Yesterday I wrote about my heart-breaking separation from my beloved Xobni. So how can we keep this from happening at our company? How do we keep our clients happy?

1. Close mouth, open ears

It’s the most basic part. Listen to your clients. REALLY listen to them, don’t just hear them talk while imagining reasons why they’re wrong. If you really pay attention to what your product’s users are saying, you’ll know exactly where the pain points are in the product and you’ll have your priority list all drawn up for you.

A few days after people create an account with AceProject, we send them an email and ask them what they think of the product, if they can suggest improvements or missing feature. The response we get is a very good source of inspiration for us.

2. Aggravation is really bad

An exasperated client should never be ignored or dismissed. If you let aggravation at your product go unchecked, it only grows and never brings anything good to you, your product or your users. When someone is angry at […]

At Websystems, we have IP phones that forward our voicemail messages to our email addresses. This is very convenient, since we can forward the message to the appropriate person easily. The voicemail notification also contains any special information entered by the caller, such as confidential or urgent.

Naturally, when I saw a voicemail marked urgent in my inbox, I listened to it right away. It could be a client with a problem that is keeping his team from working.

It wasn’t.

About 20 seconds into the message, I realized the call was not an emergency; it was a sales pitch, for an outsourced sales call service. I immediately stopped listening to the message and deleted it.

My only regret is that I didn’t catch the product’s name. If I had, I would have made sure I never buy that product or any product from that company.

Leaving a fake urgent message to make sure I listen to it is disrespectful. It’s bad salesmanship. While it did get me to listen to the message, it had the opposite effect. It convinced […]