It is common for the product development world to categorize organizations as either ‘Product centric’ or ‘Customer centric’ and stress on the point that you need to be ‘Customer centric’ to sremain successful. In my opinion, there are no separate entities called ‘Product centric’ and ‘Customer centric’ . Every product development company needs to be ‘product centric’ and every product being built needs to be ‘Customer centric’. This results in compounding the customer satisfaction. Especially when you are building public facing enterprise products targeting a million or a billion users, it is critical to understand both the customers and the product, and to maintain harmony between them. Its important not to be too focused on individual customers so that we keep the product generic and are solving the problems we intend to solve.
It is not only important to have a vision and process, but also execute them through the product. More than our sales representatives and advertisements, it’s the product that the customers spend more time with.
- Build the products that speak to the customers.
- Build the products that listen to the customers.
- Build the products that educate the customers.
Listed below are some things we follow which, i think are the efforts towards building such products.
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT:
Always go for small and focused product development teams. This worked very well for us. Being a small and focused team, we have an ideal combination here where the designers and the developers work very closely on products. The principles followed during the designs are to keep things consistent and intuitive. Every screen and behavior is designed and decided in a way that it not only looks visually appealing but is also functionally efficient. One example of a good design comes from one of our learning products is that any trainer can set up a site in a few seconds, create courses and start teaching.
We focus on giving the best experience not only to the professionals but also beginners. A great way to measure this is through customer calls. We aim at receiving minimum calls from the users asking us about a certain feature. If there is a feature which is not intuitive enough, it will not be delivered to the end user until it gets simplified.
Apart from this, we also understand that the users make mistakes. Hence, we make the user interface forgiving by providing the options to recover from errors.
Developers not only play a vital role in transforming the design into a functional product but also in enhancing the designs. Developers take initiatives to make complex things simple. They don’t hesitate writing a few thousand lines of extra code to simplify the customer’s job. For example, setting up own domain is automated so that even the users with little technical knowledge can do these things with the click of a button. Every feature is built in a way that it scales. So customers don’t have to worry about peak traffic hours. Dev-ops team contributes in identifying and fixing the scalability problems.
Hence, there is a perfect co-ordination among the teams which results in a highly efficient customer experience.
REVIEW AND EVOLVE:
Product goes through a number of reviews before and after the release. Before the release, review happens by paying attention to each and every detail so that a pixel perfect product is delivered. Each page, section and string is reviewed carefully so that customers do not find any faulty or ambiguous behavior. We believe that a product is never complete. Once it is released, efforts will be made in an iterative fashion to have the things improved and simplified. One example is that we keep upgrading the User Interface various rounds with a view of improving the experience every time and keep it up to date.
SUPPORT:
This is a critical factor in keeping the customers happy. We do not hold a huge support team for any of the products but product itself is built in a way to help the support process more efficient. We support our customers in two ways:
1. Proactive support:
We do not wait for the customers to report the issues back but product itself keeps monitoring various customer interactions to identify problems. Exception notifiers, real time monitoring and google analytics play an important role in identifying issues proactively and fix them without customers having to report. This is an example of product listening to the customers
2. Reactive support:
This happens when customer requests for help about the product. Reaching out to the support team has been made very simple and we typically respond as soon as possible. Developers are closely involved in this part as well and so far there are not many customer questions that are left unanswered.
In conclusion, all the processes are product centric with the customers in mind. This helps us in pushing the limits of the old 80-20 rule (if 80% of your customers are happy, you are successful) by keeping the happy customers percentage as close to 100 as possible.