When it comes to wearables, Is “10,000 steps walked today” actually just a vanity metric? Will it really make me change my behavior and lose weight? It is all still too bleeding-edge. Like the early days of business analytics, are we still just presenting data to people rather than giving them meaningful metrics that will change behavior.
Towards a consistent level of excellence in all Customer touchpoints
Let’s step back and look at some common touchpoints – Acquisition, Onboarding, Adoption, Retention, Advocacy, and Growth. Each of them can spawn a separate post or series of posts in itself, for now let’s just look at them from a high level.
Since you’ve been gone… How to encourage the sometimes User
When analyzing usage statistics for information to help with retention, I believe you need to look at usage by segment. Identify your Super Users as outliers – and segment them accordingly. You do want to keep them – they help you innovate, but look at them separately so that their behavior doesn’t impact thinking about the other segment of users. Then look at what the majority of the people are doing on the system. Try to make what they are doing as easy as possible. Though either the product or service solutions.
It’s not you it’s me – going deeper to find out why customers really leave
I find sometimes, people in business will almost go out of their way rather than take in bad feedback. The average person, in wanting to avoid conflict, will sometimes give a pat answer rather than discuss real reasons for stopping doing business with you. No one likes to talk about negatives. No one likes to deal with rejection. So customers vote with their feet, rather than give you constructive feedback as to why they have left.
Is your annual business review relevant to helping move the business forward?
I love the disclaimer that “past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future gain” that is often affixed to advice or information from investment houses. Because it’s just that, a disclaimer. I get a chuckle out of it. The goal of most business owners is to do the opposite. To find a way to integrate lessons learned into their business models and build positive momentum towards future gains. And yes, if you find a way to do that consistently then everyone does come along – customers, investors, and the best talent – regardless of the disclaimer.
What if your Startup doesn’t fit into a maturity level box?
One thing I recommend founders to do is to think of the company as being a portfolio of projects, and the founder as being the strategic owner of this portfolio. Each specific product or service that the company is offering is a project in the portfolio that sits under the umbrella of the company. Then they can look at the maturity level of each project and the company itself. For example, a company that is offering a service to a customer base and at the same time is thinking of how they can translate that service into a SaaS product offering, may already have a good problem/market fit for the company itself, be in efficiency in terms of delivering the service and be just starting validation for the SaaS service.
