How far are you willing to go by listening to your customers?
Understanding your users can change your business forever.
This post was originally published in Spanish here. As we received a lot of feedback, we decided to translate it to English. Thanks to everybody! š
Two years ago we decided to create Rodati.com with a single goal in mind: to change the experience of buying cars in Latin America.
I am fortunate to have excellent partners and to be surrounded by a spectacular team, which never shied away from impossible challenges to achieve this ambitious goal.
By constantly paying attention to our customers, iterating our product and making (sometimes rather difficult) decisions, day after day we came a little closer to our goal.
Today is a special day for me and our whole team. We are now much closer to our goal than we were two years ago. This post tells our story, a summary of everything we have experienced so far, and explains the beginning of a new chapter for us: Sirena.
Warning: I couldnāt find a shorter way to express and convey what weāve been trough in order to understand how we evolved to reach the position we have today. Itās a REALLY long post! But the essence of this story lies in the details.
And thus the story beginsā¦
Improving the online experience
When launching this project, we quickly realized that searching for cars and their prices was an important step for the buyer during the purchasing process. When we looked at the available resources back then, we found that most sites provided outdated and less than transparent information, forcing users to spend many days searching for accurate information. We found it hard to believe that in the 21st century customers could not easily find what they were looking for in the comfort of their homes.
We decided to focus on Brazil (the most important market in the region) and we created Rodati.com: a place where customers could easily find reference prices for the cars they are looking for, and where users may contact car dealers to make the purchase as efficiently as possible.
We continued to evolve our product and decided to include our own reviews (we werenāt happy neither with the available material nor with the OEM sites and other online resources).
And finally, we also decided to develop content that would answer our customerās most important questions through Rodati Magazine. (Neither official sites nor other online pages offered the quality material we were looking for, and we had to take inside and outside pictures of every model!)
These changes allowed our users to find better information on our site. Furthermore, our organic traffic began to grow steadily over time:
Going mobile
As we improved our online platform, we noticed a pattern: the ratio of users accessing our platform with mobile devices, both smartphones and tablets, was constantly growing.
Smartphones were just booming in Brazil, and we wanted to surf that wave.
With this in mind, we went back to the blackboard and redesigned our whole website to offer the best possible experience on any mobile device. (Lesson Learned: this is much harder than it seems!).
We adapted our layouts, and in many cases rebuilt them from scratch. In a few weeks, our content was 100% responsive and we could provide a great UI on any screen. š
However, as we delved more into our usersā experience, we realized that there were several issues to improve before we could reach our goal, and it was more than simply building an online platformā¦
Donāt forget the offline experience
For several months we focused on expanding our dealership network along with our transaction volume (our business model was to charge a fee for each generated sale). This scale allowed us to understand their operations and detect common behaviour patterns.
It was a shock to realize that these businesses didnāt have the expertise nor the tools to efficiently deal with digital age customers (knowing what I know today, I realize that this is a widespread pattern that applies to most companies in our region). Basically, sending users to their facilities was like putting them on a roulette wheel where all outcomes were possible. And donāt forget that we were charging for generated sales, not just for sending customers! š±
With this diagnosis in mind, we decided to:
- Assemble a small internal call-center team (Rodati NAR) to work with customers upon their first contact, immediately after their online search and before they contacted our partnering dealers.
- In addition to that, we developed our own CRM (Rodati Tools) and assigned specific dealership sellers to work with the customers generated through our website. This way, we had visibility and a specific person in charge of making things happen.
This different measures dramatically improved our figures. Customers were now handled according to a predictable process, and our userās satisfaction index was improving every week.
At that moment I understood that the key to our success was to combine our customerās online and offline experiences as efficiently as possible.
Seeking perfection
It all started on a Team Day in Buenos Aires, in mid-2015; I remember that unforgettable day very wellā¦
During a team meeting we agreed that despite all the improvements we had implemented, we were not yet satisfied with the quality of the experience our customers were being offered. This was an issue we would have to tackle as a company if we wanted to make a difference.
We listed the problems our customers had, and together we devised some concepts/solutions to improve their experience. The output of that meeting was so good and revolutionary that we unknowingly changed the fate of our company forever.
With several interesting ideas, we set out to validate them on the ground. We came back to Brazil and interviewed our users and our dealersā sellers again. After a couple of days, this is where we were living:
What we implemented was a technique called āDesign Thinkingā, which aims to empathize and devise solutions that will solve real problems of real people. I think this technique is a must for any entrepreneur looking at new ideas and opportunities.
Back to the story, during this process we validated several of our hypotheses and confirmed some others:
- Most dealerships did not have a robust infrastructure that would allow their sellers to load information into a CRM (slow computers, erratic internet, as well as old, unfriendly systems)
- Sellers were often unable to work in their offices (e.g. they would have to keep an eye in the showroom, replace the receptionist or even wash the cars themselves!)
- There were no records whatsoever for 99% of the interactions between sellers and buyers, it simply depended on how much the seller could or wanted to do at that particular time
But, most of all, we understood the reasons why sellers worked in a way that initially seemed whimsical to us, and we empathized with them. We managed to feel what they feel and understand why they act like that.
As the output of this whole process, one of the best ideas, which had emerged from our Team Day and which we managed to validate during the Design Thinking process, was to develop an App that would allow sellers to manage their customers directly from the palm of their hands, on their cellphones.
Returning to MVP mode
True to our style (Lean Startup ā another must for any entrepreneur) of creating things that will both add value and allow us to validate our hypotheses, we devoted all our energies to developing a minimal version of the management App for sellers. 3 weeks later we were testing it with our dealerships.
The result of this test was incredible for us. The time these sellers needed to contact our customers dropped, when using our App, 10 times ā yes, 10 timesā¦ Timeframes that used to be measured in hours or even days were now being measured in minutes. Sellers began to love the way they could manage their customers from the palm of their hands. Supervisors and managers were excited that their sellers were happy with this new tool. And they could monitor their entire business operation, all in one place.
Something important happened thenā¦ For the first time, we saw our customerās eyes shine. We put something they loved in their hands, something that improved both their experience and that of our users. They asked us earnestly to manage their own customers with our App (back then, they could only manage our Rodati.com customers). It was then that we truly realized we had something huge in our handsā¦
Looking at the big picture again
So this is how our company created, in a very short time, 5 different solutionsā¦ and each one could have been a startup in itself!
- We began with Rodati.com, our car search and price comparison platformā¦
- ā¦ and to help customers find all the information they were looking for in one place, we decided to create our own Rodati Magazine and our own Reviews.
- ā¦ but we soon realized that our customers were not being given the treatment we expected from dealerships after leaving their data with us, so we set up an exclusive customer support call center (Rodati NAR).
- Still, dealership sellers were not handling our users the way we wanted, which led us to set up our own CRM (Rodati Tools).
- Finally, we launched our own App, allowing dealership sellers to quickly contact our users and manage them directly from their mobile phones.
Making tough decisions
We have always believed in the motto that the best way to create a spectacular company is by creating a spectacular product. As we say to ourselves internally, āwe must be 10 times betterā.
But this is really complex when you have so many issues to handle, each one with its own complexities, and so many problems to solve ā or opportunities to improve.
āThe essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.ā
- Michael Porter
At that moment we were facing 2 options:
- Keep everything we had built, with our 5 products, our current structure, our team, and try to do our best in these 5 fronts.
- Focus on doing only one thing well, and focus on what our customers were desperately asking us to do.
It was undoubtedly one of the toughest decisions I had to make, together with my partners, in my entire career as an entrepreneur. Neither of the 2 options was right or wrong. Neither of the 2 options was the safest. Neither of the 2 options was the obvious one. But we had to make a decision.
And we finally made the decision. We decided to abandon many of the things we were doing, so that we could focus all our energies on continuing to build what had made our dealerships shine. Today I am convinced that it was the best thing we could have done. It was a difficult decision, but the best one for our company.
This involved dropping 80% of what we had built, which is very difficult when you have sacrificed several months of your life to create it. There was a lot of passion in every detail.
But the toughest part of this whole process was to restructure our company, letting many extremely valuable people go (whom I still miss today, and who know that I am grateful for everything they have done for our company).
But this is what entrepreneurship is about. Itās not always a bed of roses, and sometimes you must make very difficult decisions!
A new chapter in our history!
Today is a special day. Two years after starting on this path, we are shutting down Rodati.com so that we devote all our energies to Sirena.
We regain our focus and started working again on what we have chosen: helping our customers and businesses improve their sales experience, allowing them to manage and better handle their clients with a mobile solution, fully adapted to their reality.
For those wondering, why Sirena? Just like the sirens (āsirenasā in spanish) who lived in the sea used to lure sailors with their singing, our platform attracts customers by luring them with a better experience from the first contact.š
Today begins another chapter in our historyā¦ You will soon have more news on how it goes! š
