google voice number.<\/li>\n<li>I schedule a monthly meeting with some of our bigger customers.\u00a0 These tend to be 15-60 minutes long.\u00a0 This meeting lets me hear directly from them what they like about the platform, and more importantly, what is missing or broken.\u00a0 I rotate among a number of different customers because I don&#8217;t want to be pulled too far in one direction, and they all have slightly different needs, but hearing from them regularly helps me triangulate.\u00a0 It&#8217;s important to capture what they say in some kind of tracking system, even if you don&#8217;t execute against them for a while.\u00a0 This in person call also lets me let the customer know of certain other features that are new and\/or may be of interest.\u00a0 Frankly, this meeting can be exhausting because of the wish list aspect of it (&#8220;oh man, what would it take to implement that?&#8221;) but I try to avoid that and just be an open listener.\u00a0 I think that the customers also enjoy direct access to a developer.\u00a0 This certainly doesn&#8217;t scale as well as option #1.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>If you are going to pursue this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>make it a priority and realize it is going to affect your ability to deliver code<\/li>\n<li>don&#8217;t get defensive when your product is criticized<\/li>\n<li>take notes<\/li>\n<li>seek out customers with a variety of perspectives<\/li>\n<li>don&#8217;t commit to anything new in this call, but do let them know high level roadmap if they ask<\/li>\n<li>ask them about items outside of your product if you have time.\u00a0 This can clue you in to other problems they may have.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Customer service a different activity from developing software.\u00a0 It&#8217;s very choppy, and you can encounter folks that are &#8230; having a rough day and perhaps taking it out on you.\u00a0 But it also is one of the best ways to make sure that you, the person building a solution, stays in touch with the people using the solution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favorite parts of The Food Corridor is talking to customers.\u00a0 As the main technical force there, it&#8217;s a great opportunity for me to interact with folks whose [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-the-food-corridor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2477"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2478,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477\/revisions\/2478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}