User Experience and Growth

Let us face it, we all care about our users. Maybe the intensity and passion with which we care are different, but we all do. Nobody ever said that focusing on building a good consumer experience is not good for the company. From traditional businesses to VCs to founders to PMs to Ops and even finance, everyone understands the importance of experience.

Now in an ideal world, we would all have -

1. Unlimited resources to spend on prioritizing consumers' goals and interests
2. Close to 100% CSAT and retention
3. ZERO errors in our product and operations
4. Profitability in our business from year 1.
5. NPS so high that our users are fighting to vouch for our products and services against our competitors.
6. Month on Month growth of our business beating every difficult market condition out there.

It's 2023, we are still in India and while we are making good progress even discussing this, we are still far away from this ideal world even in the most profitable markets.

Building new experience or fixing existing experience?

Building: If you are launching a new product or a service and building from scratch, the approach of solving for experience is very different. This is usually a fun exercise where business, insights, product, designers, engineers, support, and operations come together to brainstorm a new launch and cover different aspects of user experience. User storyboarding, consumer insights, surveys, contextual inquiries, journey mapping, prototyping, etc, are all the most helpful ways that we use to define what user experience should look like.

There is a lot already written on this topic and I'm not going to go deeper into this for now.

Fixing: Even if you feel you got everything 'right' in the Building phase, there's always some Fixing to do. This is usually a lot of dirty but fulfilling work.

We use existing user data to measure the performance of our products or services and

• Build new features
• Improve existing products and/or operations.

We usually do this to improve our 'experience' which most organizations measure with - CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), NPS (Net Promoter Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), Retention / Churn rate, etc.

It does get tricky sometimes to be able to see how these metrics impact our business on a month-to-month level.

Businesses that are trying to grow can easily de-prioritize efforts and expenses on solving these problems, at least temporarily, so that they can solve for growth or optimize other cost centers.

When we tried to solve for user experience (Fixing) with an awesome CX team of Simant Bhargava Vijoy Shankar Roy , and Shriram Srinath , we tried to ask ourselves these questions- "Why does user experience really matter?" "

"Why should the company spend its time and resources on experience when there are other straightforward 'growth tasks'?"

"How do we get our entire team excited and committed to solving for users together?"

We wanted to keep an open mind to find answers to the above questions ourselves and with the help of our analytics team, see where the opportunity lied.

Now since this was about 'fixing', we had enough data to look at. We looked at-

1. Retention % of users who had a positive (+ve) vs negative (-ve) experience on the platform.
2. The difference in Average Order Value (AOV) of the users with +ve vs -ve experiences.
3. The difference in the frequency of use of +ve vs -ve during the same time frame.
4. Correlation between NPS and CSAT.
5. Correlation between cancellations done by us vs NPS.

We soon learned that there was a very obvious way, something that a lot of others do and we have been missing out on.

We had to get the founders, product leaders, operations, business, and others aligned to solve the "Fixing" problems. The best way to do that was by making 'Experience' a here-and-now problem.

After looking at this, obvious things were clearer to us and were now also tangible-

1. Retention % was higher by x% for users with a +ve experience.
2. Returning users with +ve experiences spent Rs.Y more than users with -ve experiences.
3. For every % increase in CSAT and % reduction in cancellations, the company's overall NPS moved from x to y and the we generated Rs. X additional revenue.
4. We could spend Rs. X lesser on marketing and contribute to our overall EBITA.
5. We could save Rs. X of costs incurred on handling/recovering negative experiences if we converted these to positives.

There lay our first key. To use NPS and CSAT as a growth project with clear ROI on a monthly/quarterly basis, we were able to get the whole team excited to take on these projects. It was no longer growth tasks vs CSAT tasks or a hypothetical scenario of growth in experience leading to growth in revenue/profit.

The second key lays in detailing the experience and figuring out 'how' we get there. I shall explore that some other day.

While it was important to use this approach to bring clarity to our team, this may or should not be the debate for early stage products or services where there isn't enough data on CSAT / NPS or retention. Cx should be solved for regardless.

Building and retaining a culture of being customer centric is a work of patience. I was fortunate to be working with a team who perfectly understood this. Sometimes, its your responsibility to show your team how quality can driving quantity by using your analysis and your consistency in driving advocacy for customers.