"While this may be true, the fact remains that you have a limited amount of time. As a matter of reality, you simply cannot spend an infinite amount of time with every customer."
Perfect. This captures in a single sentence the trap you can get yourself into here.
Lets start with the obvious, if your product is so impossible to use that you need infinite customer support hours with every customer in order to use it, well you need to pick a different line of work right?
But lets start with the assumption that you make a fine product and customers like it. The reality is that every product has to teach the customer how to use it at some level, from the simple picture on your electric toothbrush telling you to plug in the base and put the toothbrush into the base, to a description of effects various tools achieve in Photoshop.
You 1) sell the product, 2) customer buys it, 3) learns it, 4) uses it.
Its up to your marketing department to get the customer between steps 1 and 2, its up to your support to get them between 3 and 4. Every time you have to help a customer between steps 3 and 4, if you feed that back into the product (design, documentation, execution) you mitigate the future chance of hitting that problem with another customer. Unless your product is infinitely complex (see my first point) then, like a legal contract that has grown to 6 pages because of the clauses that deal with each problem that came before, the amount of time you need to spend with customers goes down. What is more amazing is that new customers benefit from all the work you've put into making the product easy to use and they share that as 'delight' with their peers, who bring in more customers.
This is the truth in this anecdote, you have a limited amount of time to succeed and every time you spend that time with a customer, helping to solve their problems with using your product, you gain much more time down the road. And you gain expertise in designing products in the future. If you read that discussion about the difference between 'years of experience' vs 'knowledge' this is it, in a nutshell. You as an entrepreneur become more valuable knowing about problems that customers will have, you as a company become more valuable because people learn to trust you, and your products become more valuable because all of that knowledge gets folded into them. There is no gamble here. There is no 'wasted' time. It is all useful time well spent, assuming you bring back the knowledge and incorporate it into your culture, and your products.
Perfect. This captures in a single sentence the trap you can get yourself into here.
Lets start with the obvious, if your product is so impossible to use that you need infinite customer support hours with every customer in order to use it, well you need to pick a different line of work right?
But lets start with the assumption that you make a fine product and customers like it. The reality is that every product has to teach the customer how to use it at some level, from the simple picture on your electric toothbrush telling you to plug in the base and put the toothbrush into the base, to a description of effects various tools achieve in Photoshop.
You 1) sell the product, 2) customer buys it, 3) learns it, 4) uses it.
Its up to your marketing department to get the customer between steps 1 and 2, its up to your support to get them between 3 and 4. Every time you have to help a customer between steps 3 and 4, if you feed that back into the product (design, documentation, execution) you mitigate the future chance of hitting that problem with another customer. Unless your product is infinitely complex (see my first point) then, like a legal contract that has grown to 6 pages because of the clauses that deal with each problem that came before, the amount of time you need to spend with customers goes down. What is more amazing is that new customers benefit from all the work you've put into making the product easy to use and they share that as 'delight' with their peers, who bring in more customers.
This is the truth in this anecdote, you have a limited amount of time to succeed and every time you spend that time with a customer, helping to solve their problems with using your product, you gain much more time down the road. And you gain expertise in designing products in the future. If you read that discussion about the difference between 'years of experience' vs 'knowledge' this is it, in a nutshell. You as an entrepreneur become more valuable knowing about problems that customers will have, you as a company become more valuable because people learn to trust you, and your products become more valuable because all of that knowledge gets folded into them. There is no gamble here. There is no 'wasted' time. It is all useful time well spent, assuming you bring back the knowledge and incorporate it into your culture, and your products.