How do you predict what will be needed to make someone feel comfortable purchasing your product or service? You could make a huge list of every question that comes to mind and then answer them ahead of time via copy, video, a demo, etc… But this tends to delay going live because you end up constantly feeling like you haven’t covered every angle. “What if this situation happens?” becomes the magic phrase that stifles moving forward.
The alternative is to just put your product or service out there and see what happens. Questions will come up, so you address them as they arise. If you notice the same questions over and over then it’s time to design a better way to answer the question and help your customer. We decided to take this second path when we quietly launched a new module store about 2 weeks ago.
Here are a few recurring questions that I am noticing
- Can I get a free trial?
- How many stores can I use this on? (i.e.: what are the license terms?)
- Where can I get a demo?
- How can I contact you more efficiently?
What did I learn from these questions? Answer: People want to feel certain that they are making the right decision when they purchase something. It helps to “touch” the merchandise before you buy it. And knowing that you aren’t stuck with an item if you get home and it doesn’t work for you will make it much more comfortable to buy.
The questions are perfect for building a FAQ page (in progress) and save me a ton of time trying to predict what questions might arise. Also, questions can lead to more elegant solutions. For example, a few people asked me if they could view the admin demo. The module product view linked to the frontend demo and had a link at the very top to switch to admin. But users were missing the link.
To avoid this question, we designed a pretty cool header for the demo store. It incorporates a toggle switch so that users can easily click between both frontend and admin views. It’s a relatively simple change that improves the user experience, reduces questions, and makes it easier to decide to buy. We would not have thought of this had we not launched first and then received customer questions so that we could get smarter.
