STUFF MEETS
THE PRESIDENT OF RING ON THE PRE-AMAZON DAYS AND HOW TO KEEP YOUR SMART HOME SIMPLE
Working at Ring has been quite a journey.
I started before Amazon acquired us… the company had existed about three years before then, but I got there right around the time our growth trajectory took off like a rocket ship. When I first started at Ring I had to tell people, “We make the video doorbells.” I don’t have to do that any more.
It’s remarkable to think how much we’ve grown.
We had 200-300 people back then. We had one tiny little warehouse office, and it’s just so remarkable to think how much our suite of products has grown – we had one doorbell and one camera.
With more products, it can become more confusing for our customers even just in terms of knowing which one to buy.
One of the reasons I joined Ring was that my parents had purchased a Ring doorbell and they loved it. And to me, a product that works for my 70-80-year-old parents is the right kind of product for the world. Every company is trying to figure out, how do we get into the home? How does ‘smart home’ work? I think we allseethepromiseinit.Butthe reality is, if a customer can’t understand your product and can’t use it, then it’s just not a good product.
We want our products to be accessible and usable by everybody.
We put an incredible amount of effort into really ensuring that seamless experience from end to end. And that’s everything from making the packaging clear – in terms of what you’re buying and what the requirements are for it to work for you – to including what you need for installation and having easy user guides and videos. We try to be very discerning in that way and think about customer experience first, above just having lots of stuff.
We try to make the default settings work for as many people as possible.
It’s a continual journey to make sure customers have awareness of new features or even existing features and how to use them. We do that through email campaigns, plus in-app notifications. And we added QR codes to make setup even better – that was a game changer. We know we always have to be looking for improvements like that, because as our products evolve and
