How companies should treat their most enthusiastic customers | Hacker News Reader

How companies should treat their most enthusiastic customers

economist.com

99 pointsad16 comments

I'm currently enjoying a special experience courtesy of a company that recognizes and supports its enthusiastic customers. They provide a service and are about to launch a new offering. Instead of just dropping the new thing into the market, they emailed me (and a number of other highly-engaged customers who tweet about them and otherwise get involved) and gave me a free weekend of the new thing. It's freaking amazing and I'm looking forward to being able to tell everyone I know about it once the launch happens.

It's also much easier to forgive faults and lapses when a company has engaged you in the past. I certainly don't expect every interaction with a business to be perfect, but when they have good service recovery and make me feel appreciated, I'm not going to get bent out of shape if something is amiss. For example, Starwood has done a great job of making sure I enjoy the many nights I spend in hotels. It's not always perfect, but their expert handling of the times it has been imperfect are actually what make me loyal to them when I have options on where to stay.

The portion of the article regarding The Innovators Dilemma is very important. It's easy to get so focused on the enthusiastic users that you forget about everyone else. Balancing between those two concerns is hard, and it's even harder to have to tell your enthusiastic users that you're not giving them what they want immediately.

This is why companies that can properly classify their user base and serve compartmentalized/customized products to those specific niches flourish.

If you are making a product for everyone, you'll eventually dissolve. This is what I see Apple's problem as being right now. They're shifting their entire OS towards the lowest common denominator which are casual users. Meanwhile their OS is becoming more and more like the new Windows.

Apple has always been focused on usability and simplicity at the expense of power. Remember the one button mouse or first desktop without any external media options?

But also, do you really think causal users care about Thunderbolt 3.1? Or previously, Firewire 800? And want a $3000 laptop that can drive two 5K screens?

I realise you talked about the OS, but it's the same deal. Apple OS'es were always dumbed-down compared to Windows - just compare the control panels and application "installation" features. Have you seen Group Policies?

Ease-of-use /= stupid

> They're shifting their entire OS towards the lowest common denominator which are casual users.

Has this not been Apple's schtick since the beginning? Computers for everyone, easy, accessible, friendly, fully 'appliance-ized'? They did aim a bit more towards making their users feel 'sophisticated' during the early OSX years but they were selling social sophistication, not technical (ie. 'you're a high end artist, an innovator, a visionary', not 'you're a computer expert'.) And even then, their bottom line was 'it just works.'

Ease-of-use /= dumbed down

This is why we here at Microsoft (in the developer side of things at least) have an "MVP" programs. This program is something I really love and am proud of as it lets us connect, take early feedback from (under NDA) and invest in our biggest developer platform fans. They do a lot for us, so its well deserved.

https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/

On the developer side of things, Google has the Google Developers Experts (GDE) program. It plays a very similar role. https://developers.google.com/experts/

That's one way of looking at. Another way of looking at is that Microsoft derives material value from MVP contributions, and rewards them with trinkets. Or are MVPs sometimes awarded stock?

Maybe the MVP program partly explains Microsoft's decades-old policy of ignoring standards and promulgating proprietary technology to commoditize the public domain. How to add some tweak to .Net is in the domain of acceptable discourse. When to support C11 or Posix, not so much.

It's been a few years since I had to deal with Microsoft's development environment. If you're taking suggestions, I think it would be nice if F1 once more showed the function's documentation instead of searching the Web. Intelligent development of the development environment never would have subordinated a useful albeit rickety documentation technology to a mindless webby one, no matter the marketing imperatives.

I'm just going to throw this out without comment or naming names.

Never ever attack your most enthusiastic customers.

Never say never. Unyieldingly binding your company to its most-enthusiastic customers at a single point in time ossifies it. Kodak and Blackberry, it could be argued, failed by refusing to bail on sinking ships.

Binding!=attacking

I think you're misunderstanding their point. The gp was saying don't ever attack your most enthusiastic customers, parent was suggesting there is equal potential for harm in refusing to detach from your enthusiasts and citing Kodak as an example. Sometimes your most enthusiastic customers are also out of touch with how the rest of the industry is heading - it's easy to get complacent and fall from the top.

"Eric von Hippel of MIT’s Sloan School of Management has found that about 80% of breakthroughs in scientific instruments came from “lead-users” rather than the manufacturers."

It seems to me the main focus of OA is on enthusiast end-users or members of the public who become fans.

The 'lead users' for scientific instruments are the scientists in laboratories doing research. Almost by definition, they will be using instruments in new ways/pushing the limits and so feedback from them is critical to the manufacturers of scientific instruments. More like a craftsman/patron relationship.

Struck me as a different kettle of fish.

Similar to the IBM story. the principles resonate across different consumer types.

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