"The customer is not always right, but they are always the customer." — Shep Hyken
Any organization, regardless of type or size, cannot survive without genuinely meeting the needs of its customers. There's a principle in marketing worth tattooing somewhere visible: customers come to a product based on what they want, but they stay based on what they need.
I worked with a company that was among the first to put newspaper clips on the Internet. Before their SaaS solution, employees would arrive early each morning to physically cut articles from print editions, paste them onto paper, and scan them into PDFs for client email delivery. The new SaaS platform made those clips searchable for the first time, presented them in both PDF and plain text, allowed for cut-and-paste access to article snippets, and offered organized archives with a host of other features.
We thought we had hit it out of the park. What more could a subscriber want? Quite a lot, it turned out. Because we had failed to ask how the subscribers were actually using the data. The majority of end users were not sitting at their desks during the day — they were out in the world, and they wanted a single email they could open during brief windows of downtime, in locations that often had no reliable Wi-Fi access.
The solution was straightforward: add a daily digest email that bundled each subscriber's search results. But the near-disaster was entirely preventable. We had simply failed to understand how users were interfacing with the service in the real world. The SaaS build cannot assume that end users will abandon their existing workflows simply because your platform is objectively better in other dimensions.
The Most Common Customer Needs
◆ Functionality — Your service must actually solve their stated problem. ◆ Price — Everyone has a budget. Don't build a Cadillac for a customer who needs a reliable pickup truck. ◆ Convenience — If it requires more steps than the current process, adoption will stall. ◆ Experience — Reducing time and complexity is often more valuable than adding features. ◆ Reliability — Be available. Every time. Without exception. ◆ Performance — Work exactly as advertised, at scale. ◆ Compatibility — Play well with the other software already in the customer's world. ◆ Empathy — Support staff who understand the user's context and frustration. ◆ Transparency — Communicate the good, the bad, and the ugly with equal clarity. ◆ Control — Make it easy to both onboard and, if necessary, leave.