Moreover, today’s customer — whether it’s your grandfather with his Fitbit or an executive vice president expecting the quarterly numbers to be reported with a snap of her fingers — they want to spend less time learning how to use the product than it takes to open the box. If there’s a box.
Customer success isn’t a new science — it’s something we’ve been doing for ages. Poorly. But when done right, it’s the difference between the 20-page manual that used to come with a clock radio and the little transparent sticker with the arrow pointing to the power button on your new smartphone.
Let’s figure out how we achieve that higher level of smoothness.
What is great customer success?
To get your brain wrapped around the concept of customer success, think of it as a process that begins at purchase and ends with the last support call.
Good customer success helps the customer get started, great customer success builds onboarding into the product. Good customer success instructs the customer, great customer success anticipates and automates. Good customer success offers built-in support, great customer success eliminates customer support.
Or at least 80% of it.
Good customer success is there to make sure the customer is doing exactly what they need to do to get maximum value out of the product. Great customer success does this too and then makes sure the product is doing exactly what it needs to do to get maximum value out of the customer.
Why startups are terrible at making customers successful
There are basically two reasons why startups fail at customer success.
One: They think about the product first and the customer second
This is especially true of B2B companies, which is why business software is usually so much less customer-friendly than its consumer counterpart. But B2C companies don’t get a pass here either, and neither do non-technical startups. I’ve used all kinds of products that have frustrated me to no end — and it quickly became obvious that the product was built for the builders, not for me.
As a builder myself, I still fall victim to this mistake more often than I care to admit. I will build the hell out of a product or feature just because I can. In fact, I’ll write the hell out of a post because I need to say just one more thing before I get to the next section. Then the next morning I’ll read the postback and it doesn’t make any sense.
There’s a moment in every product development cycle, even feature development cycle, when the builders need to stop thinking about features and start thinking about use cases.
Two: Startups need to travel light
Most startups don’t fill a customer success role because they can’t justify it. Their logic comes down to: If we can just sell a shit-ton of product, and then hire enough support people to manage the customers, we will make a lot of money.
Startups run on low fuel. So they usually either have sales fill the customer success role, which doesn’t work because once sales get commission, they’re out. Or they have support fill the role, which doesn’t work because support isn’t equipped for the duality of maximizing both the product’s value and the customer’s value.
And anyway, that’s not how growth works.
Growth isn’t about volume. Well, it is, but the incremental costs of adding straight volume almost always eclipse the incremental adds to the bottom line. Growth is about selling more product to the same customers while spending less money and resources landing new customers.
In other words: Growth is about maximizing both the value of the product to the customer and the value of the customer to the company.
There. I justified customer success.
What does a customer success team look like?
Another mistake startups often make is substituting project management for customer success. Customer success is more about engineering than management, and it’s more about quality than timelines.
The customer success role requires a product background, and the more technical the person, the better. Customer success doesn’t have to code, or design, or formulate, or manufacture, but the role needs to know the science that makes the product unique.
They also need to be able to analyze the front end — what the customer interfaces with — and the back end — the machinery that makes the product. It doesn’t matter if that machinery is Ruby or a lathe or a pizza oven, customer success needs to be able to troubleshoot flaws in the user experience and source those flaws back to all the processes that made the thing.