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.