Delivering Customer Experience At Scale
We’re at a time where viral growth is accomplished not through world class sales processes (although they help) but through the customer experience. The buying pattern is changing and expectations are rising —enterprise products are being judged alike new apps on your iPhone. Rather than wait to formalize a customer success team, in this article I’ll explain how to create a great customer experience without adding headcount or increasing budget. This one goes out to all the startups :)
“Scale is not hiring people. Hiring people is adding cost. Scale is profitable repeatability. Scale is the ability to serve ever larger groups customers without adding proportional cost.”
Ensuring our clients are wildly successful takes effort. A lot of effort. That typically means investing in headcount but, especially in startups, that budget is being prioritized for engineering. In larger companies, well-staffed and organized, this may not be a challenge — an SE may work just 5 enterprise accounts each quarter, a CSM may support just 10 customers year-round — white-glove service is expected. Quadruple that, as so often business goes, to 20 enterprise accounts and 40 customers and it quickly becomes overwhelming even for the most experienced teams.
So with existing resources let’s look at ways to maximize customer experience and even reduce effort in the process. I will simplify my approach into three categories:
Democratize the product
Make purchasing easy
White-glove everything
Democratize the Product
Evaluators today, unanimously, have an expectation to trial products unencumbered by artificial barriers or processes. Have you something like “Get Started Today!” on your website? Does it actually provide access to the product or create barriers by presenting a sign up form for your CRM? Many modern companies who have developed easy and intuitive products have embraced the free trial and some, namely those with open source origins, were made popular from freemium use alone! These offerings, like the automotive test drive, can be enough to make for paying customers, even without sales, once they see themselves in the drivers seat. Luddites who don’t believe in giving away value for free will be comforted to know that prospects may still pay for a commitment-free trial experience. Alternatively, restrict enterprise features on freeware: Heroku, a popular cloud-based application development platform, once provided a free but feature-limited version of its product. It became massively popular among students who, upon entering the workforce, converted to paying customers. There is no excuse for non-digital vendors either: Verkada, a security company offering a mix of physical devices and cloud-based analytics, even provides a free physical device to trial.
These methods have become the norm. And most senior sales engineers will, if not already, complain of giving canned demos to the Joe Smiths of the world. At minimum I recommend providing those canned demos on your website, delivered not by Marketing but by Sales/SEs, to inform prospects and lead to constructive conversations with your team. Any company still hiding product behind prospect qualification will soon find themselves being beaten out by less capable, but freely accessible competitors.
Make Purchasing Easy
Buyers expect a quick and painless experience while purchasing or renewing a product. This is not unique to software sales: Apple Pay has simplified the checkout process to a simple tap or click of your mobile device, and Amazon Go has radically altered the in-store experience. Digital startups like SalesBricks seek to modernize B2B software purchases, from cumbersome deal desk process and multiple approval workflows to something resembling a simple ecommerce checkout. Talk to your sales team, especially the BDRs, and ask how many willing buyers of trial units are being put off because they first need to engage in a formal sales engagement or value-realization exercise. Any company who creates barriers to purchase should critically investigate their funnel abandonment rates.
While we’re at it, simplify the pricing structure. I once supported a product that licensed by execution run time and required upfront payment in the BOM, not available through consumption. Worse, run time would vary depending on the script, how often it was scheduled, were there any replays on failure, and would vary depending on the locations spread throughout the world. If it takes a team of eight people nearly an hour to calculate the license cost of one product line, you’ve got to simplify!
White-Glove Everything
Let’s contrast the guest experience having a personal concierge at the Burj Al Arab to that of staying at a Motel 6. Although guests are paying many thousands of dollars and expect the highest quality of professional services at the Burj Al Arab, the owner of the Motel 6 is at an advantage because, in seeking positive reviews and return business, he can, in fact, create unexpected guest experience within his means by thinking creatively. The steps to this are simple: Assess at unit scale… look for expectations, deliverables, and resources that can be delivered through automation, scale, and repeatability while providing the same, or elevated, quality of service. Perhaps the motel owner, primarily serving long-haul truckers, will educate his staff on trucking routes so they can engage in pleasant conversations at check-in, arrange for onsite laundry service pick-up, partner with local bars and restaurants to provide motel guests with meal discounts, and sell replacement vehicle parts on consignment with local mechanics. He is now catering to his ideal customer segment, ensuring their primary needs are met in unexpected ways, ensuring repeat business, while staying within his means.
In an effort to white-glove everything (if that sounds like a fevered dream), here are six tools and processes to get you started.
A) Self-Service Evaluation Guide. If you subscribed to Rule #1, democratize the product, your prospects will be neck-deep in the trial. If they subscribe to Rule #1, they don’t want you anywhere near them until they request it. Trials are great — they expand your brand footprint and generate educated (if not qualified) inbound leads —so it comes as no surprise that sales leaders would want to support them. There are two competing perspectives for this: First, leaving prospects at the mercy of initial impressions can be disastrous with lost potential revenue (in my experience, self-guided trials had <25% conversion whereas SE-guided POCs had >85%). Second, servicing thousands of unqualified downloads would be a drain on resources and drive up customer acquisition cost. The solution: An evaluation guide that provides, with zero-touch, the expertise and influence of your team to improve trial success rates and that scales with demand. Differing from a ‘quick start’ guide (ex: Snowflake), which is often a simplified product tour, the eval guide should include: considerations when evaluating solutions (with bias), user roles and use cases, common success criteria (differentiated), an evaluation playbook, a list of additional resources and contacts, customer case studies and purchase options.
B) Digital Adoption Experience — If you have a digital product, you must invest in digital adoption facilitators. Unlike an evaluation guide, these digitally facilitate new users’ exploration of the product and create favorable first impressions. Typically third-party solutions that sit atop your product’s UI using a simple javascript tag, they provide enhanced customer experience such as click-along product tours as well as extremely useful analytics for PLG. Tools like WalkMe and Pendo.io can be installed in minutes and configured within days and may very well replace your inbound and down-market demos, freeing up valuable resources while providing greater lead insight. Product teams love that they can get a treasure trove of analytics without distracting Engineering. And Customer Success teams can intelligently manage growth/churn risk and identify growth opportunities across hundreds of accounts.
C) Asynchronous Engagement — How many of us used to run POCs with schedules, onsite visitations, and formal plans? Yup, me too. But the modern buyer persona compounded by remote work during COVID has forced the adoption of asynchronous engagement models. I’ve taken many a page out of my SDR’s playbooks while adapting to the new world order. One such model is collaborating with customers over Slack. Customers enjoy the direct access to senior stakeholders and vendors enjoy keeping a finger on the pulse of the account. Another is through low-touch evaluations that may have just a single weekly touch-point (for Q&A or workshops) but are otherwise self-guided (perhaps by a self-guided evaluation guide). Prospects love the flexibility and SEs enjoy the minimal time investment.
D) Community — One of the best ways to enhance the customer experience is to build an active and collaborative community. These communities have a myriad of benefits including self-managing incident resolution, knowledge sharing, increased event registrations, and higher NPS scores. Education and workshop events, historically a heavy lift within individual accounts, can be made communal over Zoom Webinars and saved for future enablement on the Community portal. While the initial challenge of building a net-new community may seem daunting, you’ll find plenty of community advocates within your customer base who delight in being seen as thought leaders and early influencers.
E) Customer360 Dashboard — Unify customer ITSM, CRM, CPQ, and CLM data to provide your teams with insight that speed up decisions on account strategy. Done properly and shared among customer-facing teams, it enables personalized customer journeys and offerings, omni-channel awareness, proactive support, segmentation and led generation, and growth/risk assessment. Even if you can’t coalesce or the organization hasn’t reached maturity, create systems of communication that encourage awareness.
F) Value Realization Scorecards — Are your customers getting the value they paid for from your solution? How are you going about this today? If customer success is like climbing a mountain, achieving the sale is akin to reaching the summit, and you’ve still to arrive home safely. Customer success teams should always be measuring against the original goals of the purchase while seeking new opportunities for added value. Critical to this is the handoff between sales and post-sales. Tools like Three Whys (Why Buy Anything, Why Buy Us, and Why Buy Now), a Champion Plan, and the POC Playback lay the groundwork for value realization and should be shared across all customer-facing orgs. Teams may get bogged down in the day-to-day task load so it’s important to reassess regularly.