Struggling in the mire: 6 routines I summarized for To B user operations

The Internet operations we often talk about are mostly aimed at the C-end, and the B-end is rarely mentioned due to its particularity.

By chance, I had the opportunity to experience the process of building an Internet payment project from 0 to 1. The user operation experience and insights I share with you today (given that the user group of To B products are mostly enterprises, user operation in this article refers more to merchant operation, but the two also have something in common) are also summarized from struggling in the mire.

1. Communicate with users and make them feel respected and happy

The rational nature of B-side users makes customer acquisition more difficult than expected in the early stages of product promotion . After acquiring customers, we need to communicate with them a lot, and the key points of communication are different at different stages, such as:

1. Early stage: At this time, users learn about our products through the website, express interest, and register. However, due to the existence of information asymmetry, users will still show doubts and instability, so communication at this stage focuses on exploring users' real demands, highlighting the differences and advantages of their own products, and capturing users' hearts.
2. In the medium term, when users have recognized our products, we will arrange for both parties to conduct technical debugging. Therefore, it is very important at this stage to coordinate technical resources, respond quickly to technical issues, and alleviate users' emotions about the imperfect product functions.
3. Later, after the user product is launched, various transaction problems, system problems, and functional defects that exist also require us to communicate and resolve them time-consuming and labor-intensively.

All our communications are conducted through QQ, WeChat or telephone. Many communication skills are based on equality between both parties, especially respect for users, such as speaking in a calm tone and using more honorifics (you, I'm sorry...). By creating a relaxed and pleasant communication atmosphere, users can be recognized and have a sense of belonging, and the value of our product can be realized.

2. Use professional knowledge to convince users

A major feature of B-side products is that they are highly professional and complex, and most people are not familiar with them or even have no idea about them. When users use our products, we play more of the role of experts. Because we are aimed at corporate users, there are two types of people who need to obtain professional information from us: one is the corporate decision makers (bosses or managers), who are responsible for making decisions based on their own ideas; and the other is technical personnel, who are responsible for achieving product technology docking.

The payment SDK products we develop also need to demonstrate different levels of professionalism when facing these two types of people.

• For decision makers, what they care about are business-level issues such as why your rates are priced this way, how to clear and settle funds, what are the differences between each payment product, and whether the payment scenarios of the business are compliant. This requires operations to accumulate knowledge in the payment industry through continuous professional learning.
• For technical personnel, what they care about are: how the security of data transmission is guaranteed, how the signature method is implemented, how the front-end and back-end are connected, and other technical details. This question can be answered by a dedicated technical team, and operations also need to have a simple understanding of the internal technical implementation methods of their own products.

Therefore, once a user has a question, don’t rush to answer it. Think clearly about who asked the question, what the question is, what the confusion is, and what kind of answer he needs to convince himself that this is the product he wants. The answers and solutions must be correct and professional. This is also an opportunity to highlight the image of your company and products. If you accidentally provide the wrong solution, don't be too anxious. Humbly admitting the mistake and providing a more professional solution will also win the user's recognition.

Assist in the development of operations by learning professional knowledge

3. Timely response and feedback

In "The Design of Future Products", Norman mentioned that because the hotel environment is noisy and there are many people taking the elevator, he could neither hear the sound of the elevator door opening and closing nor see the indicator light, which resulted in him sitting on the wrong floor several times. This is the consequence of an imperfect feedback mechanism. Feedback tells us what state we are in and what we should do. Without feedback, people will feel anxious and out of control.

On the one hand, corporate users are rational and have the patience to wait for a response to solve their problems; on the other hand, waiting takes time, and users also hope for a time limit.

Don’t just keep saying, “wait a minute, we’re dealing with this kind of vague and meaningless words.” Unless you can give a reply in a short time, the user will become anxious and out of control because the long wait will not get a real solution.

The correct answer should be that the operation should evaluate the time limit for handling the problem based on the actual situation. For example: tell the user that we are already dealing with it and it is expected to be available normally in 10 minutes/the problem will be solved before 12 o'clock... The advantage of this is that the user has an expectation, he can feel that things are under his control, and feel emotionally relaxed. What if we haven’t given the merchant feedback before or after the deadline? We should apologize humbly, notify the user of the change (reason) in advance or in a timely manner (before the merchant asks us back), and then inform them of the subsequent plan.

The principle here is that we should proactively provide feedback rather than letting users wait and worry.

4. Don’t necessarily do what the user asks you to do

Listening to user demands and conducting needs analysis are usually the tasks of product managers , but in fact, it is the operations staff who have the most contact with users and are the ones who can obtain first-hand information. From a certain perspective, operations can fully play the role of analyzing user needs. It all depends on whether the operator has such self-positioning.

Our own products often encounter various requirements raised by merchants, such as: the checkout page needs to be customized, the logo can be modified, data transmission needs more encryption methods, request and response parameters need to be customized, demos in various languages ​​are needed...User requirements are not equal to real needs, just like in the Nokia era, users said we want a keyboard that types faster, but the keyboard was designed to be ergonomic, but it was still defeated by the iPhone.

How operations balance the needs of products and merchants is a very important art. The premise of balance is to understand our product’s current strategic position in the company, the level of attention from senior management, the proportion of resource investment, and the proportion of the population for which the product is currently applicable. If the product itself has a low strategic position, which means few resources, then the needs of the merchants must be taken into consideration as the focus. If the current product has met 80% of the merchant needs, then other reasonable demands should be incorporated into the later product planning, and the unreasonable ones should be naturally eliminated.

But sometimes, under the pressure of some so-called big internal customers, we will give priority to meeting their requirements, which will invisibly take up too many resources and disrupt product development. For example, our previous SDK only supports in-app signing, taking into account the needs of more than 90% of users for low access difficulty and low technical hardware requirements. The disadvantage is that the security level is relatively low. At this time, a large customer with strong internal technical capabilities raised an objection and required enhanced signature security. We immediately made product modifications, but in the end the customer still found fault and gave up using our product. Although this type of demand is in line with the trend of our future products, the initial cost of meeting a customer's request is not small. Of course, this was a decision made by the boss, so we had to go ahead with it.

For different target users , if the product itself does have imperfect functions, we must also provide timely feedback to the product and tell users to wait for our new functions. Learn to paint the right rosy picture so that users can see hope and expectations, but also consider the user's tolerance limit.

5. Focus on 20% of core value users

The long tail theory states that the narrow tail of the demand curve is distributed with a large number of products and users, which is a treasure trove of opportunities. The development of third-party payment in China is indeed in line with this theory. Small businesses that banks are unwilling to get involved in have given third-party payment companies room to develop. But we should not ignore that even the long tail cannot escape the 80/20 rule , just like Alipay and Tenpay have already occupied 70-80% of the market share and obtained most of the profits.

Operational work is very complicated and time is limited. To achieve high ROI, we must serve 20% of core value users well. Our product is in the early stages of promotion and the number of users is small, so we treat every user as our own precious heart. Especially when business or internal colleagues throw a big customer to us, we have to take it and serve it well. The result in most cases is that after much difficulty the product is connected, there is no transaction volume at all.

As the volume of business grows, it becomes necessary to establish user screening and classification strategies. The operation should quickly determine this user:

1. Is this my target user?
2. Do you recognize our products and services?
3. Are you sensitive to price?
4. Are you prone to complain?
5. What returns are expected.
6. Is the cooperation process going smoothly?

…

At the same time, based on some simple and specific rules, such as corporate registered capital, background strength, profit model, transaction scale, number of users, etc., we identify core users and allocate more resources to them. Be wary of non-core users, especially disruptive users, who may have endless demands and challenges and will continue to consume the company's resources. Be brave enough to give up on such users when necessary.

Of course, the classification criteria for users are different at each stage of the product. What is important is continuous iteration and optimization in practice.

6. Data-driven operations

In the Internet era where more and more attention is paid to data, the sooner data-driven operations are carried out, the better, but the focus will be different at different stages. In the early days, when the payment product had no users or very few users, we focused more on brand communication, website traffic , and new user data. After the user scale increases, we begin to pay attention to user business-level data, such as transaction data, transaction success rate, failure rate, channel distribution, etc. At another level, user activity and silent churn data also began to receive attention.

Our earliest data was issued in the form of daily reports, system briefings, and data group reports, but their data was more inclined to explain the data itself, with too little business analysis. At this time, operations need to be optimized based on existing data reports and add more business analysis. For example, is the decline in website traffic due to reduced promotion efforts, weak brand communication, or the rise of competitors? Is the decrease in merchant transactions due to loss or silence? Is there a problem with the business or the project?

One of the transaction data templates, learn version management

One thing that needs to be clarified here is that it is necessary for those who do operations to master powerful data analysis tools ? My understanding is that when a company has a dedicated data group, operations only need to have data sensitivity and thinking, allowing a more professional data group to handle massive amounts of data. Professionals do professional things. They can process data in just a few minutes that might take you hours to process.

Once we have the data and analysis, we need to present it to the relevant team. We can use Excel spreadsheets, Word or PPT to present it. The tool is not important. What is important is that the content presented is valuable. Valuable reference: The time of leaders and colleagues is precious. The report should be concise and highlight the key points. Tell them what we have done, what achievements we have made, what problems we have encountered, and our future direction.

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