Over the years I have spoken to many CTOs, PMs, POs, and EMs (Engineering Managers). There were a few common things they all raised. The adoption of their products has been quite slow, self-onboarding is a distant dream, and while marketing is pushing for a product-led strategy, it would require a great engineering effort to achieve it.

Our industry has grown pretty complacent with massive amounts of cash thrown into our products by VCs from California; it’s time to embrace tradition and start putting customer success into our product and engineering strategy again. A product that helps no one and solves nothing isn’t a product - it’s an exercise in futility. Imagine creating a video game that is impossible to finish!

Customer success is not something that randomly happens, it’s the result of good design, strategy and marketing decisions. Successful customers can turn your cURL client into a multi-million-dollar beloved product. This is not a jab at Postman, they truly created the easiest way to repeatedly test API calls. Now it has grown to a degree that’s an industry standard to document, share, test and simulate APIs.

Customer success vs Customer Support

Really quickly, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what each discipline means. Again, the Customer Success Guide has a great page on it here but in short:

  • Customer support is reactive and is how you handle something going wrong and/or not matching their expectations.
  • Customer success is proactive and is making sure your customers are set for success. Remember, game overs are a failure of the game designer.

Why is customer success important?

To clarify, “Customer Success” does not refer only to the work discipline, although that can play a big part, it’s also what it says on the tin. Making sure your customers are not frustrated with how you operate, present and update your software. Successful customers are the ones who can use your product to achieve their objectives without dramas, a high failure rate, or after opening multiple support tickets.

The Customer Success Guide goes into a lot of detail about what CS is and why it matters, but in summary, successful customers can provide:

  • High retention rates and a stable revenue stream.
  • Free promotion! Happy customers will share their success with other parties, and even individuals with no purchasing power in an organisation can promote your product as the best solution.
  • Upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
  • Brand recognition and trust. Your product and company will gain additional perceived value, which might not translate straight to additional revenue, but being seen as an industry leader can really help with growth, finding talent, a healthy work environment and so on.

I would like to add to the above that championing customer success, helps you make some of the tough decisions during development like what features to prioritize and how to grow your teams.

Why your CS can suffer

A common trend with VC-backed product development is that you need to cram as many features as possible within a specified amount of time so you can increase the perceived value of the product, attract more investments and hopefully start earning revenue within 3-5 years. This often creates a situation where a product has a myriad of semi-implemented features, patchwork docs and code, and it’s losing focus. Especially if it’s your first and only product (of its kind), you have to ensure that it effectively meets its core purpose. Your subsequent products can, and have to be bigger. I highly recommend Adam Kalsey’s posts on this topic.

Aside from losing focus and not fully meeting your mission, there are many great ways you can completely alienate and enfeeble your customers. Here’s a great example close to my heart: letting very technical people make all the decisions about your product based on their preferences. I often say “API development is closer to product design than product development” exactly for that reason. Most developers implement things from the perspective of someone with knowledge of the product and domain, which is a major mistake. People are willing to pay for your product exactly because they don’t want to invest the time and headspace to do all that. Considering what your users want to achieve and enabling them to achieve it in a straightforward way MUST be part of your design philosophy.

If you’re interested in my takes on API products, you can check out some of my YouTube videos.

Things you can do to improve your CS

Having a really solid customer support department can do wonders. Just think how many times you’ve heard “it’s XYZ, but their customer support is amazing” throughout your life. From free returns, extending trials, fast response times, effective support representatives to tight SLAs, you can create a robust experience.

However, being reactive should not be your only strategy. There are many ways to be proactive and create a supportive ecosystem that promotes customer success. Here are a few:

  • I have been going on and on about the importance of good, factual, and up-to-date documentation. It does a LOT. You can read more about it on my blog post about this
  • Test, test, test. You need to test for bugs, you need to test your designs, you need to test your infrastructure. Having a stable, sensible system goes a long way and testing is a big part of that.
  • Make sure your product marketing and account managers don’t overpromise, or use a proposed internal roadmap in order to sell to new customers. There’s nothing wrong with offering post-sales support and custom development. Leverage customer needs to generate more work and revenue streams.
  • Act based on data, not vibes. Collect feedback from trusted customers, approach ex-customers and see why they are no longer using your product, collect analytics from the users of your product. Not all feedback is valuable, but you should be able to notice trends.
  • Have a clear mission statement for your company and promote it across all employees. I am not talking about generic value statements, I’m talking “we want to put a man on the moon”. If the majority of the people have internalized what you’re set out to do and are razor focused on it, you not only save time by avoiding constant, unnecessary sync meetings - you also build trust across the org. Everyone feels part of the same team, working toward a common goal. This is important.

Conclusion

All in all, given how volatile the market has been, and how SaaS and cloud fatigue has been hitting all of us, there’s a certain beauty in just creating a really good product that cares for the success of its customers. Obviously, who knows what will happen next, we might start getting buckets of money from Korean chaebols and we can go back to growth-at-all-costs strategies; staying on top of the market developments is always important.

Thanks for reading - what’s worked (or failed) in your customer success journey? Let me know!