Bill Myers - August 23, 2008

One way to significantly increase customer satisfaction is to get your product in the hands of beta testers before you release it to the public.

Doing this can help you find embarrassing typos, confusing or missing documentation, missing or inoperable features, and help you create a much better and more polished product.

Finding beta testers is usually pretty easy. Just identify people who are likely customers, and ask them if they would try your product and give you their feedback and suggestions.

Tell them you want their unvarnished opinions. No sugarcoating, just their honest opinions and suggestions.

Then take the feedback they give you and use that to make your product better.

For example, I recently invited all the members of www.bmyers.com to become beta testers for a major new software product I've been developing.

And the results have be phenomenal.

With their feedback, we've been able to go through and polish up a few rough edges, correct a few typos, and add some extra features that really make the product zing.

If you're interested in seeing what they've been testing, just log into the members area of www.bmyers.com and you'll find it there.