Adapttech: how we became "customer obsessive"
Everybody likes to say “the clients are what matters the most to us” about their own company. If that would be the case, you —as a customer— would have never had a bad experience while requesting any product or service. Even though companies say the customers are what matters the most, that is often not reflected in their behavior.
At Adapttech we tackle this issue right where it begins: we ask our customers how they want the product we are creating for them to be. And then we continue asking them how we can improve it. We feed constant communication.
THIS IS THE STORY OF HOW WE BECAME CUSTOMER OBSESSIVE
Ortega y Gasset used to say “I am I and my circumstance”. I think that this is perhaps the idea that carries more weight when you talk about the early stages of our product design. Naturally, Fred and I had different circumstances in our minds. We both (specially I) were very concerned about the functionality and business side of the product. Fred was equally concerned with other aspects of it, while my idea of a good product was more towards what I call the "brutally pragmatic approach": make it functional and then try to put some makeup on it so you can sell it.
Fred is a genius in product design —he truly has a knack for it—, and having more sensibility towards this issue than me, he convinced me that we needed to start thinking about the final look and feel of the product even before we started playing around with prototypes. Having to “visualize” a product out of an Arduino is no easy task for any engineer —believe me. Nonetheless, Fred was right: each hour we spent thinking about our product at the very beginning was going to be translated into months at a later stage. So, what do you do when you need to create a product that feels seamless for your customers? What we did: You ask them. You ask them a lot. . . and you ask a lot of them.
GETTING THE RIGHT FEEDBACK FROM THE RIGHT PEOPLE: YOUR CUSTOMERS
Although we are a business to business company, design-wise we were behaving like a business to consumer one. With each iteration, we became more and more dedicated to delivering a better product to our customers. For example, we knew our system was very heavy, so we wanted it to look like it can float. The solution: our insight Scanner doesn’t use a single screw. Because of this and the shape it has, light hits the scanner in such a way that it makes it look thinner and lighter.
Our Insight Wearable is pretty flexible. It uses fabric instead of plastic, but it is still washable. Each one of our own PCBs has our branding, regardless if it’s visible or not. If by any chance you as a customer decide to open one you’ll see our logo everywhere. In addition, every material we used is carefully selected, from the core ones to the packaging. And we apply this philosophy to everything, specially when it comes to the user experience for Insight App.
From the subtleties of our branding to our Easter eggs —oh yeah, we have them :)—, everything started to become like creating art. Everything we did had to be thought, and had to make perfect sense for the people that were going to buy and use it. Making sure that we had connected all the dots became our mantra. We found out that looking for the best for our customers brought up the best in us. . . and that amazing feeling is something that might very well get you, in the best possible way: obsessed.
