“Empathy” is usually treated as something you say, but sometimes its something you build. It usually means: understand your customer’s feelings. Listen to them. Build for their emotional experience. This is fine as far as it goes. But there is a version of empathy that goes further: one that doesn’t live in the messaging, the tone, or the customer service training, but in the product itself. In the decision about how the meter runs.
When Nigeria’s mobile market shifted to per-second billing, something changed for the people using it, not because the product became friendlier in any visible way, but because the billing stopped taking more than it should. A thirty-second call costs what a thirty-second call should cost. Not what a sixty-second call cost. Not a rounded-up, averaged-out approximation. The exact amount. The customer who had been quietly losing seconds — and the money attached to those seconds — suddenly wasn’t.
That precision is a form of respect. It says: your money matters enough to count properly. It says: we are not assuming you won’t notice. It says: the product is designed for your reality, not charging you as much as it can get away with.
In low-trust markets, customers notice when the meter is fair. And the feeling of not being quietly overcharged accumulates into something: a preference, a loyalty, a word-of-mouth recommendation to someone else who is also tired of being rounded up.
Every product eventually makes this decision: estimate, round, or count exactly. A payment provider deciding how to apply a foreign exchange spread is making it. So is a ride-hailing app calculating waiting time, a utility metering electricity, an API billing usage. The decision rarely gets called a values statement. It gets called pricing. But it is always a decision about whose money absorbs the rounding.
Fairness is not a value statement. In prepaid markets, it is a growth mechanism. The operator that bills accurately earns something the one that doesn’t cannot buy: the sense that the system is working for the customer, not against them.
Where in your product or pricing does precision — or the lack of it — tell your customer whose side you’re on?
These reflections sit alongside a longer body of work in progress — The Emergent Economy — which explores how systems form before institutions notice them.
“Precision is a form of respect”, love it.
Truly, we will build great brands/things if we think “Human first”
Loved this. We often think empathy is something we communicate, but it can also be designed into the products we build.