DevRev's "iPhone Moment" for building products that customers love

"ChatGPT is the iPhone moment of artificial intelligence. This is the time when all those ideas within mobile computing and all that, it all came together in a product that everyone kinda [says], I see it, I see it."

Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, opened his talk at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley with this poignant remark.

What is the iPhone moment?

In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the world to the ‘iPhone’. It was a device that unified multiple recent technological advances and devices. This revolutionized the way we interact with technology and changed the landscape of the mobile industry forever.

Over time, this historic moment has become synonymous with any disruptive innovation that changes the landscape of an entire industry.

Jensen Huang couldn’t be more right in terming ChatGPT as the iPhone moment of AI. ChatGPT unifies decades of research in AI, computing, and human-computer interaction and adds its own flavor to create a new way of working and innovating to bring these technological advances - which once seemed so foreign to the average consumer - directly at their disposal to change how they work and live. It has opened up new avenues that seemed almost impossible just a few years ago.

These iPhone moments are not a regular occurrence. They are unprecedented. You ought to wait it out! But when they do occur, a tectonic shift happens in the respective industry landscape.

Our lives before the iPhone Moment

Before the iPhone, An average person’s life looked somewhat like this:

Every need of ours had a separate device. Cameras, WalkMans, Journals, Watches, Blockbusters, VCRs, Computers. Back then, every respective brand was trying to innovate and come up with the best camera, the best WalkMan, the best internet browsing computers and the best of their own devices and tools. Innovation was happening at a rapid pace.

But they failed to see a major crippling problem that the users were living with.

Our life was bloated with devices. Each of these came with its own cost and problems. It was so easy to lose things and data. We couldn’t share any information between these devices..Interestingly, even most users didn't recognise that this problem existed.

Until the iPhone.

The iPhone Moment

Fast forward to the present day, our lives would come to a standstill if our smartphones are to be taken away. It has become the norm of how we run our day to day lives.

Anything and everything you think of, you will have to use your smartphone at some stage of the process.

At its core, the iPhone achieved a simple thing: It gave us one single device to carry around, a rich interconnected data network across different aspects of our lives, a simple way to interact with that data and just one associated cost.

Has the ‘iPhone moment’ happened in the world of customer support and product building? Or is it yet to?

Before I can satisfy your curiosity, let’s take a step back and look at our current world of business and products.

Where businesses are at now

Every time a customer wants to reach out to get help, we start opening multiple tabs on our browser. A Helpdesk tab to view and respond to the customer ticket, a Slack tab to search for some information to help answer the ticket, a JIRA or any Devops tool tab to raise an issue with a developer, every time copy pasting the information to the other tab or hoping the third party integration pushes all the necessary fields to the other tool. And hey, we have to constantly ping the developer to see if they’ve picked up the issue.

When none of this works, we go back to the customer asking for more info and some screenshots please!

Two weeks later, sitting in our bi-monthly catch ups with the Product teams, we struggle to convey what our customers want and what they are struggling with, because none of us wants to reopen all those tabs and collate that information and make sense of it.

What’s the core problem here?

Something crucial has been missed out by us all these years, and businesses have allowed themselves to accept that these problems are inevitable.

We have become so used to this way of working and building products that we don’t seem to realize the damage it has on the quality of products we build. We don’t realize the impact it has on our productivity, our engineering handoffs, our understanding of users, and the quality of support we provide to our customers.

History is repeating itself. Everyone is trying to build the next best helpdesk, CRM, data storage solution, data visualization platform, product roadmapping tool, work management software…and the list goes on.

However, once again we fail to see the core problem. Broken data between systems, multiple tools, multiple associated costs and eventually losing the one thing that matters, between all these tools - The Voice of the Customer.

The DevRev Moment

What if we could create the ‘iPhone moment’ in the business world?

One platform, one interconnected data stack, one cost. That's DevRev.

DevRev creates a beautifully orchestrated journey for your customer and stitches the customer experience process together with the entire product development process.

DevRev provides an end-to-end solution for supporting your customers and building your product:

• Integrated Observability to monitor your user sessions with event recordings and session analytics
• An AI-powered chat bot that instantly responds to customer queries and helps take the load off your support teams,
• Seamless Issue Management to enable your developers and customer facing teams to work as one
• Contextual Product planning and roadmapping tools that integrate the customer voice into product development

DevRev combines every aspect of your business under one roof, helping each of your teams support the customer as one.

At each stage, the journey is enriched by our integrated AI-powered features like our genAI-powered chatbot that deflects customer support queries, helping your team stay focused on solving more complex issues. Our 360 analytics help you see your business from all angles, helping you and your team make better decisions and work more efficiently.

This subsequently brings down your tool costs, prevents data loss between systems, keeps your team well connected in context and gives you a birds-eye view of the product you are building as well as your business.

The ‘DevRev moment’ brings together the Dev(development teams) with the Rev (customers), thereby driving the next generation of the world’s most customer-centric companies.