Customer Experience and Product Are Equally Important: SaaS Lessons Learned in a Pizza Place

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Everyone's been there: After a long day of work, shopping, and meeting life's obligations, you're exhausted. And hungry. So you pull out your phone and open a food delivery app. Now you can sit back and relax knowing that a meal will be at your doorstep in less than an hour.

In this case, the convenience of having your food delivered is just as important as the taste and quality of the food itself. This same principle applies to more than just food delivery. At the heart of any product or service is the most important element: the experience.

Deliver experience, not just product

As a child, I worked in my family's pizzeria on weekends. One day, while putting toppings on a pizza, my dad said something that stuck with me: "It's not that we deliver pizza, although maybe it's the physical thing that we bring What we do is provide an experience and provide comfort to someone."

Startups need to take note. In the world of B2B software in particular, there is often too much emphasis on creating a product over an experience. Most tech companies are so focused on functionality that the experience falls by the wayside. Fortunately, there has been a recent trend for B2B software companies to adopt some of the best practices in customer experience (CX) that we would normally associate with B2C brands.

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When it comes to SaaS (or anything, really), your product isn't everything: it's just one leg of the stool. The experience is comprehensive and companies need to think of everything through the lens of the user. Every connection point should be incredibly transparent and improve someone's experience with your company and your product: if someone wants to try a product, they should be able to easily find it, install it and start using it without having to speak to a salesperson. , or if it is technically not possible, to be able to find out more in a pleasant way.

But that's not always the case with SaaS. Generally speaking, the different parts of the user experience are divided into silos, which creates a disjointed experience. For example, a user may fall in love with a product while trying it out, but have a less than enjoyable time once they use it regularly. These negative results are normal when each experience belongs to a different team within the company, teams that care about different things.

Creating consistent and exceptional experiences requires a change of mindset. Instead of building shiny new features, your top priority should be building empathy for users by gaining a deep understanding of their workflow and pain points. Just adding a CX team is not enough to achieve this. Empathy should be woven into every part of the business and creating enjoyable experiences should be everyone's MO, not just CX teams. This ensures a smooth user experience from start to finish and creates alignment between teams.

KYP: Know your problem

Experience is key, but another piece of the puzzle is figuring out what problem you're actually trying to solve with your product. It sounds obvious, but too often companies get so caught up in what's happening in the broader market, or so focused on new technologies, that they end up missing the big picture. An example of this is the apparent obsession of many companies with automating things using artificial intelligence and machi...