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I’ve found that a lot of software companies have regular meetings to sit around and discuss what they think their customers want. These meetings often involve the marketing, development, and executive teams – sometimes they might even include sales. But how confident can a company be that what they think should be done in terms of development, new features, and enhancements, is actually what the customer wants and/or needs? The truth is… we don’t always know – and when we guess, we usually come up short. That is why software companies need to stop guessing and start listening to actual users and potential uses. Think: Windows Vista.

ComputerWorld outlined “12 unnecessary Vista features you can disable right now” in September of 2008. In Microsoft’s attempt to create a feature-rich, beautiful-looking, super cool operating system, they added a bunch of junk that most users would never use or even realize it was there. And the result? A slower system that forces users to go in and actually delete applications. How is that helpful?

I’m guilty of this myself – at Net-Results, we’ve often sat around and brainstormed about features that would be really cool to have and placed them on our “wish list”. Some of our features have even been driven by what our competitors have deemed important. Yet, nearly once a week I will talk to a prospect or customer who comes up with an idea we’ve never thought of – one that seems simple enough – but never crossed my mind. For example, a prospect asked me if he would be able to send out a discount coupon email to his customers on their birthday that varied depending upon what pages they looked at and where they showed interest. Seems reasonable, right? Yet he told me that not one marketing automation system he’d evaluated would have been able to do that for him. (In all fairness: it is possible with Net-Results, but would take a fair amount of set-up). Another customer asked if they could do split testing in a wizard beyond A/B – they wanted C/D/F and compare all the results. Again, seems reasonable, yet they had never found a system that would allow them to set that up via a wizard. From this, we’ve become much more aware of customer needs and we are tailoring our development roadmap and wish list priority to specifically reflect what our customers want – not just what we think is cool (although we are thrilled when “cool” meets “customer needs”).

While each customer has unique needs that may or may not be wide spread, they are all important to listen to. In brainstorming meetings, be sure to include your customer service department – you know, those people that actually speak to your customers? If Microsoft had listened to their customer base, I expect they might have heard “speed of operation” and “ease of use” as two of the main interests… and maybe Vista would have turned out a bit differently.