By: Natalie Johnson
In a time when marketing strategies often focus on lead generation, clicks, and sales, the true connection between brands and customers may not be as strong as it could be.
If you ask, “How do you win customers?” many responses focus on the same idea: the quality of the product or service offered.
That answer may have held more weight in the past, but as professionals like Ish Agrawal have observed, customer experience has become increasingly important for winning and retaining customers.
Research shows that 65% of customers believe a positive customer experience holds more value than even great advertising. Additionally, surveys indicate that a significant portion of customers — about one in three — may leave a brand they’ve enjoyed after a single negative experience.
But where and when does this customer experience unfold? It isn’t typically in the social media feed or inbox, as many brands might assume. Rather, it occurs in the moments when a customer is actively using your product.
Many traditional marketing strategies overlook this key moment, but for Ish Agrawal, that moment is pivotal. It’s when the genuine connection between the brand and customer can truly take place.
Ish discovered this key insight during her time at Stanford, where she took a course on entrepreneurship called Lean Launchpad. She recalls, “Everyone obsesses over acquisition—email flows, paid ads, websites. But when we stepped back and mapped the actual customer journey, we saw something clear: the most emotionally engaged moment isn’t when someone clicks ‘buy.’ It’s when they’re using your product. That’s the moment they’re paying attention. That’s when they’re open. That’s where the connection is possible.”
Building on this idea, Ish has developed a tool that is reshaping how brands engage with customers: Tapp. Tapp focuses on creating intimacy and building the post-purchase media network, one product interaction at a time.
Tapp is a tech solution designed to help businesses connect with their customers directly through the products themselves, using an interactive interface. The key to Tapp’s approach is not simply pushing out more marketing messages, but designing the product to facilitate engagement as the customer uses it.
With Tapp, brands can build a stronger presence in the moments their products are actively being used. By placing a smart sticker on each product, customers can tap on it, and without needing to download anything, they are immediately transported into a personalized world filled with interactions, promotions, games, surveys, support, rewards, and brand messages. This design allows customers not just to use a product, but to engage with it meaningfully. This may represent a new direction for customer engagement.
Tapp isn’t just a new solution; it’s a tool that has been shown to generate impressive results, with notable increases in customer spend and a significant boost in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for businesses that have adopted it
Ish’s vision for Tapp extends beyond just technology — she sees it as a way to create a new post-purchase media and marketing channel. Her goal is simple yet profound: to deepen and enhance the brand-customer relationship each time a customer interacts with a product. Whether it’s a coffee brand sharing recipes and routines or a skincare product offering tips, new products, and discounts, the aim is to create an experience that feels both authentic and enjoyable.
Ish believes that attention should shift towards post-purchase marketing and customer experience building in the coming years, with an emphasis on more genuine, real-life interactions.
Through Tapp, Ish and her team offer brands a refreshing alternative to the overload of emails and SMS that currently dominate commerce today. The goal is not to flood customers with more messages but to provide meaningful content, delivering more delight rather than just more data. It’s about that one tap that can help nurture customer loyalty, creating connections that are harder to break.
With Tapp, the future of customer experience building is already underway, one smart sticker and one personalized experience at a time!
