We constantly hear that experienced entrepreneurs are obsessed with customer
feedback and while I personally was like “Ok, sounds good”, the message took
time to fully get through. We’ve come to understand that live chat is a
feedback super weapon. Talking regularly to users helps correct dumb and
dangerous assumptions and here are a few.
Lie 1: “Our software is simple to understand”
When live chatting we’ll sometimes use a term we think is universal and it
turns out that half the people don’t really understand it. This includes even
very common words like ‘domain’. Yep, domain. We still use ‘domain’ sometimes
but try and say ‘website’.
Lie 2: “Trust me, everyone will love this new idea”
When someone says an idea is interesting it’s code for ‘I would never buy this
and I barely understand what you’re saying’. The reaction we really want is
‘Hell Yes!’.
We’ve tested and even built new feature ideas we thought people needed, talked
to them about it on live chat and nobody needed it. They were mostly using an
existing tool that was much better for that task and they were never going to
adopt ours. When we analysed the 100s of casual conversations in which
they mentioned those other tools it became obvious they needed an integration
option and not our feature.
Lie 3: “Lets hold off on the marketing, we already know they’ll complain
that we haven’t got [insert feature you think is missing] so lets fix that
first”
Sometimes we don’t launch something new because getting abuse and criticism
sucks. However, it also turns out that they don’t care about the missing
features and they’re mostly complaining about the one core feature. That’s
something we learn by getting faster feedback and it’s always an eye opener.
Some more lies that live chat exposed for us
“Of course they know they can cancel at any time.”
“We’ve fixed all the main bugs.”
“They understand what API means.”
“Most of them probably don’t research our competitors so why add a comparison
page.”
SEEING users use your site is a revelation
Live chat taught us a lot. What did Upscope co-browsing teach us? Seeing
people’s screens during a chat as they used the website told us we were wrong
about a most of our interface assumptions.
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The free trial link is not obvious.
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They don’t know how to fill in the “world’s simplest form”.
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People don’t read. They really really don’t read. Keep text simple.
and a lot more…
Upscope has a free trial and it feels like magic seeing it the
first time.
