Improve your product features with a private community — with SwiftKey
It’s not easy tailoring your product to be the best it can be.
This read is directed at enterprise companies that are looking into improving their product, creating user loyalty and saving the company money.
It happens that you may want to roll out a feature that you think will make a whole lot difference for your product, but your users maybe won’t relate to it. Now you’ve spent days/weeks or even months working on something which users don’t relate to. There are several reasons a feature is not well received. One of the reasons is because you’ve executed it poorly, it’s not engaging enough or it’s just not relevant, but most of time the main reason is because your community has not first validated the idea.
Your users are your best assets so listening to them is key.
Imagine you already have a considerable number of users(like SwiftKey does). Some of them are more active than others and some of them engage with the Community more often than others. You want to engage with the ones that have the most interest in you, they will know your product best because they use it the most. They are the ones to be asked what they think about your future plans for your product.
Feature request? Product rollouts? Testing new features? What if enough users ask for the same feature at once? What if you get a glimpse at a feature’s impact before rolling it out? Wouldn’t you want the Community to be happy and add their suggestions to your roadmap? You don’t have to look into all their suggestions, let’s be honest, some of them don’t make sense, but some of them do.
Doing it right will create loyalty within the Community.
My clients over at SwiftKey had this very same issue. Below I will present how we’ve approached the matter and how this has improved client success — by a number which if I communicate, will get me in trouble(NDAs, am I right?).
Your help desk is your power tool. In this case, we will be using Zendesk for the following use case:
1. Have a main community where users can find general information about your product. You need a good FAQ system with product inquiries that you know your users have when interacting with your product.
See it live here.
2. Secondary private community where you fire away with product suggestions, inquiries, product rollouts, testing and feature requests. It’s a very good idea to engage with people who have the most interest in your product.
Keeping it private is also a good idea because as mentioned above, some users engage more than others and have more interest in your product. You don’t want to prioritise your “once per week user’s input” to influence key features.
You can easily identify those users closest to you by posting an announcement on your main community help desk asking who would like to participate in a “product review” Community. Then you link them to an application form where they fill in valuable information and reasons why they want to participate in the private Community. Make your private community users sign an NDA to make their commitment official.
See it live here.
Because of privacy reasons, you also don’t want your whole community to see what you have “under the hood”, you want to keep a low profile so to make the best decisions without leaking information to the general public. This can have a negative unwanted impact on your product and you don’t need that. Also, if there’s any information leaking, think about how that would impact press releases and how that could cause a stir in terms of negative publicity. We know “there’s no such thing as negative publicity” but I don’t think that is true, there are soooo many cases where products saw their demise from press leaks(like Snapchat).
Obviously, I cannot show the private community because, well, it’s private and I don’t want to get into trouble. If you’re an avid SwiftKey user though, please go ahead and join their private Community as it’s full of great stuff. Also, if you’ve not used SwiftKey, they have an awesome product and you should check it out.
Conclusion
We create loyalty within the Community because we listen to our users, we improve our product because we have constant feedback, and we know of a way to save money by interacting with the Community and asking them what they prefer to roll out next.
Wanna chat with me? I don’t bite, darlings, so say hi@dominiccx.com and follow me for more CX goodies.
Until next time 🤜🤛