I thought this topic deserved a post of it’s own, because it’s a problem that I had not anticipated until it came up. And that is customer feedback. Any good product design course will tell you that you need customer feedback during the entire design process- from inception to final design. So that’s what we tried to do: we had put out our first product iteration, and now it was time to see how we had done.
Where’s the problem? When we went to ask people for feedback, people considered us a nuisance and didn’t want to answer any questions.
“What, all this for a 10INR service? Just cancel my service, don’t come back”.
What we forget when we are making our product, throwing our lives into it, and essentially thinking that our product is God’s gift to mankind, is that to the end customer…it’s really not. Well, let me rephrase that. It is helpful, and people like it (especially for 10 INR). But do they like it enough to have us come to their doorstep 3 times a month (once to collect money for the service, once to see if they want to add the cost to the water bill, and once to ask for their input?) No. Not yet at least. (And yes, as soon as we started getting these negative responses, we stopped asking for customer feedback)
One thing that we need to streamline are the customer touchpoints. Until we are a household name, we can’t afford to “bother” the customers. Which means, that we have to be smart about how we interact with the customers (this sounds like common sense, but believe me, when you are thinking about your product 24X7, your perception becomes skewed).
The end lesson to any new startup: Make the customer experience seamless, and tie customer feedback into that process from the very beginning. Think of the types of things that you will want to know about your product and somehow find a way to unobtrusively build that in to your customer interaction framework.
This will happen in the coming months for NextDrop (as I am confident that our team will find a way to make it part of our systematic process of customer enrollment), but as of right now, we are back to the proverbial drawing board.
We will post updates in the coming months.
“Customers Are King” in India that would be a cruel joke. Very caustic but true. just look around you. think of instances for other products or services when feedback was asked for or a valid/genuine complaint was attended to the customer’s satisfaction. Customer is a variable which can be manipulated using the difficult (but once mastered very effective) “art” of Indian Psychology Explain why MNC with good product or service fails in India but a MNC with a inferior product or service (compared to with what it offers in USA or Europe) does well in India. Even Indian companies which operate abroad have a different set of standards for the local market and foreign market.
Thanks for sharing about this experience! Good reminder to those of us interested in development work that we have to be aware of our role and presence in a community and involve the customer from the beginning, when working to address a problem. Please keep us updated on some of the changes NextDrop makes when applying the findings from the customer feedback.
Interesting stuff. It must be difficult to find that right balance between being unobtrusive, but also making the customer aware that you do indeed care about their feedback.
Even Indian companies which operate abroad have a different set of standards for the local market and foreign market.