Dating sites should live and die by their user feedback.
I work with sites large and small, startups to decade-old veterans. They all say they know their customers, because can you imagine if they admitted they didn’t? Recently I talked to a medium-sized dating site and the owners admitted they knew very little about their members. That made me smile, how refreshing.
In online dating, conversions are king but what about conversations with your customers to learn what you need to be doing to get those conversion numbers growing?
Sending out a survey every few months doesn’t always get you the information you need to make the right choices, because you are asking the questions, instead of letting your customers tell you what they want.
Often times, once marketing gets ahold of your survey, you’re toast. You’re going to get the answers they think they should be asking. Take it from someone who has been doing online marketing for a decade. Customer service is who you should be talking to.
Dating company CEO’s should take to customer service every day. The person making $16 an hour listening to disgruntled customers knows a lot more about your company than you do.
Acknowledging that you need help finding out what’s on your customer’s minds is the first step.
Perhaps you have come across Dell’s Idea Storm, where customers can vote for specific features they want in their Dell computers. this is typically called crowdsourcing. Jeremiah Owyang has implemented Uservoice to solicit feedback from readers and recently blogged about customer feedback.
I really like the setup and have set up a Uservoice account. I would appreciate it if you would take a moment and leave some feedback about this blog so I can learn what you would like to read here. Suggest new topics, tell me what you’re tired of hearing about and what you’d like to hear more about.
SuggestionBox and Get Satisfaction are two leading platforms to build a community around your dating brand. Check them all out before you decide on a service. After you have gathered feedback, put a plan together to prioritize what you’re going to build, fix or enhance.
Let me know how it goes and what you learn from the process.
