Atul Manohar did his schooling from Pune’s Jnana Prabodhini and then architecture from MM Pune. Immediately after finishing his architecture, he went on to IIT Bombay IDC to do his Masters in Design. He worked with corporates for a dozen years in companies like Mahindra Satyam and Informatica, mostly in the IT sector – intermingling it with entrepreneurial stints. For the last 3 years, he has been running ThoughtCraft, a design consultancy which works on customer experience management with product and services companies. They work in the new product space to transition ideas to revenues.

Atul defined customer loyalty in a very relatable way. All of us know of at least one food joint in our hometowns, where you have to queue to fill in your plate. And the food runs out before customers do. This is loyalty. All of us dream of running a business where this loyalty can be replicated in our own business. The trick to get customers into loyal mode is by working on their feelings. 

The brain works on logic, the heart works on emotion but feelings can come only from experience. What is the difference between emotions and feelings? The NZ All Blacks rugby team does a haka dance before every match. Seeing the haka dance is understanding what feelings are all about. After you watch this video, you could be tempted to adopt your own haka/Veer bhav every morning to get the same kind of feelings. 

Customer experience management not only helps in customer retention but improves word of mouth when trust leads to customer recommendations. How does it feel to wave out to your regular pan wallah and get the pan that you want without saying anything? There have been 4 stages of product experiences – and customers have had different feelings in each of these stages.

Stage one is where inventions are enough to sell your product. In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler, with the help of Wilhelm Maybach, developed the forerunner of the modern gas engine by advancing Nicolaus Otto’s oil-powered design. Adapting the engine to a stagecoach, Daimler successfully designed the world’s first four-wheeled automobile. If you were a 19th century denizen having your own ghoda gaadi, this ghoda less gaadi would have you very interested. This was the era of the invention of products like the electric bulb and the gramophone. The product was the experience, and hence the feelings.

The next stage is when engineers got to work on these basic products and improve them by adding features. So Herr Daimler’s stagecoach started evolving – and in a short span of 20 years, the basic automobile design that we continue to see even in today’s cars – four wheels, engine at the front, differentials, radiators – had been stabilised. Between 1900 and 1919, there were around 2,000 American companies involved in the production of motor vehicles – each trying out a new combination of features – and trying to give a different user experience.

Stage 3 is when the designers came in and looked at how usable these features were. By 1929, there were only 44 active automobile manufacturers. By the 1950s, the remaining smaller producers merged into larger corporations or disappeared. This also illustrates a major disease that entrepreneurs face at some time or the other in their product development – featuritis – the mindless addition of features without worrying about their utility to customers. The Model T was a classic example of features honed down to the minimum, but when the entry level car market shifted to used cars, Model T went into a decline. This was also a time of increasing urbanisation, and customer experience was moving from basic transportation to better suspensions and cabin comfort. 

Atul talked about the bible of user experience – The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. The book’s premise is that design serves as the communication between object and user, and discusses how to optimize this communication to make the experience of using the object pleasurable. It argues that although people are often keen to blame themselves when objects appear to malfunction, it is not the fault of the user but rather the lack of intuitive guidance that should be present in the design.

The book when it was first published in 1988 was originally titled this way. You can read the book here –

Stage four is when designers and engineers came together to build in usability right at the  design stage. Usability can be understood on 3 axes: effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Atul illustrated the importance of this stage’s user experience by taking an example of share trading. It turned out that it was not a very appropriate program example, because only one person out of the 35 middle agers in the audience was an active share trader. Atul has been a user of ICICI direct. But his son recommended and he shifted loyalties to Zerodha. The difference is in the number of clicks used to finish a trade. This is where the role of the entrepreneur, his strategy and focus come into play. For ICICI, share trading is a poor cousin of core banking – for Zerodha it is bread and butter. 

Product experience can be looked at a cumulation of:

• Surface which is usually the aesthetic sense of things. 
• Skeleton what up what are parts of the website which can be clicked 
• Structure which is the information architecture. 
• Scope: What all features does the customer want 
• Strategy: the sandbox of the entrepreneur

Customer experience is a perception based on not just the product, but the distribution channel and communication. A SaaS product  that is not being used by a client is a big threat for an enterprise company. Companies need to realise that they have to invest in support teams from day one to encourage adoption and stickiness of their SaaS product. Atul used to work at Informatica, a company that manages data – earlier on company servers – and nowadays on the cloud. Being an enterprise product, it was difficult to sample – as the files were heavy and time consuming to download in an era of slow internet speeds. To encourage trials, Atul and company came up with a light installation file which developers could download in a jiffy. Another kaizen was to develop customer personas so that developers could relate to users of their code. The design team actually made human sized cutouts with QR codes on them – a coder could scan and get a detailed understanding of this persona.

Customer experience can be mapped on a timeline which starts with awareness which should transit into engagement. After the engagement has resulted in conversion, then the focus should shift to adoption. There is a huge gap between adoption and loyalty. The acid test comes when adoption leads to loyalty – and in the case of companies like Apple, going one step further – to advocacy. 

We then went on to do a group exercise about managing the customer experience at a maternity hospital. Participants were asked to come up with stuff they could do about managing customer experience at different parts of the timeline. I wrote down ideas which ranged from event sponsorships to create awareness,database calling to acquire customers, patient workshops to convert, follow up programs for discharged patients to encourage loyalty – and getting old patients to volunteer to help with new patients as advocacy. Others pitched in with a ton of ideas: websites, yoga classes, Insta reels, influencers, doctor interviews, articles, podcasts, fertility clinics, live Q and A, Community groups, Support groups, one on one consultations, voice bots, pick n drop facility for patients. Quite a few of these would apply to most businesses. One idea that did not get voiced – but methinks would be a good diversification to a maternity hospital – adoption!