You have a great product, you have a large customer base. Awesome! But how tuned in are you to how your user base is using your product? How wired is your product? Web products can get you good deal of information such as page views, number of unique visitors, how they move through the funnel, [...]
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This morning, I had to get an oil change and I drove up to the local Jiffy Lube. They charge $35 for an oil change. When I pulled in, they pulled up my car record and based on the mileage, they told me about the Honda recommended maintenance I have to do. Replacement of automatic transmission [...]
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Product managers and others, here is an opportunity to get creative.
A well known radio station here in Boston is looking for your help in coming up with some creative ideas on how they can do fund raising. Currently, they do this via their broadcast, but unfortunately this results in interruption of the regularly scheduled programs [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer needs, marketing, product management | 11 Comments »
Recently Facebook did a major UI upgrade that caused an uproar in the user community. People screamed because the new Facebook UI was just awful and made the user experience terrible.
Google last week brought out the new iGoogle UI and it is awful. To make matters worse, they did not tell anyone, one day you [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, marketing, product management | 7 Comments »
I listen to WBUR/NPR every day on my 50 min drive to/from work. I listen to the BBC World news (and it really is world news) at 9am and to OnPoint with Ashbrook at 7pm. At last, I had found one radio station that I looked forward to listening to and getting quality news in [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer needs, marketing | 2 Comments »
Kristin Zhivago has an awesome post on her blog titled Gone! The reason customers leave. I would strongly recommend that anyone who touches a customer (sales, tech support, product management, professional services, executives) read it.
I had written last year about how customers are lot more tolerant of a vendor’s mistakes or shortcomings if the vendor [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer needs, marketing, product management | 3 Comments »
The media (social and real) is abuzz with how Apple botched the launch of the 3G iPhone last Friday. Yes, they could have done it a whole lot better but I don’t think it is going to make much of a dent on the how many of these phones Apple will sell.
Seth Godin in his [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, marketing, product management, word of mouth | 2 Comments »
Couple of weeks back, I came across this company called InfusionSoft. I signed up to download something that looked interesting to me called “9 proven techniques to double sales”. To do this, I had to fill out the following form.
When you do this, they send you a link via an email to download the white [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer service, marketing, product management, word of mouth | 16 Comments »
OK, this post is more about my first and nightmarish experience with Vista than a product management tip.
Over the weekend, my aunt visiting from New York asked me if I could figure out what was wrong with her PC. She said her problem was that she just could not surf to hotmail.com using IE, but [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, marketing, product management | 5 Comments »
The other day I was kinda ticked off that I had to reschedule two customer presentations because Webex just would not work for whatever reason. Webex customer support had all sorts of technical reasons as to why it does not work and what the customer should do (yah, great, it is all user’s fault). It [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, marketing, product management | 2 Comments »
Last week, I had to get a tree cut in the yard and then my garage door broke down with the door bent and the rollers popped out. Not knowing who to call, I checked out ServiceMagic. What an awesome experience that turned out to.
Within minutes, they send me names of three pros rated very [...]
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As a product manager, you are very likely to have more feature requests than what you can put out in a given release. In my case, a good product manager’s job at release planning is figuring out what to eliminate from consideration – you have to make hard decisions – that is what you are [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer interviews, customer needs, marketing, product management, voice of the customer | 3 Comments »
I have been living in the US for the last 18 years and I have never traveled on a train over a long distance. This week, I had to travel to New York and decided to take the Acela Express. What a remarkable experience – I don’t think I will ever fly to New York [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer service, marketing, product management, word of mouth | 4 Comments »
I used to own (until it was stolen:-( ) a Magellan Roadmate 700 series portable GPS system. The system was so simple to use – it did one thing – GPS and it did it very well. The controls were very easy to use and programming it for a trip was a breeze.
On my new [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, marketing, product management | 12 Comments »
I have been a big proponent of online communities and social media – I have written at least two blog posts on this. So when the latest Business Week arrived with the main section titled “Consumer vigilantes” I could not put it down. The most interesting article among many dealing with social media was titled [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer needs, customer service, leadership, marketing, product management, voice of the customer, word of mouth | 1 Comment »
In my product management career, I have always had some users who were more vociferous than most of the others. Their decibel level when they asked for new enhancements or yelled at you for the bugs in the software was orders of magnitude higher than majority of the users. The vast majority of these users [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer interviews, customer needs, customer service, marketing, product management, voice of the customer, word of mouth | Leave a Comment »
I bought a new car last week. I was very clear what I needed – a Toyota Camry Hybrid and knew the exact options I needed. I did all my research on the web in reading user generated reviews, dealer invoice prices and so on. After spending about 3 hours doing all this, I was [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer needs, customer service, marketing, product management, word of mouth | 1 Comment »
For the last week, gmail has just stopped working for me. Boy, it has not been fun, being locked out of your personal emails. I also use google docs and the story is no different here – I am locked out of my documents as well. I have tried everything that Google has recommended on [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, marketing, product management, saas | Tagged: free products, gmail, google | Leave a Comment »
How often have you called customer service at credit card companies, airlines, medical benefits and you have been asked to enter information such as your credit card number, your zip code, your social security number, your frequent flyer number etc. and then finally when you get to a live person, the first question is what [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer needs, customer service, marketing, product management | Tagged: customer experience, customer service, gethuman, service experience | Leave a Comment »
