As many CEOs will agree, the success of a business hinges almost entirely on customer satisfaction. After all, these are the individuals who will write reviews, tell others about your business, choose whether or not to repurchase, and so on. In theory, you may have a great product idea, but if there is something about its execution that your customer base does not appreciate, your sales can experience a sizeable loss. This is especially the case if your business is not addressing these concerns, resulting in customers making returns, choosing your competitors over you, and discouraging others from purchasing as well.
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Without a doubt, maintaining a profitable business includes exploring your customer’s attitudes, beliefs, and concerns about your products. In the case that you find a majority of your customers hold the same issues, it can be indicative that you need to redesign your product in order to boost business overall. In this blog, we’ll go over common issues customers may find as well as how a professional industrial design company would go about resolving them to output the best product design possible.
Common Customer Complaints
1) The product’s aesthetics are not appealing
Contrary to the popular proverb “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, the visual look of a product is just as important as its functionality. For example, if a customer is given two products that are identical in their function and price point but differ in looks, they will be more inclined to purchase the version that they visually find more appealing. When customers don’t enjoy the stylistic choices a business has made for a particular product, it signals that something about its design language is not resonating with the market. To address this issue, the best course of action, according to industrial designers, is to conduct market research to clarify what it is your customer base is looking for when it comes to aesthetic components. Aided with this information, your designers can then create a product that utilizes the correct design language for your market to visually entice customers to choose your business over others.
2) The product is failing to deliver on its promise
In most cases, customers are driven to buy products that offer real-life solutions to specific problems in their daily lives. For instance, someone who experiences issues falling and staying asleep is likely to purchase devices that promise a better night’s rest, such as weighted blankets, white noise machines, eye masks, and meditation apps, in comparison to those who don’t share this same problem. That being said, it’s important that products follow through on their promises, or else a business can risk creating unhappy buyers who are disappointed with their purchase and will be unwilling to trust that same business in the future. When it seems as though this is the biggest issue customers have with your products, it implies there is a flaw in the product’s design that is impairing its functionality. In this situation, a redesign is necessary to revise and correct its mechanisms. Specifically, returning to the ideation stage is an excellent starting point. Here, industrial design companies can uncover what the best design-build is for your product’s given function so it can perform exactly as advertised.
3) The product is difficult to use
If the majority of customer complaints signal difficulty using your products, it’s time to investigate their functionality, much like the previous point. However, in this case, it’s likely there isn’t anything technically wrong with the design-build or mechanisms rather they’re just too complicated. Customers want simplicity- in most cases, they’d rather give their business to a product that only needs a push of a button rather than one that requires switches, toggles, knobs, or any other combination of elaborate steps. To supersede this issue, your designers will need to complete market research with a focus on product configuration. There, you can get a good idea of how the market expects a product such as yours to function. With this information, your designers can move onto ideation aware of the correct features to implement in order to engineer a product that is straightforward and easy to use.
4) The product is too expensive
Customers taking issue with a product’s price point is a fairly typical grievance. Of course, your business is your livelihood, and you as a CEO should price your products whatever you see fit for what is essentially your own creative innovations. However, marking up your products at significantly high rates can be a bad business practice if your customers don’t believe its quality merits its expense. Luckily, there is a way to decrease your price points without taking a vast hit to your potential profits. This involves ensuring your products are made using methods, materials, and resources that result in as little waste of money and time as possible. In doing so, you can find an adequate price point given the quality of your materials and the amount of time spent on creating your products. This is called making a product “cost-effective” in the industrial design world. Finding the correct balance to assure your profitability is maximized through cost-effective product development can be tricky; however, skilled industrial design companies in California are well versed in working while wasting as minimal resources as possible, so you can be sure your products are priced fairly for both you and the market.
Hire Design Stein Studios to Improve Your Product
If customers are consistently taking issue with a particular aspect of your product, it may be time to enact certain adjustments to protect your business’s profitability. Luckily, these changes are typically fairly simple to make, especially when you have a knowledgeable industrial design team by your side. By outsourcing this job to a company like Design Stein Studios, we can work alongside you to investigate what customers are saying about your products and use their insight to make any necessary modifications to your product, whether they be to its features, functionality, aesthetics, or the process itself, in order to appease the market and create loyal customers who will advocate for your business and the success of your products.
Do you need to improve your products? Call (714) 375-4846 to find out how Design Stein Studios’ industrial design services can help today.