Interview: Outrank’s Dave Zohrob & Harish Agarwal on the Importance of Customer Feedback

Customer & audience reviews are an integral part of a continual improvement process for any business, for eCommerce business feedback is like a vital organ. A popular metric to gauge customer experience & feedback, Net Promoter Score or NPS, is currently employed by most Fortune 1000 companies.

Positively, created by developers Outrank LLC integrates Net Promoter Score to gather actionable feedback and measure customer satisfaction for Shopify stores. In our exclusive Q&A session with Positively creator Dave Zohrob, we discuss the inspiration and innovation behind the creation of the app.

For our readers, tell us a bit about your app and how you got started.

We started Outrank after working together AngelList on their startup recruiting platform. Positively is our first product—it’s a free, fast and easy way to collect customer feedback using the Net Promoter Score system.

How did you get started in the e-commerce/Shopify app industry?

After Dave left his last job, he spent a lot of time talking to entrepreneurs in many industries. Customer satisfaction seemed to be a common theme, and many of them also spoke about the power of the Shopify platform. One of those entrepreneurs was a fashion designer who recently moved her boutique over to Shopify and was raving about it. When we were considering which businesses to target with our Net Promoter Score survey product, we thought that Shopify business owners could really benefit from powerful customer feedback tools.

40% of customers expect businesses to be listening, according to a study. [Source]

“Customers feel bad when they spend the time to give detailed feedback and don’t hear anything back from the business.”

What inspired you to create Positively?

We believe every business can benefit from getting closer to their customers.

At AngelList, we built a homegrown Net Promoter Score survey tool that allowed us to survey customers on all sides of our marketplaces (founders, angel investors, job-seekers, and recruiters). We frequently used the NPS metric to guide product decisions and to judge whether or not product changes were successful.

We thought that Shopify store owners could benefit from the same powerful tools that we had grown used to, and when we looked at the various survey providers in the app store, we thought that all of them were either overpriced or under-powered. That’s when we started building our own solution, Positively.

How can an e-commerce store use customer feedback to improve their businesses?

Here’s how to take advantage of customer feedback in 3 simple steps:

1. Send good surveys: Survey as many of your customers as you can, preferably automatically. The Net Promoter System that Positively uses offers an industry-standard survey format that your customers can answer with a single click.
2. Close the loop: listen to what your customers are telling you in their responses, and follow up individually. Customers feel bad when they spend the time to give detailed feedback and don’t hear anything back from the business.
3. Track your Net Promoter Score. If you pay attention to your customers and address the issues they bring up, you should see your NPS rise over time. Harvard Business School researchers have linked increased NPS to increased revenue for businesses across a wide array of industries.

What’s the most common mistake you see Shopify store owners make frequently with their online stores?

To mangle Tolstoy, happy entrepreneurs are all alike; every unhappy entrepreneur is unhappy in their own way. But we can try to generalize. 🙂

High-performing stores all seem to be customer-obsessed; they care deeply about the quality of their products and the experience of each and every customer. If you look at reviews of Shopify stores online, you’ll see that most stores with poor reviews tend to have violated their customer’s expectations in some way: products didn’t arrive on time (or at all!), or were different or lower-quality than advertised.

“Don’t chase trends—find something you are passionate about, and commit to it.”

What is your advice for struggling e-commerce entrepreneurs?

This quote from our friend and colleague Naval Ravikant seems about right:

“Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.”

We believe the same applies to running any business. Don’t chase trends—find something you are passionate about, and commit to it. Obsess over your customers and your products. As the cliché goes, success is a marathon, not a sprint.

Thank you for your time, it was a pleasure chatting with you guys.

You can check out the Positively app at https://getpositively.com