Businesses must be concerned about the entire sales cycle. Much research has been focused on the presales cycle - what makes a consumer purchase one product over another. I am interested in the post-sales cycle and how and what makes customers happy as they use our products.
Content matters in the Use part of the sales cycle because it supports the customers as they work through using the product. The day-to-day use feeds into perceived value of the product, suitability of the product, and perceived ease-of-use of the product. These issues feed back into future sales.
Additionally, common sense tells us people like working with companies they like. Part of being liked as a company is making the customer feel important, by having customer empathy and concern about their issues. With the dramatic changes to the marketing world from social media, we have new ways to connect with our customers and make them feel important.
Best of breed companies make their customers feel important and these customers are engaged with your brand. Engaged customers are your best source of future revenue.
But what does fully engaged mean, from a customer's point of view? How do we make customers feel important so they want to be fully engaged? We can do this with the after-purchase attention we give to our customers. Social media is one of those ways.
With roughly 1.2 billion people on Facebook and 100,000 tweets a minute on Twitter, people are communicating with each other. As part of that communication, I wondered if people are asking for help with products after they purchase them. Are people using product documentation to get help? Or are they tapping into the "hive mind" for help? Or some mix of both, or perhaps neither?
In a previous poll, I discovered that 90% of people use product documentation to help them use a product. But with social media playing such an emerging role in our lives, I wanted to know if people use social media to help them use they products they purchase. If they do leverage their social media, what are their expectations? Do they expect the company to notice and step in? How do they feel if that happens, or doesn't happen?�
This was an opinion poll and is not meant to take the place of ethnographic or observational research into whether or not what people are reporting is factually true. I wanted to get to what people thought and what they report doing. These findings are interesting suggestions into what people are thinking and reporting they are doing. I welcome ethnographic or big data research into these areas.
