How Meesho is taking its “customer first” culture to the next level with its Listen or Die programme
According to CEO and Co Founder Vidit Aatrey, ‘Companies of this age and era really have two options with them — either they listen to their customers (and thrive), or, they wilt away.’
He says, “I truly believe in this and do think the most important input in delivering an exceptional user experience and product is the voice of the customer. And our best ideas and solutions at Meesho have always come by listening to our resellers.
And that’s why Meesho launched the Listen or Die programme for the entire organisation — an opportunity for Meeshoites to speak to our resellers. The idea was to make it a common practice across Meesho and cover the entire organisation every two months. And the motive of this exercise was not just to collect feedback, but also to act on it. Being able to get at least a few workable ideas from our reseller conversations and acting on them, would then be a metric of success for Meeshoites.
But what exactly does Listen or Die mean? According to Sean Mc Dade, author of the bestselling book Listen or Die — 40 lessons that turn customer feedback into gold, ‘if you don’t deliver an exceptional experience to your customers that might want to make them shout your name from the rooftops, you might just die!’
And this means talking to your customer, listening to them and getting feedback from them — good or bad. And following up and acting on it to “close the loop!”. Basically, “make it right!”
Some of the most successful brands across the world have made a habit of listening to their customers regularly. It is no secret that Amazon’s success is largely credited to its “obsessive compulsive focus on the customer” over competitors. Amazon’s customer obsession is well documented and here’s how they describe it: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers. Focusing on what customers want and need has made Amazon a truly customer centric company.
Even in its initial days founder Jeff Bezos, set the tone of his meetings by setting an “empty chair” in the room and informed his team members that they should assume that the chair was occupied by the customer — “the most important person in the room”. The presence of the customer was always accounted for and key decisions were made around that.
At Meesho, we not only listen to our customers, but we try to understand what they want and respect them. As Vidit says, “When we build a product for an audience which we are not, then we have to stay close to them. From its early days, Meesho has been a strong believer in staying close to its resellers and listening to their valuable feedback. We have built a culture which is very, very user focused and our monthly “We Hear You” videos are like a townhall for our resellers, where we speak about our new features, what is working and what isn’t and listen and implement on any user feedback we might get.
Ritisha Choudhury, Marketing Manager, Activation Org and Product Manager, Growth, Damini Mishra will elaborate on how and why they ran the Listen or Die programme in their teams.
Over to Ritisha!
At Meesho, we’ve always had a tradition of reaching out to our resellers to find out what is working well for them while doing business on the platform. We would be doing churn surveys and calls and would in the process acquire a lot of insights. During these conversations, we also dug deep into what was not working for them, how are they using their business tactics on the platform, based on the reseller responses. This practice gave us some good insights and made us realise early on that listening to our resellers and being close to them is what is going to get us ahead and help us improve our product, and create business impact. Talking to resellers has always been a practice at Meesho as making them successful is a core Meesho value.
In that sense Listen or Die then is an extension of our monthly video newsletter We Hear You, where we already communicate with our resellers giving them important updates, new launches and how we have acted on their feedback.
The way the Listen or Die programme works is that every individual in the organisation is assigned resellers to call and speak to, and understand their issues. Different buckets of individuals were picked up for this programme, under each org at Meesho. I was assigned the task of running it for the Activation org at Meesho. We spoke to some of our top, churn and new resellers. For instance, for the new resellers, we tried to identify how they had heard of Meesho, how they had arrived on the platform, and how did they feel about the overall app experience, while feedback from top resellers would involve what has worked or not worked for them and what has helped them stick to the Meesho platform.
The major driving point of the conversation was to figure out the reseller experience, and our open ended questions acted like a way to connect a Meesho employee with the end user on the app. Four orgs went through this activity at Meesho — O/R, Activation, Acquisition and BD/Sales. The insights gleaned from these calls were then shared with our CX team, who would then deep dive into the data and present findings.
We had a two-fold aim for this exercise:
- Every individual at Meesho would actually get to know who our resellers are.
- And along with business insights, this is also a great way to ask questions related to your own org at Meesho such as community, branding, or design too. For instance, a product designer could find out more about how the UI for the product appears to a reseller.
The response has actually been great. Meeshoites have really found the activity of speaking to resellers very useful. And this has not only helped put a face to the name but also helped in building trust among our end users.
For any organisation, especially startups, it is very true that either you listen to your customers and build on their feedback (close the loop) or just die and fade away. Managing customer experience is very important and has an impact on business results, in the long run.
For us this is not a routine exercise, but we actually gather actionable insights from this programme. We gather insights and take customer experience from the regular/ average to the exceptional and that is something we continuously strive for. In terms of marketing, we want our resellers to be our brand evangelists and speak for our products.
When they use and talk about Meesho, they are using something that has helped them achieve an identity of their own and has helped them grow as a business professional as well. Women empowerment is a key aspect of Meesho’s work and this is our way of assuring them that we are there for them.
Now let’s hear Damini’s take on why the Listen or Die programme is so important for the Growth org at Meesho
From the perspective of Acquisition, the Growth org works primarily in the acquisition of resellers. And for us to be effective, we need to understand who is it that we are talking to. Who is it that we want to acquire — who is our target audience and what is the kind of message that works for them.
So, the Listen or Die programme is extremely relevant for us. These are the people we have acquired over the past year, and many of them have turned out as great resellers. We talk to them, understand the language they speak, where they come from and tweak our acquisition strategy according to the findings. Speaking and listening to resellers has a direct business impact for us. For instance, if we come across a power reseller who lives in a very small city, and speaks a certain language, we sort of come up with an experiment to see what if we were to try and acquire more people from this place and see if we can get traction from there.
We are very data driven at Meesho, but speaking to resellers is the qualitative aspect to it. Our work is to acquire more of those people who are more likely to become successful resellers down the funnel. For us, it is important to find out what are those quality metrics that will help us define who those successful resellers could be. Geography, gender, age groups as different data points are what we arrive at by looking at data. By talking to resellers it becomes a validation for what we have come up with through data analysis.
I remember Vidit mentioning that a great company is either when you solve a problem that you directly connect with (solve for yourself) or you try to build a product where you solve for others, who have not been able to solve their own problems. And for that you will have to be able to stay super close to your users. And this is why everybody at Meesho is connected to the reseller in some way or the other — whether it is the Growth org which is acquiring more users or the O/R which is helping them to earn more or NPS (Net Promoter Score) team which is ensuring that fulfillment is happening. So everybody is connected to the experience that resellers have.
And because all of us are connected to the resellers in some way or the other, it is very important for us to talk to them to understand the human aspect of it. Otherwise our only interaction with them might be the data that they bring to us. While the number of users we have acquired and converted are certainly important metrics, but if we don’t know who these people are, we can’t understand the human aspect of it and that is something very important for us to design campaigns for the product, to design a good product, and even for branding towards communications.
The Listen or Die programme is probably one of the biggest levers that is helping us get to the next big idea level because these are insights coming directly from the users.
This is not a one time activity and is especially useful for new joinees, because it is important for them to understand and have the larger picture in mind.
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