In 2010, Microsoft had hit rock bottom. The once might king of technology was oveshadowed by Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.
It was spending billions on new products with nothing to show for it.
It’s search engine Bing was a distant second to Google.
The Vista operating system was plagued with bugs.
The windows phone was too late and too lame. It bought Nokia for billions but wrote it off as a loss.
It’s Xbox gaming system was losing money.
Internet Explorer browser was very unpopular.
It seemed Microsoft kept failing no matter what it tried.
Things started changing with it’s new CEO – Satya Nadella. The company realized that it could no longer look to the future while staying focused on Windows.
Nadella began reorienting the company to the cloud and began building a cloud infrastructure for business. It tried this before but had failed.
But this time they used a radically different approach.
They started talking to customers to understand their needs and frustrations. Based on the feedback they built tools that allowed customers to easily use it’s cloud services.
The results have been clear.
Sigups to its cloud service – Microsoft Azure started going up significantly. The new cloud unit is now generating billions in revenue.
Microsoft’s stock price recently hit an all time high.
Listening to customers has always worked. It always leads to more revenue and profits.
But a business has to speak to the right customers.
There are two groups that are most helpful:
First is your best customers – the ones who are buying repeatedly from you now.
Second is your former best customers – these are customers who *used* to buy repeatedly from you but have stopped.
Talking to these two groups of customers will yield profitable insights.
RewardCamp provides a list of both current and former best customers, along with their detailed buying history, in an easy to use way.
Sign up now at www.rewardcamp.com