Even this cat knows it’s about customers.
One thing I’m really passionate about right now is spending an inordinate amount of time at customer sites. I’m literally spending weeks on end locked up in sites all over the US trying to figure out any way we can become better. How can we make customers lives easier? How can we do things faster? How can we make things simpler? How can we provide better service? Essentially, how can we make our customers experience one of legitimate “awesomeness”?
The biggest set backs our company’s had in the past are when we’ve made assumptions regarding what customers want without actually having hands on experience to back it up. Even when those decisions have been deep rooted in logic and vetted by intelligent people, in many cases they’ve come out wrong and we’ve had to go back to the drawing board after getting customer feedback.
It boggles my mind how few start-ups and large companies actually have a pulse on what customers are experiencing with their products or services (Phone companies, Airlines, etc.). The world is getting smaller everyday. To me, business in today’s age is simple, being successful is about building products that actually make peoples lives better, it’s about delivering products and services that are awesome, provide tangible value and don’t suck.
It’s no secret that some of the most successful companies today were started by people who were trying to solve their own problems. It’s a lot easier to understand the customer when it’s you. At Google Larry and Sergey wanted a better search engine, the guys who created Hotmail wanted a way to send personal email at work without using their work mail client, Steve Jobs uses and tests Apple products relentlessly way before they’re commercial, and Howard Scultz used to visit Starbucks five times a day.
So until I become a dentist in another life, I will have to vicariously live through them, constantly obsessing about what can make our products better.
Enough said. Flight to catch in 4 hours, must sleep.
- Matty @ Chicago Mid-Winter Show
