Friday, November 21, 2008

Customer Experience: Communication

Another facet of our Customer Experience team is marketing new product releases. Our group is charged with providing all types of information related to the launch of a new functionality within our product line. In our latest release we provided different types of videos from simple advertising to comprehensive instructional training. We produced release notices and quick reference guides. We even offered live online demos for those who wanted a personal touch.

What we are learning is no one method of communication will reach all our customers. Everyone absorbs new information differently. Any format we can think of to provide customers with information about upcoming changes is attractive to some segment of our customer base. It is time consuming and makes for some hectic weeks prior to the formal release date. However we need to know that when the product change impacts 100 percent of the user base our communications must impact 100 percent of the user base too.

Some customer gives us positive feedback others just thank us for not getting surprise by unannounced changes. Most just go about their business but we know we are making good progress when the support calls do not dramatically increase the day after the product updates are released.

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