How Hevo brings Customer Obsession to Tech
Great companies build products that their customers love. The obsession to please one’s customers drives those companies to think and deliver beyond what is required from the product. The engineers at Apple obsess over the roundness of the iPhone’s edges, the engineers at Tesla obsess over the thud of the door handles, Amazon obsesses over delivering the order on time.
This obsession of building something great, something that leaves your customers spellbound is the bedrock of being a customer-centric company. There are countless examples where companies have gone over and beyond consistently to deliver a great customer experience and have built timeless brands in the course.
“You’ve gotta start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology” — Steve Jobs
Easier said than done. Customers are not always right, they don’t always know what they want, and they are often not easy to work with. Regardless, a singular belief that only the customer is who you serve, and having the humility to accept mistakes as a team is what is needed to be truly customer-centric.
There is no dearth of companies claiming to be (or at least wanting to be) customer-centric. Every brand that doesn’t even pick up your phone call when you are stuck with their product claims to love its customers.
At Hevo, we always strive to be customer-centric. However, the trickiest part is to maintain the same level of customer-centricity as the team grows.
There are a few very simple things that we have done to do the same:
We have defined our user persona well
The first thing we did and continue to do is define the user persona more clearly with each passing day. User persona should describe your users as humans and not just as attributes. You must be able to visualize a person who resembles your persona. A good example of that is “All users whose designation is VP of Marketing in a Fintech company which is less than 500 people in size in North America.” A bad example is “All users who run marketing in fintech companies”. You can have multiple personas to target as long as they are clearly defined individually.
We articulate our unique value proposition (that matters to your customers) well
There is no generic definition of a great product. A product that is a lifesaver for someone may be completely useless for someone else. To build the right product for your customers you need to define the USPs well. For us it has always been one thing - “Hevo is the most easy-to-use data pipeline on the cloud”. All efforts hence are supposed to be in the direction of making the product easier to use.
We bring raw customer feedback back to the ground
We never believed in hiding or moderating customer feedback. We are adults, and adults know how to take feedback. Everyone in Hevo has access to customer feedback coming in from every channel (support, sales, marketing). We also facilitate looking at customer feedback by publishing it on slack channels.
Raw customer feedback helps engineering teams to align their priorities to deliver an awesome customer experience.
We watch our customers use our product
The best way to take customer feedback is not to ask them. It is to watch them use your product. We have done that from day one. We record user sessions (responsibly) with FullStory. It gives us immense insights into how our users are interacting with our product. A big part of our product roadmap is driven by insights generated from watching these sessions.
Engineers are product owners
The easiest way to kill innovation and make engineers lazy is by spoon-feeding them the requirements. We believe engineers are great at logical thinking, problem-solving, and taking ownership. At Hevo engineers are owners of their products. They have to define the problem statements, find solutions, and follow them up for more improvements.
Engineers are responsible to think about customer experience
At Hevo engineers don’t get away with building crummy customer experience. They are supposed to think about the usability of their features.
Customer issues take priority
The things that bother customers a lot is encountering issues when they are using your product. What bothers them, even more, is when they have to wait for weeks for the issues to be fixed. We take customer issues at the highest priority, often at inconvenience to ourselves.
Our roadmap is defined by how often a feature is wanted by customers
We pick features based on how often they are requested by our customers. It gives them confidence that we are listening to them and are standing behind our product. Anybody suggesting a feature in the team is also often required to show evidence that it has been often requested by customers, this takes developers’ and product managers’ whims out of the picture.
We don’t believe we are there yet, building a great product takes hard work and toil. However, everybody in our team shares the same obsession, each one of us makes the effort to go the extra mile every day. If you feel you and we think alike, give us a shout at create@hevodata.com.
