The Scientific Method
As a marketer it is so easy to look for confirmation of what you are doing right. What if you flipped that and asked yourself, “What do I believe is wrong? How can I test and measure the way I do things? What is working? What’s not?”
I’ve recently begun doing this. When a customer complaint comes in about a bad experience on a website (usually to the not-so-helpful tune of “this website sucks”) instead of thinking, “That customer is obnoxious and must not know how to use the web, so I am just going to ignore him because I know my site works,” I think about how we can improve this experience for future customers. What are we doing wrong and how can we improve it? I’ll even email the angry guy and ask for his detailed feedback. Customer complaints are a goldmine for improvement. It takes much more work, but I think it will ultimately pay off in a better project. Read more about this here.
