--- title: The Secret To Making Customer Relationships A Superpower description: How do you take your customer relationships and turn it into a superpower? How do you go beyond what most companies do? image: https://www.onstartups.com/hubfs/super-woman-horizontal.jpg --- # The Secret To Making Customer Relationships A Superpower Written By: [Dharmesh Shah](https://www.onstartups.com/author/dharmesh-shah) March 11, 2021 The Secret To Making Customer Relationships A Superpower Written by [Dharmesh Shah](https://www.onstartups.com/author/dharmesh-shah) on March 11, 2021 - - - - Every company wants great relationships with its customers. The question what does it take to truly turn your connection with customers into a superpower? Let's start very simply. The most obvious (and most common) way to deepen a customer relationship is to ask for customer feedback so that you can improve your product. You do NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys. You set up focus groups. You conduct user testing. You try to identify bugs. You try to collect, categorize and prioritize new feature requests. All good things to do. If you’re not doing those things, you should start. It’s good, clean living. Next, there’s an *even* better thing to do. Don’t just get feedback on your product, get feedback on  your entire customer experience. What’s it like evaluating your product before buying? Was it easy to figure out pricing? Was a conversation with a sales person necessary? If so, was that conversation *enjoyable* or dreadful? What do customers think about the invoice emails they get from you? Are they clear? How do they feel about your support? Is your sales team helpful or aggressive when looking to upsell existing customers? Is your experience good enough that when the customer changes jobs, they take you with them to their new gig? If you’re not collecting feedback and seeking answers to these kinds of questions, you should start. It’s better, cleaner living. Once you start getting good at this kind of customer feedback, there’s one more level to achieve. And, it’s not about “collecting feedback”. The inherent limitation with collecting customer feedback is that it’s all about *you*. How *your* product can get better. How *your* business can get better. Nothing wrong with your goal being to make *your* business better. That is a fine, understandable goal to have. But, in order to truly build that deeper connection and understanding, it can't be about you. Not directly. The next level is going beyond collecting customer feedback and connecting to a customer's hopes, dreams and fears. Remember, customers are people too.  How is your customer *doing*? Are they OK? What’s work been like? What’s *life* been like? What problems are they trying to solve? What is keeping them up at night? Now, you might have this question in your head: *“Dharmesh, this is all well and good, but how is all that relevant to my business?”* It may or may not be relevant to your business. But I guarantee you it’s relevant to *the customer*. And *they* are relevant to your business. You may find that response a tad too abstract and not sufficiently satisfying. So, let me expand on it. Let’s say you’re looking to spot new market trends before others. Find new adjacencies to expand your offering. Identify an acute market need. The best way to do these kinds of things is to understand your customers. Like, *really* understand them and what’s going on in their lives. The ability to deeply connect with customers in this way is a super power.   Does it scale? No. But, it doesn’t need to. Even if after a hundred conversations you uncover  just one transforming insight, it’s worth it. And you will. It’s just a matter of time. At my company, HubSpot, we believe that we’re not just here to build software, we’re here to build careers. So, we really try to dig into the true needs of our customers. We ask ourselves not just what our software can do for them, but what our *company* can do for them. That mindset has served us well -- and I think it would work for you too. ## Related Posts [The Most Important Thing to Do Before Building Your Startup #StartupAdvice June 3, 2014 We failed. After 6 months poring over the code quality and refining the design of our mobile app, my partner and I finally launched it in the app store and the downloads started… Read Post ** ](https://www.onstartups.com/the-most-important-thing-to-do-before-building-your-startup) [How To Get Media Coverage For Your Startup: A Complete Guide March 22, 2012 The following is a guest post by Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, a smarter way to post on Social Media. [Note: I'm an angel investor in Buffer and love what they're doing] The… Read Post ** ](https://www.onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/80121/How-To-Get-Media-Coverage-For-Your-Startup-A-Complete-Guide.aspx) Subscribe ### Get OnStartup News and Updates in your Inbox. ```json { "@context" : "https://schema.org", "@type" : "BlogPosting", "author" : { "@type" : "Person", "name" : "Dharmesh Shah", "url" : "https://www.onstartups.com/author/dharmesh-shah" }, "dateModified" : "2021-03-12T19:26:55.878Z", "datePublished" : "2021-03-11T19:48:53.000Z", "headline" : "The Secret To Making Customer Relationships A Superpower", "image" : [ "https://www.onstartups.com/hubfs/super-woman-horizontal.jpg" ], "mainEntityOfPage" : { "@id" : "https://www.onstartups.com/the-secret-to-making-customer-relationships-a-superpower", "@type" : "WebPage" }, "publisher" : { "@type" : "Organization", "logo" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "url" : "https://www.onstartups.com/hubfs/mjtw-assets/logos/onstartups-logo@2x.png" }, "name" : "OnStartups" } } ```