Charity Sees Customer Feedback as Critical Tool for Its Pump Business

“Know the customer” is a mantra for most successful retail businesses.

But the old marketing saw takes on added significance for a charity that hopes the sale of its products —

in this case, manually operated water pumps to irrigate African farms — will help to achieve the organization’s ultimate aim of lifting people out of poverty and stimulating economic development.

The nonprofit group, KickStart, sets aside roughly 5 percent of its budget to gauge its progress and gather feedback from customers.

“It’s market intelligence,” says Martin J. Fisher, one of KickStart’s co-founders. “Whenever you sell something to any customers, you need to know, ‘Do they like it? Are they happy with the product? What can you do to change the product or the service?’”

A key tool in this assessment is the one-year satisfaction guarantee that comes with every irrigation pump. To qualify, customers must fill out a form that asks for such information as the buyer’s name, the administrative district in which he or she lives, and the school, church, or other landmark closest to the farm.

Using that information, employees of the charity’s monitoring department visit a random sample of customers the first month or so after they buy a pump.

But tracking down customers for that first visit can be tricky, given how remote many rural areas in Kenya and other countries often are. Usually employees will first drive to one of the markets in the district to ask for directions to the landmark the customers gave. Once there, they ask people they see if they know the customer and how to get to his or her farm.

Then, over the course of what can be a three- or four-hour interview, the employees try to get an accurate picture of the household’s economic situation and standing within the town or area. The information acts as a baseline against which the charity can compare the impact of future profits on the household’s standard of living.

Making People Comfortable

When Regina Kamau, a monitoring and reporting officer for KickStart in Kenya, makes the initial visit to interview a new customer, she brings a tiny notebook, just to take down the most important numbers, despite the significant amount of information she needs to gather.

“People are very suspicious when you come with paper and pen and forms and books,” she explains. “They think you are the tax man.”

Similarly, because women in rural Kenya are unlikely to open up to a man they do not know, and vice versa, the monitoring department goes out in pairs, one man and one woman. They wear simple T-shirts that identify them as KickStart employees.

When asking questions that might seem personal, Ms. Kamau first volunteers her own information — like the number of children she has or how her family spends its money. She says simple gestures like these not only put people at ease, but also often lead them to offer more information than she asks for.

The employees revisit the same people 18 months and 36 months after they have purchased the pumps to see how their lives and incomes have changed as a result.

After having used the pump over several growing seasons, customers almost always report significant increases in household income, says Ms. Kamau. Often they have expanded the amount of land they have under cultivation and hired additional help. Some customers, she says, even talk about people in the village looking to them as leaders in a way they hadn’t before.

Hearing a customer’s success story, says Ms. Kamau, is “one of the most gratifying moments of my job.”