Have you ever noticed how it’s the little things about any product, service or offering that really get up your nose over time? It seems to me that we are willing to forgive really glaring gaps in software functionality but the fact that it takes too many clicks to get some particular place in the application or that 90% of the application behaves a certain way, but the other 10% works in the exact opposite way just makes us want to spit nails?

I recently had this fact driven home for me by a good friend and fellow Product Manager. A while back an executive from one of his company’s largest customers came to visit. The goal of the meeting was to discuss his customer’s evolving needs and how a software vendor might be able to help the company meet some of their anticipated challenges – solid Product Management practice to be sure.

Naturally my friend was all set to roll out the roadmap slides and talk about how his company’s product is evolving to meet the changing needs of its customers. Interestingly enough, what this executive really wanted to talk about though was usability. In fact, he even went as far as to bring along a compiled list of the myriad little details about using my friend’s software product that really made him crazy.

To my friend’s chagrin, the conversation focused very heavily on dozens of relatively minor changes that could be made to the software to make the user experience less frustrating and more positive. No thundering multimedia presentations about the Grand Vision. No need for Pie Charts, User Survey results or industry White Papers, just some nipping and tucking to reduce the number of keystrokes, organize information more logically and provide a more consistent User Interface.

Of course this got me thinking (and writing as it turns out). We sure do spend a lot of time deciding on what the next big feature should be or (more valuably IMHO) what big problem we are going to help our customers solve next. But what about current users who are having some trouble getting the product to do exactly what it is that they bought it to do? Well sure we fix bugs and such but isn’t it time we gave a good solid think to what we are doing to do for our current customers to make it easier to use our products?

I know, you’re thinking “But current customers only contribute a small portion of our revenue. Net new customers are where the big dollars are.” Perhaps, but consider the following…

As software sales move more toward a SaaS (Software as a Service) business model, the focus has to be on retaining existing customers and growing more usage within a given set of accounts. There is no more “big bang” of license revenue and “little aftershocks” of maintenance revenue in the saas model, just one nice flat, predictable revenue stream. This is really a game changer if you think about it. Customers that buy your software likely have all of the major functionality they need, or they probably would not have bought yet. However, if they find it difficult to do the basic things that they bought the software to do, we risk the dreaded customer attrition. In this model it is far more important to keep current users happy so they re-sign year after year.

Tired Marketing Cliché # 5847 says that it is (depending on who you listen to) it is somewhere between 25 and 300 percent cheaper to generate revenue from an existing customer than from net new customers. Trite? Yes. Hackneyed? For sure. However, someone once told me that things get to become clichés because they are at least partly true. You know, I believe she was right in this case.

So, as the worlds of our customers and our own business models continues to change and evolve, should we be changing the balance between improving the usability of our current products and adding new functionality?

I say absolutely yes. After all, it wouldn’t it be a shame if our revenues bled out through a thousand little cuts while we are rushing around trying to build the next Big Thing?