Pygg has recently been diving deep into solving the cash issue in public schools. Every school day thousands of children across Australia carry cash to schools for payments relating to excursions, fees, sports days etc. For a five year old, this is plain crazy.
We started solving the pain of these cash transactions with our cashless payment platform. We asked the customer what their problems were – which helped – however, the real innovation started when we observed our clients using the product. There were so many opportunities for innovation as we observed customers battling their existing systems and processes around the edges of our solution. They had not identified these problems – or found them difficult to communicate.
For online services a web analytics solution like Google Analytics can do some of this work, however, watching a customer engage with your product is still invaluable. You don’t need a large sample size to get a lot of critical feedback. The key is to let people fail as they use it so you can see where your weaknesses are, versus defaulting to the natural desire to help them through the experience.
And lastly: find ways to obtain feedback from your customers. Think about the last time you were out to dinner friends and they complained about the food / service / music. Later, when the waiter asks how you found the meal, “great” is often the reply. Why? People don’t like giving negative feedback – you need to go digging for it. How can you garner more honest feedback from your customers to enhance what you are building?