Talk to your customer!

Recently, I started reading Steli Efti's book "Talktocustomer". In this article, I haven't translated directly from there, but I wanted to share a series of articles describing the points where what Steli wanted to explain in the book intersects with my 3 years of entrepreneurial experience.

Professionals from all demographics and sectors talk at great length about the importance of data. But in my opinion, there is something even more important, and that is talking to the customer. Data tells you what customers do through various analyses, but it does not tell you why they do it; this is where the "talk to customer" concept occupies a magical place.

The most important root cause of the failure of technology companies is that they work on things their customers do not want. Because technology is an expensive service and you may be using this extremely expensive effort to build products that customers do not want. Or worse, you might be developing products for the wrong customer base. Worst of all, you might be realizing all this after your capital has run out.

In one part of the book, Steli says:

“In Silicon Valley, asking for an appointment to visit a customer or setting up a meeting, so to speak, saying 'I'm coming over for a cup of tea' is perceived as old school. Instead, it is thought that using analysis tools and examining data will reveal the secrets of commerce.”

I see the same approach in teams developing technology in Turkey as well.

Although the importance of talking to customers was shaped by "Lean Thinking" developed in Japan, which I determined as my area of expertise since my university years, I can say that a training course I took in the early years of my entrepreneurship created a great awareness in me.

I was accepted into the training of two trainers who had founded valuable startups both in Silicon Valley and in Turkey, exited some of them (selling a startup after it matures) and are currently in investor positions. Since the training would last for 5 business days, I had prepared my notebooks and set up camp in the training hall.

It was a requirement for participants in the training to come with a business idea, and I had my business idea in my pocket. After about 2 hours of theoretical training, I learned that the training was completed, at least for that day. When we asked what we would do for the rest of the day, we received the response "talk to customer".

I've always had a business idea, but waiting for it to be perfect had kept me from having the courage to talk to potential customers. This time, I went to industrial zones, explained my idea to customers, and tried to understand whether they had such a problem. I can say that I gained as much knowledge and experience as what is explained in thousands of slides of training. This was the occasion for my introduction to the magic of "Talk to customer".

With this awareness, we had visited about 150 different companies before founding Navlungo. Since I resided in Eskişehir at that time, I would sometimes travel 4 hours for a single appointment.

For this, I would get up at 05:00 every morning, make my preparations, and set off. When the appointment time came, I didn't care so much about what people shared with me during the half-hour they reserved for me because for me, an appointment was only considered successful when it turned into a sale.

Looking back, I see that the real gain came from the information provided by the customers who did not buy. As a result of these visits and meetings, we made the decision that we should develop the product for medium-small SMEs, not for medium-large industrial enterprises, which was the most important gain.

(This prediction turned out to be successful. We currently have 1500 SME customers. If we had developed a product for the wrong customer, we might have closed the company by now.)

In the first months we founded Navlungo, we personally as founders attended to the company's telephone exchange for 6 months. Here, we listened to the complaints and suggestions of dozens of customers every day.

We definitely implemented these suggestions in the structure we established. Finally, the team began to grow, and a call-center team started answering the phones. Still, some calls continue to reach us. This keeps us in the moment and focused during the "talk to customer" process.

We understand better day by day how valuable customers who do not buy actually are. In this context, when we grew the team, one of the first things I did was to open a position that calls and chats with customers who do not buy:

"Customer Experience Understanding Specialist"

With this colleague, we divided the customers into 3 groups:

First-time users of the platform, continuous users, and those who used and left. By preparing separate questions for each group, we discover the following:

For first-time users:

• Is it difficult for them to use the site and the software? Are our messages understood? Would they want to use it again? If not, what is the reason for this?

For continuous users:

• Would they recommend it to their friends? (With this question, we measure the customer loyalty score.)

For customers who stopped using:

• Why did they stop using the site? If they are using alternative channels, what features make those channels better than us? What experience would have prevented them from leaving? What do we need to change in order for them to come back?

We started evaluating the data obtained from these customers by the customer experience specialist and ourselves in a weekly meeting attended by the entire 25-person team, including software, operations, accounting, warehouse (if our company had a tea server, I would have made sure they joined too).

This approach reveals the awareness that the employees who do not speak to the customer due to their position are actually dealing with people, not numbers or codes.

While researching customers' site usage habits, we also use analysis tools like Hotjar, but we cannot capture the facial expressions and tone of voice the customer uses to express their complaints or satisfaction to us on the phone or in their office with these analysis tools.

Up to this point, I have tried to explain to you how talking to customers influenced us while developing products at Navlungo. Hope to meet in the next article.