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Why Video Feedback is the New Competitive Advantage

Posted 16 Sep 2021

Chad Reynolds

When you’re growing your company—there’s no doubt you’re doing your best to get in front of the right clients and customers.

The problem is the way that most organizations go about gathering feedback. We have forgotten that data without context can be misleading, and that genuine human interactions are what power innovation.

You may spend hours on research and development, validate a new concept through beta testers and interviews, improve it and launch it—all in the interest of building a better product.

So, how do you do that in an authentic way that allows input from actual consumers?

You talk to them—and not just through mechanical surveys and pages of cold data analysis. You have real conversations with real people, face-to-face. That’s the power of video feedback.

You see a customers eyes light up when they discover a love for your new product because it solved a real need. It’s that magic moment that makes all the difference in your product creation.

Be Customer Centered

Why talk to your customers in such an authentic way? Because you didn’t create a product, build a business, and work on making it better just to sell something. You did it to solve a problem your customers face.

Your customers’ feedback helps you solve that problem better every day—better than your competitors. And when you solve a problem better than all of your competitors, you gain your customers’ raving loyalty.

Building a customer-centric program in your company allows you to turn your company focus toward your customers—every department should know your customer inside and out. It creates a culture bent toward customer happiness because, after all, your goal is to make them happy by meeting their problem with perfect solutions. 

The only way to gain that happiness is to constantly ask how you can get better. Their honest answers act like bumpers on a bowling lane, helping you and your team course-correct as your product heads for that perfect strike.

Implement these questions at the prototype phase, and you have a venue for beta testers to give their honest opinions about how your product works and how it can work better, physically demonstrate their frustrations, and show you their reactions. 

Build Lasting Connections

Forbes calls the areas of modern competitive advantage “speed of delivery, speed to market, price, technology, design, scale, customer service, personalization, intellectual property, and experience.” But none of these are genuinely sustainable. Workers go on strike. Production slows or even shuts down. A competitor enters the market with a flashy new product. Someone does it new, does it better. 

Even being the first or even the biggest mover in a given market doesn’t last. What can last is a deep, constantly developing understanding of your target customer. The effort of staying connected to your customer and what they want and need from your company and your products creates a momentum of sorts over time that propels your company forward

The more you meet your current clients’ needs, the more they tell people about you and your products, the more new clients their raving brings in. Satisfy those new clients, and the cycle starts again, gaining more traction, more speed, more advantage over your competitors. 

Launch Better Products

In your business, your products and systems also need input on how to grow and better meet the needs they were created to meet. That constant loop of communication, feedback, and applicable iteration as key to the success of your products as it is to the success of any career.

This process is all about talking to your customers first and then using that insight of human emotion internally as you go through the journey of product creation and advancement. It puts customers at the center of everything you do and build.

Chad Reynolds

About the author

Chad Reynolds is the Founder & CEO of Vurvey, an innovative co-creation platform that empowers companies to partner with consumers to build, test, and launch winning products. Chad is a serial tech entrepreneur, often speaking at industry events about human-centered design, co-creation, and disruptive innovation, as well as serving as a mentor and board member for high-growth start-ups.

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