Case Study of a Failed Frictionless Customer Experience
Why we have failed with Landbot and what we are going to do about it.
Recently I wrote an article about Frictionless Customer Experience (FCX). For my surprise, it got a high amount of interest from people all around the world. Even Medium helped to spread the word:
FCX is the mindset of a business that pursues continuously the right product to customers at the right moment and in the right channel.
This is what inspired us to build Landbot.io. So after publishing the post, we did a self-reflection on how our own company was doing regarding the FCX. It was a shock to us, and we realized how far Landbot.io was from being frictionless, as it was actually quite painful.
To understand why we have failed, you would need a little context about Landbot.io
Our mission is to help businesses create Frictionless Customer Experiences by using Conversational Interfaces (chatbots). We want to think big, but start small. That’s why we are focusing first on landing pages, one of the most common tools in early stages of the customer journey. It’s also the first experience companies provide to their potential clients.
Reid Hoffman once said: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” It was one of the main reason we wanted to launch the first version of Landbot.io as soon as possible to get real feedback from users.
To some degree, it worked. We launched on Product Hunt in July, and despite fucking up the launch day we got +1700 upvotes. However, soon after the launch we realized that we had just made the opposite mistake: launch too early.
Many PH users were very excited about Landbot, however, got frustrated after the first experience. Here is some of the feedback we received:
We were aware of the early state of Landbot would piss off some first-time users. But we naively believed that most users would be tolerant about the defects of the product and stick with us.
The reality is that as our momentum has passed, the user traffic dropped, and people weren’t using the platform as much as we imagined. There was a huge misalignment between our communication and user expectation.
We were selling Landbot as it was the future of landing pages (which I believe it will be eventually). But the reality is that, the product currently is far away from the state it should be to deliver the promise we are making.
Glitches and bugs on UX, non-existing onboarding process, confusing and anti-natural bot building process all these issues are making the life like hell for 90% of new users.
If we truly want to build Frictionless Customer Experiences, the current version of Landbot is certainly not going to make that happen. That’s why, after the awakening from our mistake, we wanted to take action and make things right.
Next steps
As CEO and co-founder of Landbot.io, I want to share with all users (current and future) some critical changes we have made:
- BETA mode. Starting from today, Landbot will switch to private beta mode. We have disabled the direct access to the platform for new users. They can subscribe to our waitlist for the upcoming Landbot 1.0. We will solve the main issues of the current platform as fast as we can and will send invitations progressively to let beta users access a much polished and better platform.
- New pricing. Thanks to the feedback we received from our early users we have changed as well our pricing. Now in the Sandbox (free) Plan, new users can get unlimited leads and the option to embed Landbot on their own website.
- Landbot 1.0. As I mentioned before, we are preparing the Landbot 1.0 which is not a random name; we wanted to call it so, to remind us how we failed in the first version and Landbot 1.0 will be the actual starting point for us deliver real value to our users. We are redesigning the whole bot building process. We will also add new features like a template system with pre built landbots, more options to personalize messages, etc., Stayed tuned for future updates!
- Share learnings. We want to build the future of conversational experience together with our users. We are the first to experiment new use cases of conversational interfaces. All insights and learnings will be shared with the community so everyone can learn from our experience.
- Existing users. First of all, you will be the first beta users to try out new features of landbot 1.0 and help us to shape the next version of the product. If current users prefer waiting for the final version of Landbot 1.0, you can just subscribe on the waitlist and you will receive a notification from us at the day of the official launch.
Finally, as a reward for your trust and support in us, we will design an exclusive VIP Badge that will only appear on your landbots.
I want to keep this post short, so that´s enough info for today.
Landbot is just getting started, let’s build the future of frictionless customer experiences together 🚀
Best,
Jiaqi, CEO & Co-Founder of Landbot.io
For those interested in Landbot 1.0 you can sign up for the beta access here.
