Define Your Customer Success Basics
Does the platform provide you with the tools that you have defined you really need to resolve your current pain point? For example, if you know you need to empower your customer support team make sure you have dynamic chat and knowledge base tools that allow them to fully engage with customers. It sounds simple, but you would be surprised as to how many product managers and customer success managers get sold on non-product-led customer success tools they don’t quite need yet, while sacrificing the priority items that will impact their growth.
Be Scale Buddies
Let’s face it – start-ups can’t afford the ticket prices of larger companies, but they don’t want to invest in training a team to use a product they will outgrow in a year.
We’ve all faced these issues – particularly with CRM. Remember how Pipeline was selling a Platinum level option, but in reality they hadn’t actually even built the features for that higher-priced service yet? Ouch.
Look at if the company is nimble and if they truly want to hear your feedback. At FROGED we actively look to our clients to make improvements to our product and our own customer success team uses it daily. This means our recent product launches like auto-messages and customizable behavioral events came from active listening and a desire to grow with our clients. It’s why our churn is 1.3% vs. the 6% industry standard. Okay, it also has to do with our amazing product-led customer success platform – we aren’t bragging, we are just really proud of what we are building everyday.
Create a Flexible Product-led Experience
Given the current desire to create technology packages, (we call them boxes) nimbleness seems like a fantasy. Yet, it shouldn’t be. No customer is the same and every business has different ways in which they navigate support and measuring their customer experience.
Start-ups need to consider if the product they are investing in is flexible for their current engagement needs as well as down the road. Dive deep into the tool to see for example not just if you can segment your audience, but rather HOW you can segment. Consider this example deeply because when you segment customers you will probably want to trigger proactive automated messages to get their attention or guide them in your product onboarding.
At FROGED we go deep into the how, but putting our clients in the driver seat. That’s right there’s no proverbial box, this means you can do the following
1. Segment your clients by their attributes and by their actions using custom events
2. Personalize the email for each contact with their data (name, company, etc.)
3. Analyze the interaction with the campaign with the open rate and click rate
Sustainable Product-led Customer Growth is Key
Whether you are looking for a deep knowledge base or pro-active support tools like push notifications or the ability to switch conversations between agents there are products out there designed to provide solutions for your business needs. In fact there are so many, it can be overwhelming to a start-up.
Don’t forget you are small, but mighty (staring in the mirror now) and with a little prioritization and open-ended questions you can find the right customer success platform for your business today and tomorrow. It’s not necessarily about the unicorn, but rather more about the fable of the tortoise and the hare – slow and steady wins the race. We call it sustainable growth and your partners should be like minded.
FROGED’s technology might leap, but we use our own product everyday for our business. It doesn’t get more sustainable than that.
