Spire Africa: Customers Have A Mic
A day in the life of a product person: You get up for standup and get ready for your one in a million meetings, one of those meetings is with customer-care concerning a bug, another is from the CEO concerning feature requests and just before compiling everything on Notion or Jira (whichever is your poison) to pass off to the product team, you get a message on slack from HR containing a screenshot of a tweet a customer made concerning an issue they are facing.
Apparently, the customer cannot sign up but you are already thinking of adding more features.
A day in the life of a customer: He wants to use a product and he is a fan because he knows someone who works there. He tries to complete his onboarding but he keeps getting an error prompt that looks like JavaScript and because he knows someone there, he sends out a tweet that something is wrong and tells his friend that works there that something is wrong.
Now imagine this happens to a customer who knows no one and is aware of alternatives.
The first 2 paragraphs paint a picture of 2 key scenarios and 2 stakeholders. A product manager with a ton of feedback to manage and a customer who cannot even use the product and resorts to using Twitter to rant about having a poor experience rather than give constructive feedback about their experience.
What’s worse is when they start advising their followers to avoid the product and one of the followers there replies the tweet with: “I had the same experience”.
Well, word of mouth marketing and testimonials will go in reverse real quick.
If you have ever worked in a product team, especially when it is at a fast-paced startup, you will find that it can be chaotic. A lot is moving, the team is shipping, measuring, growing and in the midst of all that chaos, what is even more chaotic is the process of getting feedback for the products.
The problem is that feedback is usually everywhere, unspecific and not always relevant and all that makes it hard to manage feedback.
So how will teams manage feedback and execute accordingly?
Spire!
Spire started out by helping people access an audience anytime they need to collect feedback. In fact, the name of the initial product was SpireCrowd and it helped anyone with a budget get access to a specific audience. It is basically a one-stop shop for businesses seeking to get feedback from an audience.
Spire is now topping it up a notch by giving businesses and organizations the infrastructure to collect and manage feedback.
The problem Spire is trying to solve is something businesses and organizations have to deal with, especially those that have a large user/customer base. They need to create a feedback loop and put in place systems that will enable them to categorize the feedback and pass it on to the relevant channels.
A good example of how to use Spire would be to think about the picture we painted before about a customer not being able to sign up for a service. Some product teams might prioritise such issues as critical and fix them ASAP but ASAP becomes impossible because the information does not come to them straight away. Think about a widget the customer clicks on, a form pops up and the user fills in his issue as critical. The message goes straight to the product manager or the entire product team gets a notification that the “house is on fire” which is just code for a critical issue.
Spire promises more
With Spire, you do not just get to collect feedback but you get to contextualise feedback. This means you don’t have to do the hard work of taking everything to a spreadsheet that becomes an endless list you might never work on. With spire, you get to gather feedback across different channels, streamline that feedback and assign it to whoever needs to work on it.
The Future:
Spire is out to become a repository for feedback, the way you have GitHub for your company’s code. You are going to have that for feedback. The best part is that it’s already happening with events, Spire has covered a number of tech events but as consumers, we only get to see the feedback forms and glossy designs.
You can tell that the team is not playing around.
It’s a wild guess but Spire is on the way to a few things:
- A platform that enables people to choose the best product based on feedback from experts.
2. Products that would be easily integrable into hardware devices and the data will be accessible on the cloud, think about applications in IoT.
3. A tool that listens to brand mentions on social media and enables businesses to generate feedback from mentions from all over social media.
4. Global expansion especially in the EMEA region.
With Spire, organisations do not have to keep making assumptions about what works or doesn't work for the customer, the customer will tell you. If you are a business that wants to collect feedback and use that feedback to improve your customer’s experience, you should check out Spire.
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