Human before technology: extreme customer centricity takes centre stage at Ziggu

‍Ziggu offers a state of the art digital platform to streamline the homebuyer’s journey, so it’s safe to say Ziggu takes customer experiences seriously. Thanks to the platform, property developers can work more efficiently and guide customers better throughout the entire building process. But Ziggu doesn’t just look after developers’ customers. They take care of their own as well. In fact, Ziggu goes for ‘extreme customer centricity’ — an approach where their customers’ experiences take centre stage in everything Ziggu does. 

Ziggu being a tech company, it would be easy to think the team’s love for technology is unconditional. But nothing could be further from the truth. Ziggu’s CEO Yannick Bontinckx explains: “We love the possibilities and opportunities technology has to offer, of course. But to us, the human aspect will always be equally, if not more important. Technology should be at the service of humans, not the other way around. So we would never create a feature just because it’s great technology; we only create what makes sense to the people using our platform.”

Yannick sees how many tech companies fall into the trap of automation and endless processes — even trying to automate parts of their customer service. “I get it”, says Yannick. “It makes things easier. But I strongly believe it doesn’t necessarily make things better for your customers. The human experience should come before anything else, and technology isn’t always the way to do that. So from the very beginning of Ziggu, we knew putting our customer first in a very extreme way would be the way to go for us, even as a tech company.”

Feedback is serious business 

‘Extreme customer centricity’ is what this approach is called — and Ziggu does this in many different ways. It starts with knowing your customer very well. And how do you get to know them so well? “By listening, first and foremost”, says the CEO. “We take feedback seriously. We discuss every opinion or idea given by customers with our team and often even include them on the roadmap. Our platform is made to make people’s life easier, so of course, it’s important to translate their feedback to our solution.”

However, extreme customer centricity doesn’t mean saying ‘yes’ to everything the customer asks. “True”, Yannick says. “Ziggu is a SaaS platform, meaning it’s the same for all our customers. So we put the common interest of our customers first; we won’t create a new feature that’s only interesting for one person. But transparency is incredibly important here. When a customer asks us for a specific feature that we think isn’t a good idea right now, we explain our reasoning. We’ll also look for ways to help them out in a different way — by pointing out an opportunity to change something in the way they work or by using another feature more efficiently, for example.”

Petits moments de bonheur

But extreme customer centricity goes beyond dealing with feedback to improve our solution. Spending the day at a customer’s offices to better understand their way of working, sending out birthday and thank you cards, giving a ‘bug hero’ shirt to someone who reported a bug on the platform, etcetera: it’s the little things that make a difference, according to Yannick. 

“Does giving out fun t-shirts matter all that much? To us: yes. It won’t do much for our business — the customer won’t all of a sudden build more apartment buildings just to put them on the Ziggu platform and please us”, Yannick laughs. “But the person receiving the card or t-shirt will smile that day, and that is good enough. It doesn’t always have to be about business. We’re all human; we can all use those little moments of happiness, right?”