Customer interaction - Ensuring that solutions to problems are put out frequently on the product page

Just selling a product is not enough. Unless a company is in a very niche area where there are very competitors, customers should be seen from the long term. There have been some good products that have failed because of inadequate attention being paid to ensuring that the customers are happy and satisfied. Every product will have defects (if somebody is claiming that there product does not have any defects, you can be confident that they are lying), the way forward is to ensure that you have the right strategy in dealing with such defects.
There are many defects that have a workaround. So, for example, a customer may be running into a problem with a specific workflow using a set of steps, and there is a certain defect in either the process of the workflow, or in the information generated at the end of the workflow. Now, there are certain customers for whom this workflow is not important enough, or was something that they tried only a few times, and did not try again, or that they feel that they will not try. There could be other customers for whom the workflow is very important, and they do not feel right about this workflow not working.
Along with the different impact of such a defect to customers, there are also differences with the way that the customers raise such issues. There are customers who will actually raise such complaints to the customer service team of the product, who will search for this issue and look for any solutions posted by the company or by other users, and will visit user forums seeing whether other users are also getting such solutions and whether the company has posted anything with regard to such solutions.
In earlier posts, I have mentioned how the company should be monitoring the user forums, looking at customer complaints and the like, so that they know whether their customers are facing issues, and so on. And it is not just looking for such complaints or issues, but reaching out to people who have reported such issues. This reach out gives customers a great feeling that the product is supported by people who are responsive to customer issues, and this increases their attachment to the product.
There is another higher level in terms of responding to customers. If the team reaches a point where they feel that the case is critical, or where a number of customers are reporting the same issue, the team should consider investigating the issue such that some kind of solution is available. This might mean interacting with customers to get more information about the problem, and then putting in the best possible effort to solve the problem and figure out a solution. This solution could be in the form of a small patch that is posted on the product site along with an article that details how to use the patch; it could be in the form of some steps that prevents the product from getting into a state where the defect occurs (for example, we once had a case where we could edit a specific registry entry and an application crash was prevented), or it could be in any other form.
The point to all this was to figure out that there was a problem that needed the attention of the product team (often this would be flagged by the customer support team, since they kept a track of what issues were becoming critical; but this could be seen by looking at items / complaints getting posted by users on other online forums), investigate the issue and figure out a solution. Once the solution was available, then the next step would be post an article that detailed the issue, and then list the steps needed to solve the issue. The advantage of posting these on a site was that the post would also bet picked up by search engines and when a user ran across the issue and did a search, they would quickly find the solution.

Support forums - encouraging users to add their feedback and increase communication levels

In today's world (actually even in times gone by), it was always important for makers of software to engage with their customers. If you build something, you may be secure in the knowledge that you did your best and built your software to meet the customer needs and expectations, but if you are not engaged with your customers, then you might not be on the path to success. What works with customers can be enumerated through marketing and surveys to the highest degree, but customers have a horrible way of surprising even the best laid plans. You may turn out with a very successful software product, or you may turn out with a product that may fail to click with customers. How do you prevent this from happening ? Well, you need to be engaged with your customers, get their opinions, and do so in a way that you are getting it in their natural setting (and not depend entirely on a controlled setting where people representing customers are presented questions and information taken from these answers); and so this before, during and after your product is released.
Why would you want to get information from customers after your product is released ? Well, unless you are there for a one-off product, you need to ensure that your customers are engaged with you, feel that their opinions are taken into account, and if they have any queries, those are answered. And a critical part of that is about ensuring that their opinions and complaints are responded back. However, one major problem that I have seen is that formal customer support is more and more treated as a way to also generate revenue (or also to atleast cover costs). If done well and if you have skilled customer support, then you end up with customers who are satisfied. However, I have also seen customers who are very dis-satisfied with the level of customer support that they are getting and this forms the basis of a bad opinion of the product and of the organization. I was recently searching for some help on a topic related to MS Word, and found a page where users had suggested some solutions, and this worked for me as well. But, when you read about the opinions expressed by many of the users, the common complaint used to be that the customer support was unable to help them, and then they found a solution on a web page, and continued customer interaction on that web page brought such pages to the top of web searches for that particular problem.
And this is where teams and organizations need to be focusing. Formal customer support in the form or chat and telephone may have a certain resolution capability and experience, but it is important to combine this with web pages where users can report problems and get solutions. I have seen teams where team members are encouraged to respond to user problems and suggest solutions (especially in cases where customers are looking for simple items such as looking for a certain feature or a plugin, or some other issue that is not machine or user specific). In the cases I have seen where teams did this kind of interaction, we also saw that other users also started jumping in where they could suggest solutions or where there was a case where they had been given a solution in the past and they could post the same solution for another user. In addition, we had started tagging users with badges which identified them as experts at proposing solutions, and this started to build (pride and the prestige associated with getting recognized in front of other users would make sure that people got into this mode of reporting solutions). Eventually, this got into a self-sustaining mode, but the team ensured that it it did not let up about their interactions with users).
These pages also started getting reported higher and higher on search engines, and as a result, more and more users started landing on such pages when they were running into problems and for most of the users, there was not a need to go to formal customer support mechanisms.