Dennis Wang
When I joined the technology scene in the early 2010s, I had one big ambition – solve big customer pain. Luckily, I solved two in the last decade. Firstly, I joined Easy Taxi, where we aimed to improve urban mobility. In 2017, I joined Nubank tosolve the painful experience of banking. Both companies successfully impacted millions of lives, which was mainly driven by the fact that both were customer centric organizations. Looking back, I would factor 4 key pillars in order to build such organizations: Brand promise, talent, product and processes.
Brand promise means finding a big local customer pain which becomes the founder’s obsession to fix. While traditional companies focus on bottom line, customer centric organizations will first find the best solution and then find ways to make it viable by using technology and innovation. While Easy Taxi mantra was giving passengers a fast, safe, and convenient ride, you see proptechs such as Emcasa improving the experience of real estate transactions. Another example is Contabilizei, SAAS startup, simplifying accounting for Brazilians. These companies will do the impossible to deliver on their brand promise.
Once the organization has a clear promise to customers, the customer centric organization builds a ´talent machine´. Frist by attracting and onboarding talent that is committed on delivering the promise. As CrisJunqueira, co-founder of Nubank, says, “You can teach someone almost anything, but not how to care”. The customer obsessed crew now needs clear guidance, sense of urgency and be empowered to build and delivery amazing product and service. Needless to say that companies need to treat employees as they want their customers to be treated.
“While traditional companies focus on bottom line, customer centric organizations will first find the best solution and then find ways to make it viable by using technology and innovation”
A good product is aligned with the brand promise. It will deliver what the customer needs and not what the company needs. Confused? For example, an ecommerce offering complex checkout in order to over optimize for fraud. Or a long and complicated contract which customers cannot understand to reduce legal risk to nearly zero. If the company wants to go the extra mile and build an incredible product (and luckily create brand love), the product should be intentional on small details that other products and competitors do not – e.g. unboxing experience, product discovery, tone of communications, among others.
Finally, all company processes should make sense to your customers. To your paying customer, does the purchase process make sense? Does the return policy make sense? To your internal customers, such as call center operations, does the process empower them to solve customer needs? Does it make sense to have a long HR admission process or a painful reimbursement process? Trust your audience, reduce bureaucracy, and build controls.
After being part of two customer centric companies, I am currently a partner at Igah, Ventures, a Brazilian venture capital firm investing in seed, Series A and B. I hope that by sharing what I learnt helps more organizations to become customer centric as my new ambition is to findand support amazing entrepreneurs on building customer centric organizations.
