Customers are at the core of any business. Having a deep understanding of your customers can help you build great products and address important problems. But how do you get everybody in the company to get into customers’ shoes to understand their problems and then figure out ways to improve their experience? One way to do is a DoorDash approach.
DoorDash is a food delivery company in the US with 60% market share and over 390,000 restaurant partners. Internally, DoorDash has a WeDash program which requires all employees, even the co-founders, to deliver meals at least 4 times a year. The goal is to build customer empathy by using the product in the real world and understand the shortcomings firsthand. Experiencing issues directly builds clarity and understanding of what improvements need to be made to provide better customer experience. You are not just theorizing about issues, you are facing them directly.
Employees interact and gather feedback from restaurants as well as end-users. They get to understand issues through product usage and in-person conversations. Keith Yandell, the head of BD, says that he delivers once a month and almost always finds something broken with the product.
Employees who don't have an opportunity to deliver can shadow customer support teams and help resolve customer issues in real time.
The WeDash program is a cool way to put employees in customers’ shoes and empathize with them. It lets people experience their products first-hand and then solve for issues. Do you know of similar programs from other companies?
I learned about this from an episode of
‘s podcast