Building Products that Delight Customers
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service”
Most of the product folks who I have worked with have a decent pedigree and raw intelligence. We do not need to worry about their ability to create or build solutions. In fact quite a few people can create outlines and detailed product experiences in days. However, this does not equate to building a product that meets customer needs and definitely does not come close to building an amazing experience that results in customer delights. In fact, the whole education curriculum from engineering to MBA is designed extensively to promote analytical thinking over any creativity. This results in the unnerving pattern that most of the people today joining the workforce have less correlation between their decision making on products versus how people make decisions in their own personal spaces. As human beings, our decision making is predicated on our experiences, intuition and recency bias and often these decisions are not fully rational.
At Razorpay, we have had the pleasure of creating customer delight in the early days but that had happened due to our laser focus on crafting such experiences and recognizing the importance of it. We didn’t chase quarterly numbers in the past. At least not for the people focused on building the product. The sales teams or founders may have had targets but it didn’t flow down to designers or engineers. One good consequence of it was that most people were focused on creating a great experience. A great experience leads to amazing product branding, the value of which is difficult to quantify in numerical terms.
What is Customer Delight?
There is no formal definition of customer delight, but let me attempt one. When the customers experience the product, it should evoke a positive emotional reaction automatically. A feeling of good will gets imbued in the user towards the product. The user remembers the experience and may want to tell others (in their circle) about it later. This doesn’t talk about the customer achieving the end goal. That’s table stakes but not enough by itself. There are many products that let customers achieve the end objectives but fail in creating delight.
When we started Razorpay, we had two designers working with us from the start. We cared enough to make everything look really smooth and delightful. User experience was something that was taken for granted in the startup industry in India (especially till 2014-15). Expectations around good experience were still becoming a standard back then. And we thought this could very much be used to our advantage so we crafted the best experience that we can.
We have had so many stories of delight about checkout since then that it’s worked to reinforce this belief in our teams. To start with, I had a meeting with the executive of Kent water purifier. We were there to pitch our payment solutions. Just as the meeting started, the guy praised our checkout experience and said that this is the first time he enjoyed making an online payment. Half of our sale was already done at that point because we didn’t need to prove the efficacy of the product but only talked about how it solves their pain points.
Another great example is when our investor Sequoia was doing due diligence on us long before investment. Rentomojo, one of our earliest customers, had put it in their investment deck that they used Razorpay as a payment gateway. This caught their fancy. Because normally you don’t talk about these kinds of things in an investment deck. But you do if you think it gives you a tangible benefit over the incumbents. For example, we usually call out that we are hosted on AWS because it gives us instant and reliable scalability which is not really feasible for banks or old-school incumbents. The value prop of a product at this point transcends from simply solving a problem statement to becoming a defining marker for the industry. For a lot of consumer products, this is evident at the point where they become a verb (aka Google, Swiggy, Uber, etc.). But even in b2b, we have excellent examples like Intel, Salesforce, etc. which have demonstrated this strategy in different times.
Customer delight is just one important input, there are other things that over time matter as well. But if the product is not something that makes it a delight for you to use then it has the potential to limit the growth significantly.
At its peak, Oracle defined the database paradigm. The product was so powerful and influential that it spawned the whole database industry over decades. Their focus on customer experience waned over time and they increased the focus on sales. But because of their clear early dominance due to solving the user pain points around databases, they still reap the benefits to this day even though the competition has caught up and their product has progressively stagnated. The customer delight and customer satisfaction factor can simply never be ignored. Ignore it and it will come back to show up in numbers eventually.
Why is Customer Delight so important to aim for when building a product? Simply because it helps you achieve non-linear growth in the short term and retention and loyalty in the long term.
A happy and satisfied user wants to share their experience with others as a result generating brand loyalty and word of mouth for your product. This comes free of cost and is extremely valuable. This is different from bragging rights or status symbols (aka Apple). People may brag about Apple or Cred but definitely do not brag about using Gmail or Amazon for example. Our checkout anecdotes earlier are also similar.
The second important reason is retention and loyalty. Because the customers remember the positive experience, most of them would automatically return to using the product and you raise the bar for the customer to go and try an alternative product. Amazon’s post sales service is a great example of this. The UI/UX of Amazon today is mostly functional in nature and not as memorable. But the whole experience from the point of ordering an item to receiving it is just the best that you can get in the ecommerce industry. It’s magical. And the customer service of Amazon at every touchpoint again sets a high bar. This has helped build amazing retention of users for Amazon. There are few other obvious examples like Google Search and Whatsapp where mostly built-in technology has played that role. These examples are good guiding stars for engineers looking to understand how they can influence and create customer delight.
Lastly, in the very long term, it results in increased revenue and profits. Remember, that money making is usually never the end goal. However, from the Oracle example, you can see how it can hold true for such a long time even when delight has gone completely out of the window.
In summary - Branding & Word of Mouth - eg Razorpay Checkout Retention and loyalty - The product experience standards are raised to an extent that going back to the old way of doing things just doesn’t feel as good anymore. Long term - Money (Revenue and profits eventually) - eg Oracle
Product market fit is hard to achieve for any startup. And quite often your users will use the product in ways you did not even think of. But getting to the product market fit is as much of an art as a science. If getting adoption was only equivalent to building a product then most internet companies out there would have done it. Because in theory, internet gives you unlimited distribution. Even a product which solves a major pain point will fail critically if it only gives lip service to customer experience. Otherwise, in b2b, it may survive, but you would need a massive sales and solutions team to prop it up. We still haven’t figured out how to create customer delight at every touchpoint as a process. It’s not as simple as doing steps 1-2-3 and expecting the result to come through. Like good software engineering, a good product engineering process becomes intuitive only over time if you focus on it deliberately. A lot of it has to be part of the culture and be driven as a philosophy. You should question every decision whether it serves the customer correctly or not. Whether it’s being built for the sake of solving a problem or is it actually going beyond and also making our customers champions of our product. There is a distinction between the two and the good product managers and designers remember to also focus on the latter.
While there is no set process of achieving this, there are few heuristics that will definitely help you get closer to the goal.
Keep end customer in mind, always
The first and foremost thing is to almost always keep the end customer in mind. You are not building for the engineering team or the existing technology. A lot of product managers build according to the systems that exist rather than according to the best solution that should solve the end problem. Having an engineering background helps but is not necessary. Understanding technology is important but again not the end goal. Do not at any time confuse your strengths and understanding of the system with the end goal of solving a pain point. These tools are part of our craft but they should at no point be the focus unless solving for tooling itself will help achieve the end goal.
Talk to customers, a lot
Secondly, talk to the customers, a lot. You can mostly never over do it. In the past years, I have never remembered telling anyone that you are talking to customers a lot! But the opposite seems to happen every other week or a few days. A lot of product specs that I read do not have a sliver of customer conversations and it shows. Because a lot of input is simply derived from support tickets and complaints of vocal customers, you only then build to solve the most pressing pain points. But that doesn’t go far towards creating customer delight. All it would do is make a set of customers satisfied but it would not create customer champions.
Be obsessed about the experience
Additionally, we must understand the importance of crafting a beautiful experience that at times cannot be captured with numbers. On every occasion, we must ask ourselves, will this experience help in creating customer delight? This requires us to put way more effort during our research phase than you would normally think to do. There is no end to how much you can talk to customers. There is never too much! However, it’s very easy on the other hand to not talk to customers at all and build things sub-optimally. Often, the implication of this is not evident while shipping and it only becomes obvious a few months from the time a product or a feature is launched. A good interface invites the user to try it out and experiment and play around. It doesn’t scare. It hides the complexity beneath a layer or reveals it in stages instead of throwing it all at once at the user. It reveals the capabilities according to the needs of the user and not necessarily just to boast. And at all times, it never loses sight of the user. In the end, the user is the center of the universe and no amount of distractions should ever change that fundamental aspect.
Onboarding intuitively and easily
Third, always think of the onboarding experience of a feature or a product. A lot of products especially in b2b are complex and feature laden. There are a lot of ways that we can increase the educational content for customers when introducing them to a feature / product. Tinder is an excellent example of this. Today, if you experience the Tinder app, it’s a powerhouse of features built on top of simple actions of left and right swipes. However, the app does an excellent job of hiding this complexity and only exposing it to users at the appropriate time when users qualify to a certain threshold of experience with the app. This certainly helps in reducing the cognitive overload and having the feeling that the app is super simple and extremely intuitive to use. Two recent examples that I thought were probably not as well done were the HRMS systems that we have used (K and Z). I could be wrong but navigating the dashboard for the first time just didn’t come intuitively and there didn’t seem to be a guide for helping with the same. A lot of our products also probably suffer from similar challenges and it’s not a great thing. They will always struggle to get organic traction in such scenarios even if the solution nails the problem perfectly.
Identify the fundamental assumptions and basic actions
Fourth, try, understand and codify the basic fundamental assumptions and few basic actions on top of which the product is built. These assumptions or actions should be relevant to the target demography in a way that building the whole app on top of it makes it easier for the users to adapt them. Going back to our Tinder example, the basic assumption is around attraction and basic actions are around the left / right swipes. I am pretty sure it would have taken the product developers quite some time to come up with the basic swipe actions in the app which have made it so valuable today. Would it have been a stroke of chance or a good amount of research in the consumer psychological behaviour that gave birth to it?
Another extremely ubiquitous example is Whatsapp. At today’s scale, it’s difficult to envision how a small team of early developers could have established the product. However, the start of anything is mostly small. The whole app is built around the paradigm of messaging with the assumption of human need for connectivity. Another major belief in the product is that latency and reliability of message delivery trumps everything else.
A/B is expensive when starting from scratch
As a thumb rule, always remember, building something without understanding customers is most expensive. A/B testing is also more expensive than talking to customers especially when figuring out what to build. A/B testing works better when optimizing towards a goal at scale. Google Plus is an extreme example of this. Really talented folks with amazing experience but while building the product, they forgot to talk to the customers. No amount of design or A/B was able to save the product.
Don’t lower the quality bar, once lowered, it’s extremely difficult to pick it back up.