Lis­ten­ing to crit­i­cism from your cus­tomers can be painful, but it’s a nec­es­sary step if your brand tru­ly wants to embrace cus­tomer-cen­tric­i­ty. Know­ing the issues your cus­tomers have with your prod­uct can be worth its weight in gold, and lead to need­ed inno­va­tion and more rev­enue.

Cus­tomer obses­sion isn’t a buzz­word for the Bing Ads team. It’s a state of mind. But it wasn’t always this way. As the under­dog in paid search adver­tis­ing behind the Google AdWords jug­ger­naut, Bing Ads learned that they didn’t have the right to be arro­gant or tell the mar­ket what to do. The mar­ket told them what they had to do, said David Pann, Microsoft gen­er­al man­ag­er, prod­uct mar­ket­ing, online ser­vices divi­sion, speak­ing at the Bing Ads Next event in Red­mond, Wash­ing­ton. Bing Ads learned to start lis­ten­ing and deliv­er­ing what adver­tis­ers were ask­ing for. “I’ve nev­er seen an R&D team lis­ten to cus­tomers bet­ter than our team,” Pann said. “They took [lis­ten­ing to our cus­tomers] to heart, and demon­strat­ed that we’re going to keep lis­ten­ing and react.”

Listen To Your Customers

Steve Sirich, gen­er­al man­ag­er, Bing Ads prod­uct mar­ket­ing, said a big turn­ing point was when the team adopt­ed an out­side-in cul­ture and empow­ered cus­tomers to tell them what does and does­n’t work. “Our cus­tomer obses­sion is very gen­uine,” Sirich said. “We want to make sure peo­ple are hear­ing the mes­sage and see­ing the changes.” Sirich said inno­va­tion and improve­ment are the result of going out and inten­tion­al­ly meet­ing with your cus­tomers face to face, one on one, in their envi­ron­ments, to see what’s fail­ing and under­stand the issues and the pain. Pann echoed Sirich’s thoughts on the impor­tance of talk­ing to cus­tomers, real­ly lis­ten­ing to them, and under­stand­ing how they oper­ate. “It’s the art of lis­ten­ing,” Pann said. “Peo­ple want to solve prob­lems. Well, you may not have actu­al­ly heard the prob­lem. Ask them open-end­ed ques­tions and lis­ten. Try to [fig­ure out] did they actu­al­ly ask for some­thing, or did they actu­al­ly mean some­thing else?” To begin address­ing what mat­ters to con­sumers, Bing Ads focused on four areas:

• Scale: Bing Ads went from offer­ing adver­tis­ers the abil­i­ty to review 5,000 key­words, to 250,000, to 1 mil­lion.
• Sim­plic­i­ty: Bing Ads redesigned with a new user inter­face that was more intu­itive and sim­pler.
• Per­for­mance: Bing Ads Edi­tor got a boost with faster upload, start­up, and bulk upload speeds, and also reduced data lag from 4 hours to 30 min­utes.
• Data: Bing Ads gave adver­tis­ers the abil­i­ty to see the impact of bid changes on impres­sions with a bid land­scape tool.

3 Ways Bing Ads Learned To Become Customer-Centric

Bing Ads learned three things were impor­tant to its cus­tomers:

• If you want cus­tomers’ time, you have to be real­ly effi­cient. If cus­tomers say they’ll give you 15 min­utes out of an hour, you bet­ter make it effi­cient. Do in 15 what your com­peti­tor can do in 45.
• Remove all the fric­tion – stop mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for adver­tis­ers to spend mon­ey with Bing. Strive for par­i­ty, but also offer less fric­tion, Sarich said. Rec­og­nize what your com­peti­tor is doing well, but also look for dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion that brings incre­men­tal val­ue and makes for a bet­ter cus­tomer expe­ri­ence.
• Give a great buy (ROI). It’s about how to know when to put the best ad in front of the con­sumer so they’ll con­vert, and mak­ing sup­ply and demand as effi­cient as pos­si­ble at the right moment in time, Pann said.

“Cus­tomers are always our North Star,” Pann said. “They hold us to a high stan­dard, so we must deliv­er on prod­ucts, con­ver­sions, and effi­cien­cies [adver­tis­ers] desire.” Ulti­mate­ly, Bing Ads learned that any one chan­nel isn’t the answer. A mul­ti-pronged approach will bring the most suc­cess. “You’re see­ing Microsoft be much more present to con­vey our mes­sage of the val­ue we can bring,” Pann said. That mes­sage: “We have a great solu­tion and we’ll deliv­er it to you.” Dur­ing the same event, Bing Ads also announced a new way to define and track per­for­mance goals and con­ver­sions with uni­ver­sal event track­ing.