How Merchant Insights Drive Innovation at Dodo Payments

Hello everyone!

I’m Deep, and I lead Product at Dodo Payments, a global payment solution that is revolutionizing online payment processing.

I work closely with an amazing team of designers, engineers, and customer success specialists to help deliver a great product to our merchants.

In this post, I’d like to walk you through how we take feedback from our merchants and transform it into new and improved features on Dodo Payments.

Why Listening to Merchants is Crucial

As Product Managers we can sometimes fall into a trap of thinking that we know what is best for merchants but keeping our ears on the ground helps us gain critical insights from customer feedback. The advantage of being in a beta program is that we have a much closer connection to all our merchants and they are very open to providing feedback and voice their requirements.

This feedback is critical in planning our features and we practically have the feature roadmap for the next 3 months available through merchant requests alone. The only thing left to do is prioritise.

How Do We Listen to Our Merchants?

In the early days, our team would just pick up the phone and call a merchant when they faced any issue or wanted some improvements in their payment processing. Having a detailed conversation helps to understand the why of any feedback which provides more insights than the what.

As we scaled, we set up more channels for feedback collection;

• Discord Community: Our vibrant discord with over 450 members is the place where all our merchant of record clients provide their feedback, resolve their queries and request new features
• Feature Request Section: We have a feature request section on our dashboard where merchants can request for new features or vote for existing ones
• Chat & Email Support: Our merchants who are not comfortable with discord can also reach out to us via our chatbot on the dashboard or through our support email for reporting any reporting payment processing challenges and compliance management issues.
• One-to-One Discussion: Even though it’s tough at a larger scale, our business team makes it a point to speak to as many merchants as possible to get deeper insights into their requirements and helping us understand the why of their feedback

How Do We Prioritise the Feedback?

At Dodo Payments we make it very easy for our merchants to reach out to us and while all of their feedback is very important to us, it’s not practically feasible to act on every feedback or understand it in more detail so prioritisation becomes critical.

There is a popular method called the RICE framework which stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort which helps us to understand the ROI of any update or new feature request. This guides us in prioritising the features but being at an early stage we do make exceptions for certain updates where our merchants require something on priority.

Taking our License Keys feature for example, it was a part of the roadmap and planned for the upcoming month but after speaking to merchants the business team highlighted that some merchants need this on priority as it affects their business. We picked it up and our Rockstar developers helped deliver this feature within a week.

The merchants were really happy with our proactiveness and even though I did not like sidestepping the process, I think it turned out to be a great showcase of our abilities.

Action on the Feedback

We analyse all queries the merchants raise and if an issue seems to be recurring, we try to release product solutions to help resolve them at scale. Nothing is outside our scope.

One such instance was the policy generator that we just created. For our verification process we needed the privacy policy, T&C and refund policy of our merchants but since a lot of them were technical founders, they did not have much experience with compliance. We decided to create a free policy generator to help them and we saw great adoption for this. A lot of the policies which we are reviewing off late are using the template we provided and there can be no better validation than that.

Another example was the onboarding tutorial we recently added. A lot of merchants seemed to be facing an issue navigating the dashboard in the first instance so we created a tutorial which helped them create their first product and perform the first test transaction. This should help them get started with lesser friction.

Conclusion

The quick turnaround time is what keeps things very dynamic at Dodo Payments and making a changelog announcement on Friday with new feature updates the merchants were waiting for is a feeling that we truly cherish.

So if you have any feedback please reach out to us, we are always listening !