Why feedly sucks in customer experience

This is an article which focusses mainly on the reason behind the failure of the products due to a pathetic customer experience.

After the shutdown of google reader its users were pretty much in need of an alternative solution for their reading needs. That’s when feedly came into picture with a bold promise saying transition from Google Reader will be ‘seamless’ . But the sad reality behind that is regardless of a decent usability of the product, better integration capabilities it failed miserably in providing a basic customer experience.

Why I think customer experience is important?

Being an product designer, If i just want to care about one thing in the universe it would be the experience of my customers. If we go back to the basics of how our mind helps us build love towards products, It’s not about how it works or how it looks. Its all about ‘ how it makes us feel ’. Users generally dont care about anything other then what they really care about. This very point makes customer experience very important in this age of product rush, As it is turning out to be the most important competitive advantage to be successful in your business.

Here’s an example of a routine service request on feedly’s forum—say a login issue—for the customer it is seriously hampering his workflow. The company may receive millions of requests about the product and must handle each one well. But if the user is asked about the experience he had after repetitively complaining about the problem and yet was not solved, The answer is BAD. A customer would never remember it as a positive experience for the rest of his life. That moment he has lost faith in the product and would never dare to look back to use its services again regardless of its marketing magic. Understanding the context of a request is key. A customer might have been trying to explain the pain he is going through because of this issue. The minimum courtesy would be to respond to his request with a hint about the investigation started. An ideal company that manages complete journeys would not only do its best with the individual requests but also seek to understand the broader reasons for the call, address the root causes, and create feedback loops to continuously improve interactions upstream and downstream from the call.

Ironically, the answer is that for decades, customer experience didn’t matter as much to the success of a business as it does today. Consider that from 19th centuary we were in the age of manufacturing. In that era, if you owned the factory, you owned the market and because of the limited alternatives customer experience was never really an important differentiator. But the 21st centuary is called the age of customer, because due to the information revolution the customer is equally aware of your business or product so as you. In this age, the only source of competitive advantage is the one that can survive technology-fueled disruption: an obsession with customer experience.

I hope the message above would strike feedly as a lightining bolt and motivate in improving it’s customer experience and value it customers or else i am sure it would no longer be in the business.

Article was originally written on : http://blog.harishsimha.com/why-feedly-sucks-in-customer-experience