Tag Archives: Customer Management

customer success

Customer Success: Product Creators Need To Know The Customer’s Voice

by in Build TV, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Product Development, Product Management, Software Development, , , , , , , , , 0 Comments

Customer success has become a key differentiator when it comes to building software products and retaining customers. Baking customer success into the product and its experience is key. Unfortunately, it has become a real challenge for many companies because silos start to form as a company grows, causing employees in various departments to become distanced from the end customer. Hence they lose connection to the customer and think less about the customer’s success. In this post, I’ll share some strategies for breaking down silos and ensuring customer success.

I am the self-appointed family travel agent. Though if you ask my partner and the rest of my family members they’d agree that I am the best person for the job.

Why?

Because over the years I have become adept at making sure I don’t overlook the details when planning a vacation—you know where the devil hides! And who wants the devil to turn up on their vacation?!

Unless of course, it’s a blue devil 😉

I take the time to read through ALL the descriptions and fine print, talk to customer support agents to find out if there are any additional fees, and make sure that family members who have accessibility needs like my 10-month-old baby and 82-year-old grandma will be taken care of.

Once I’ve done all this planning, I know I have truly earned my vacation 😉

Despite all my effort, there have been times when things didn’t turn out as planned. Like the time I booked a home in India only to find out that the address was incorrect. The host mixed the street name with the city name. We would have had to drive 3 hours after 24+ hours of travel, but I called customer support and they resolved the issue for us quickly.

Elements of customer success

It was a positive customer support experience: responsive, seamless, and efficient. As a result, I continued using that service to book my travel, knowing that if something screwy happened I could count on them next time.

But there are other companies whose customer support agents place me on hold—for more than a few minutes. When the agent returns, they tell me that I’ve reached the wrong department. Then they transfer me to the “correct” department. Once the transfer is complete, I have to repeat what I told the first support person to the second support person, all the while hoping that they can help me resolve the issue. They can’t. When I look at how much time I’ve spent, and the exorbitant fee or unreconcilable charge, I am frustrated and vow to never do business with them again!

I know I’m not alone.

No one likes being at the receiving end of a bad customer support experience

It’s easy to place blame on customer support, but it’s not their fault because the problem originated somewhere else—when the product or service’s feature was being created.

Someone designed the experience in a way that wasn’t particularly customer friendly, and then it became a challenge to change the experience because of the silos that formed in the company between teams: sales, marketing, product, engineering, and customer support.

At the start of a company, teams are usually flat and highly collaborative, but over time, silos start to form, slowing things down, making it hard to innovate, and distancing teams from their customers.

How silos stop customer success

Is it even possible to slow or stop them from forming? And to enable everyone across teams a chance to interact with customers?

Well in today’s episode of Build we’re going to answer these questions and more. We’ll show how silos form of overtime, some best practices for keeping silos at bay, and what to do once they have formed to break them down.

To help us out I’ve invited Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré who is a B2B SaaS Consultant with 20+ years of experience in online marketing, and a champion for customer success.

As you tune into today’s episode you’ll learn the following from Nichole Elizabeth:

  • Why everyone on a team including software developers and engineers should have a chance to interact with customers, not just people who are on the customer support, sales, and marketing teams
  • How to empower teams to break down silos, and a framework for evaluating experiments and features that factor in constraints
  • When to automate and when to interact with customers
  • How silos form over time, how to avoid them, and what to do once they’ve formed
  • Why when building B2B products it’s important to focus on making your customers successful not happy
  • Why you need to rethink off-boarding customers and make it easy for them to leave

“When everyone on the team is aware of the voice of the customer, everyone is super excited about what is going on (with the product).

If you really want to stand out right now it isn’t pricing, it’s team alignment and customer experience.” — Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

Prefer to listen to the episode?

Listen on iTunes here or listen on Stitcher here.

Check out the resources Nichole Elizabeth mentions on the show:

Stop Building

by in Product Development, Startups, , , One Comment

A lot of founders come to me and say, ” I need to fundraise!”  When I stop and ask them why, they say, “Because I need to money to build more product!”  So then I proceed to ask them, “Will building more product definitely get you more paying customers?  And how many will it get you?”  Silence.

When to Build and When to Walk

If you cannot quantify the number of new customers you will close by creating a new product or feature, there is really no point to building it.  Too often people hear from potential customers that they don’t have XYZ feature.  They might hear this a couple times and think that they should go build the feature, but that’s exactly the wrong thing to do, because it just drives up costs.  Your cost of creating the feature and maintaining it goes up.

If you really think that customers will absolutely not purchase your product without a certain feature in it, then why not round them all up and get them to pre-pay to have it built?  Put a price on the product, and see how people react.

This is a tactic one of the startups I’m advising took recently.  A potential customer of the founder told her that they wanted XYZ feature.  Her startup team just didn’t have the bandwidth to make it happen, but it was a pretty prominent customer whom she knew had deep pockets.  She also knew that if she built XYZ feature that other customers she had talked to before would come back.  Instead of saying no to building the feature, she figured out the cost of building it, then told the customer how much they would need to pay to build the feature.  The customer happily obliged, and the feature then went into production.  There was of course some back and forth negotiation, but throughout the process it was evident that the customer really needed the feature, and was willing to pay for it.

Focus on creating value.

Why We Jump to Building

Its easy to want to build, because it gives you a sense of accomplishment.  You’ve created something that is tangible.  Whats harder to do is to convey the value of the product you’ve already built, and find new markets to sell to because it requires you to think creatively.  But often times this is absolutely necessary, especially if you are limited on funds.  If you’ve got a product that has been selling regularly, and you know you don’t have the means to make more product, focus on finding new markets and new marketing angles.

At some point you have to stop building, and a good time is when you know you have a customer base that is consistent.

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