Evening Counter Comments

Read what your customers said about their visit today, at closing time, when the shutter is half down and the market has finally gone quiet.

Who this is for

Sanket Deshmukh runs Balaji Mobile in Sitabuldi market, Nagpur, a shop the width of two arms. He and his younger brother stand at the counter, and Irfan does repairs at the back. Fifteen or sixteen phones a month, plus covers, screen guards, chargers, and a steady line of cracked displays. The moment this software is for: 9.40 pm, shutter down to his knees, cash counted, tea gone cold, and for the first time since morning he can hear himself think.

How the job is done today

Nothing is written down. Sanket calls out sab theek hai across the counter and the customer nods, because neither of them can hear the question. When someone is genuinely unhappy he finds out in one of three ways: the man returns on Saturday and shouts, or a Google review turns up four days later with a name he cannot place, or Irfan mentions it a week on while eating lunch. The staff WhatsApp group exists but it is full of scheme forwards from distributors, so nobody opens it. The day's cash is counted every single night. The day's complaints are not counted at all.

The screens, in order

1. The counter card — This is what a customer sees on their own phone after scanning the small card taped near the billing machine, so they can rate the visit in two taps without saying a word over the noise.
2. Say more, if you want — Gives the customer one box to type a line about what happened, which some will use and most will skip, and that is fine.
3. Tonight's list — The one screen Sanket actually opens at closing, holding every rating and comment from the day in a single scroll with the unhappy ones sitting at the top.
4. One visit — Opens a single rating to show the time it came in, which of the three of them was at the counter, and whether it was a sale or a repair, so the comment stops being a mystery.
5. Calls to make tomorrow — Keeps the two or three people who need a phone call in the morning in one place until somebody marks them as called and writes what they said.
6. The last thirty days — Shows plainly how many people rated and how many were unhappy, so a bad fortnight cannot quietly pass as a bad day.
7. Who works here — Where Sanket adds his brother and Irfan, and prints a fresh counter card when the old one gets sticky.

What it keeps track of

• Visits — which day, what time, who was at the counter, sale or repair, what was bought or fixed, phone number if the customer gave one
• Ratings — how many stars, the line they typed, which visit it belongs to, when it arrived
• People who work here — name, counter or repairs, still working or left
• Calls to make — which rating, who is calling, called or not yet, what the customer said on the phone

The one decision that matters

There are two ways to handle a one star rating. Either it lights up the second it arrives, with a message to Sanket's phone and a red band across the screen, or it waits with everything else until he opens tonight's list at closing. It should wait. At four in the afternoon in Sitabuldi he cannot hear his own ringtone, and his hands are on somebody's screen guard. An alert he never sees is worse than no alert at all, because the software believes he has been told and he believes nothing came. One quiet page he chooses to open at 9.40 is a promise this market cannot break. The single concession: unhappy visits sit at the top of that page, so the first thing he reads is the thing that needs a call.

What to leave out of the first version

Leave out everything that sends a message back to the customer. No automatic thank you, no apology, no nudge to post the same words on Google. The first version has one job, which is to let Sanket read the truth of his day at closing. The moment the software starts speaking to customers in his name, he will spend his evening checking what it said instead of reading what they said. A phone call from him at ten in the morning does more than any message, and he already knows how to make phone calls.

How you would know it worked

On a Thursday night Sanket reads that three separate customers mentioned being quoted six hundred for a display and charged nine hundred. He rings all three before opening on Friday, and he talks to Irfan about it, having heard it from nobody during the day.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I have a mobile phone and accessories shop in Sitabuldi market in Nagpur. My brother and I stand at the counter and one boy does repairs at the back. The market is so loud that nobody hears anything, so please make me a website and not messages. I want a small page a customer opens by scanning a card kept on my counter, where they tap one to five stars and can type one line if they feel like it, and I should be able to note which of us served them and whether it was a sale or a repair. Then a page only the three of us can log into, which shows the whole day's ratings and comments in one scroll when I sit down at closing, unhappy ones at the top, with a place to write down who I called back the next morning and what they said. Please do not send me any alerts during the day. It must work properly on my phone.