Customer driven handbook

The Customer-Driven Handbook Ignite Your Audience from Hi to Highly Engaged

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Table of Contents

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INTRODUCTION Defining a Customer-Driven Company

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CHAPTER 1 Empathy: The Key to a Customer-Driven Website Experience

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CHAPTER 2 Removing Friction: A Customer-Driven Sign-Up & Onboarding Strategy

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CHAPTER 3 Fostering Long-Term Usage: A Customer-Driven Engagement Strategy

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CONCLUSION Bringing It All Together: How to Turn this Book Into Action

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I N T R OD U CTION

Defining a Customer-Driven Company

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“

We’re building Earth’s most customer-centric company.

Even if you don’t know where the phrase comes from, you’ve probably heard it. You may even be working on doing this very thing—right now— at your company.

Generally, folks understand the phrase “customer centric” to mean “we’re going to work really hard to do good things for our customers. In fact, customers are going to be a part of everything we do!” While taking customers’ needs into account throughout their experience with your product is a smart business move, there is more that can be done. We like to think of the next iteration of “customer centric” as “customer driven.”

To understand the delta between the two, think of what it means to travel to the center of something. In a city, you have to go through the sprawling suburbs to get to the hip urban center. In a movie theater, you have to stumble over people’s knees to get to the center seats. When you have a Tootsie Pop, you have to lick 252 times* before you get to the center. By definition, the center of something has other layers around it that come first—unless, of course—you can somehow begin your journey in the center.

This book is a guide for beginning in the center of your customer’s experience, so that experience can drive every project your team embarks on.

The customer-centric business might build, build, build, then review new features with a few choice customers before a major release; but the customer-driven business will have the problems and goals of the customer documented before they ever begin planning.

*Approximately

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CU STOMER DR I V EN [cus-tom-er • dr-iv-en]

Noun

1. Ensuring your customers’ needs are the foundation of every company initiative.

This book will provide a shared language for your team discuss and prioritize your customer’s needs and desired solution, to ensure your communication and product projects are truly customer driven.

Because your customer’s onboarding experience is key to their overall experience with your product, we’ve written this guide to aid the person (or people) at your company who “owns” the onboarding process. Who that is— and what team they’re on—often varies from company to company. At some SaaS companies, onboarding is owned largely by the Product team. At others, it’s seen as a product marketing initiative, so Marketing makes the calls. For still others, Customer Success owns this stage.

Whichever your situation might be, onboarding is the pivotal stage that either converts a curious lead who’s thinking about buying into a paying customer, or it leaves them over- or underwhelmed, and they abandon—their needs unmet.

Ensuring this stage of the journey is customer driven (and, therefore, high-converting) requires communication and mutual understanding across departments.

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Why Does Customer-Driven Matter?

51%

Of sales leaders are focused on increasing customer retention through deeper relationships.

In fact, the most successful sales teams care just as much about creating long-lasting customers through great customer experience (CX).

And buyers have the option to research and even demo/trial products before they ever interact with a salesperson. They’ve looked at you, they’ve looked at your competitors, and now they’re looking back at you to see who has the best solution. Your website, your email campaigns, your free trial, and more are all being experienced by your potential customer before you’re ever aware of it.

Software purchasing is increasingly moving from the bottom up. No longer does a C-Suite exec issue a Request for Proposal (RFP) and wait for slide decks to roll in. More often, an individual contributor looks for a free tool to help make her day easier, finds your product, and slowly works it into the day-to-day practices of the organization.

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A customer-driven approach has significant advantages in this environment for three key reasons: Your customer needs a problem solved If you’ve had the customer’s problem in mind at the beginning of each project, then your advertising, content marketing, and web copy have all been carefully tuned to attract the customer who needs your solution to that problem. You are proactive about making it easy for the right people to find you and start living a better life with your solution.

You don’t waste your time and money on meaningless projects An SEO strategy set up to chase the top slots of your industry buzzwords might work to get more unique visits to your site. But it’s not automatically the best way to get the right people actively using your platform. Approaching every project with a deep understanding of customer needs first means that your team is doing high value work 100% of the time. Even if you miss a target, you’re learning more about what your customers need.

You succeed as a business A customer-driven approach is not merely altruistic. Look at everything above. Being customer-driven is about getting the right people to find your product and solve the right problems at the right time. Customer-driven is about finding and impressing the people who are ready to spend money and are going to keep spending money. Between the decreased overhead that comes with focusing on projects that matter, to the decreased churn that comes with enabling your best customers to do their best, customer-driven is a winning business strategy at its core.

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The Amazon Example Amazon’s slogan is “Earth’s most customer centric company.” And as a behemoth in the ecommerce space, Amazon has set the expectation for what an online transaction should look like—it ships fast. You can return it easily.

There is a person ready to talk to you right now when something goes wrong.

Customer centric, indeed! But customer-driven?

Consider the account menu dropdown, which we’ll unpack briefly:

For a company that has created refrigerator magnets that can reorder your preferred brand of cat litter with the push of a button, this sure seems like a complicated experience.

Why might a customer click something labeled “My Account?” Presumably she is after her account information—perhaps a credit card, perhaps an address.

Considering the name and the information we expect to be stored there, this menu, replete with three video options seems a bit over complicated.

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The Amazon Example And about those video options—can a customer clearly delineate which link leads to which section of their video service? Where are the TV episodes they’ve already paid for? Where are the ones they can watch for free?

What might a customer-driven experience look like here? Considering Amazon’s customer base, the answer is variable. They could benefit from multiple experiences targeted to different sorts of users.

A heavy user of their digital content might appreciate something a bit clearer and simpler than the current video scenario. A serious “Subscribe & Save” customer might not even need the video services options to appear on their homepage.

Whether or not your business has as many variables at Amazon’s does, the point remains: Different users need different experiences based on their different desired solutions, and it takes a customer-driven approach to understand and develop those experiences.

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Three Pursuits of a Customer-Driven Company This book will cover three pursuits of a customer-driven company. These pursuits likely cross into several departments—marketing, customer success, design, and product. When it comes to creating a customer-driven experience, however, the lines dividing your company’s actual departments may blur a bit, and collaboration will be key.

Empathetic Website Experience When we discuss a customer-driven website, we’ll share insights and stories from leaders within the SaaS community who’ve dug deep to understand their customers’ current experiences, and then used those learnings to increase conversions across their websites and guide their content strategies.

Frictionless Sign-up & Onboarding Congrats! Someone wants to try your product. Don’t get tempted to ruin this experience by trying to pull too much information out of someone, just so you can load them into the marketing automation machine. And don’t leave them to fend for themselves in a mysterious new product.

Onboarding often proves to be the most crucial piece of a truly customer-driven experience.

Engaged Longterm Usage Creating a truly customer-driven experience goes beyond speedy responses to support tickets and bugs or quarterly check-in emails from an account manager. The tasks here don’t just prevent churn for financial sake, they prevent churn by making sure people are getting the most value from your product.

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Again, collaboration across your company’s existing departments is key to creating a customer-driven experience. Consider the Amazon example above: who would be responsible for improving that overwhelming UI? Front-end dev might need to change some elements of the page. Marketing will have to change the copy. Or would that be part of customer success since we’re talking about Prime users? Every department in a business has a unique call to be customer-driven and distinct methods by which they should execute.

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Let’s Get Started!

The next three chapters will deep-dive into pursuits of a customer-driven business. It bears repeating that within your company, these pursuits may require skillsets and expertise that are currently divided between the business units of your company.

Fear not: there is no need to restructure the company around these departments.

The goal of this guide is to help you understand the different goals of your company departments and help you align their goals with yours as the advocate of product adoption. It’s important to facilitate cross-departmental conversations about what truly makes an experience customer-driven, in order to identify who from each existing team should own a particular project.

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C HA P TER 1

Empathy: The Key to a Customer-Driven Website Experience

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Before a customer ever reaches your product, they encounter your website.

To move from website to product, they first need to find a solution to their problem as quickly and clearly as possible.

As Grey Garner, owner of 2520 Consulting (previously VP Marketing at Emma and Chief Strategy Officer at Kindful) puts it,

“The deeper my understanding of my best customer, the better I can build a site experience that’s aligned with the next step they want to take. Reverse engineering site design from that perspective helps me do all the right things on content & messaging, product trials & onboarding, nurturing, etc., all the way out to my keywords and SEO. Avoid chasing a metric like traffic, or leads, or even MQLs in a vacuum. Unless you’re producing great customers, those aren’t necessarily true success metrics at a business level, but happy customers almost always are.”

GREY GARNER Owner, 2520 Consulting

Since those easiest-to-track metrics fail to paint the full picture, creating a customer-driven website experience can be a difficult pursuit to effectively execute on and could potentially require the most cross functional work of any pursuit we’ll discuss. And ultimately, folks from each one of these teams will need to regularly assess what is and isn’t working.

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Engineering Will need to make sure the mechanics of the site—speed, functionality across various browsers, mobile performance, and others—are top-notch.

Design/UX Will need to have a say about how everything flows.

Marketing Will be involved to ensure the copy and CTAs are on point.

Georgiana Laudi, previously VP Marketing, Unbounce (now founder of Forget the Funnel) learned the hard way that decisions made in a silo can cause a drop in conversions from visit to sign-up:

“We were testing new headline and sub-head copy (trying to be more relevant/helpful), and in doing so, we pushed all elements on the page down by maybe a couple hundred pixels. We ran the test, we declared a winner, and off we went on our merry way testing the next thing.

What we didn’t realize was that we’d pushed the secondary (even tertiary) page goal of “kick the tires free signup” down below the fold. Free signups tanked, and it took us (gulp) weeks to notice. All of our KPIs were affected since, as you’d expect, many 30 day trial starts come from our “kick the tires” free users. Tough lesson, but super valuable.”

GEORGIANA LAUDI Founder, Forget the Funnel

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The design change (the CTA being pushed out of sight) ended up doing users a disservice, because they missed where to go on the site to gain access to the Unbounce product.

Ultimately, what Gia’s team learned is that considering the perspective of the customer must always be front and center.

So, how to ensure you’re catering to the customer’s perspective?

C USTOMER R ESEA R CH

Finding the “Whys” Attached to the “Whats” Google Analytics will tell you how many folks visited your site and whether most of your them were on Chrome or Firefox.

Your marketing automation platform will tell you what content someone downloaded in exchange for their email address.

But the qualitative information—why they did these things—will only emerge in candid, open conversations with visitors and customers.

And understanding your customer’s goals and mindset intimately enough to develop an experience that caters to them? That requires the what and the why.

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Fio Dossetto, one of Hotjar’s marketing team members, highlights how relying on the what (quantitative data) without the why (qualitative) can lead to significant problems:

“A while back, we set up a heatmap on our pricing and plans page, which showed that prospective customers spent most of their time reading the details of our ‘basic’ plan. We assumed they were doing so because they were excited about the plan and ready to sign up to it—but just to be on the safe side, we set up a poll to ask if the pricing was clear.

It turned out our assumption had been wildly inaccurate. People were spending so much time on that section of the page because they could not figure out what words like ‘sampling rate’ and ‘data’ meant, and they could not find an answer anywhere.

However, the design change (theyour CTAcustomer—existing being pushed out or of potential— sight) actualThis is a typical case where putting first ly ended upblocker doing users a disservice, they mightthere havewas missed turns a major into an opportunity.because We did not realize an

where go onwas. theOnce site towe gain to the Unbounce product.

This issue, buttothere sawaccess it, we also could find a way to fix it.” ends up wasting the user’s time, as they now have to hunt around the site to find where to go next.

FIO DOSSETTO Marketing, Hotjar

The quantitative data shown by Hotjar’s heatmap only yielded actionable insights when combined with qualitative data from a poll. But once the two data sets were held up side by side, it was easy to see this was not the case, and then the team could begin reworking this particular page from the visitor viewpoint.

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“To really optimize a website or a product experience, you have to get to know who these people are and what (the they’re You need understand However, the design change CTAlooking being for. pushed out oftosight) actualwhether or up notdoing they’re finding what they’re lookingthey for, and if they’re not, what’s ly ended users a disservice, because might have missed

where to go on gain access stopping them, to the helpsite theto process along.”to the Unbounce product. This ends up wasting the user’s time, as they now have to hunt around the site to find where to go next.

FIO DOSSETTO Marketing, Hotjar

This is a textbook example of customer-driven research spurring customer-driven action.

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C HA P TER 2

Removing Friction: A Customer-Driven Sign-Up & Onboarding Strategy

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Imagine you’re at a big-box store on a Saturday, hoping to buy a washing machine.

You’re walking down long, concrete-floored rows of white, black, and stainless steel machines. If you can successfully make a decision within the next hour or so, you’ll be able to purchase one of these machines, get out of this big, too-brightly-lit store, and enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Deciding which washing machine to take home proves challenging: • You can’t plug any of them in while you’re in the store.

• You can’t tell how loud they’ll be when they run.

• You can’t wash sample loads of laundry before taking any of them home.

And worst of all, you’re at the mercy of the commission-only sales rep on duty.

This is a person who knows nothing about the kinds of clothes you wear or the detergent you like. Yet they’re responsible for pushing you through the entire purchasing process—from sales pitches, to endless paperwork, to the back-and-forth hassle of scheduling delivery and installment dates In addition to bulky physical products like washing machines, this clunky experience was also once the de facto buying process in ye olde days of software. There was no try-before-you-buy option, no easy way to just pull out a credit card and move on. Instead, the sales rep was the product gatekeeper.

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As the champion of product adoption at your company, you already know this sale-before-implementation, “washing machine” method is far less considerate of your customer’s experience than the “bottoms-up” approach that’s evolved over more recent years, in which an individual can try your product with no sales assistance, share it with their team, and then put down a credit card once they’ve found value.

This “bottoms up” approach has proven, time and again, to be a superior product and growth strategy.

Daily active users rocketed from

0-2.7M

within three years of launch Reference

Company spent

12-21% of revenue on customer acquisiton (VS Standard 50-100%) Reference

But reaping even a fraction of the benefits of this “bottoms up” approach requires more than simply slapping a free trial in front of your product.

Without careful consideration of your customers’ “external goals” (that is, what they’re trying to accomplish at work and in life by using your product), and strategic construction of an onboarding experience built around those goals, a free trial fails to be the rocketship of growth it can and should be. Instead, it becomes a pointless parading of features and widgets that your new user may never end up learning to operate.

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The Business Case for Customer-Driven Onboarding Sometimes, a product adoption owner—who sees clear value in optimizing their product’s sign-up and onboarding flow—can struggle to get necessary members of other teams bought into the idea.

This can happen for any number of reasons. The sales and marketing teams are under pressure to hit aggressive lead and prospect quotas. The engineering team would prefer to spend time on developing new features.

The customer success team is so swamped with support and account management, they lack the bandwidth necessary to step back and reevaluate the current setup.

However, in the same way that a great onboarding strategy requires participation from everyone, it’s also an effort that benefits everyone—from pre-sale teams, all the way to those responsible for long-term satisfaction, upsells, and expansion.

On the pre-sale side, designing and optimizing an onboarding experience around your ideal customer’s external goal helps marketing and sales weed out unqualified leads from highly-qualified ones, ultimately making those teams more efficient. On the post-sale side, this results in fewer bad-fit customers coming on board, then pulling valuable time and resources away from ensuring good-fit customers are successful.

By honing in on your ideal customer’s external goal, you can work backwards within your product to identify what actions a user needs to take in order to achieve that external goal—and consequently—feel value. This is your “aha!” moment: the point at which a user has taken the minimum number of necessary steps to achieve something and identified themselves as a qualified potential customer.

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The Business Case for Customer-Driven Onboarding As an example borrowed from The Complete Guide to PQLs, the team behind Mixmax knows that for a new trial user to get value from their platform—and eventually upgrade—that trial user has to do more than simply click around her account, exploring the features available to her.

That new user has to actually integrate at least one of Mixmax’s features into her daily workflow (the ideal Mixmax user’s “aha” moment).

“What we’re looking for is whether a user has actually used calendaring. Have they actually set up an automated email sequence? Are they actively using any email templates? Did they co-opt into Salesforce or set up our Slack integration?”

OLOF MATHÉ CEO, Mixmax

While focusing on your customer’s goals may sound obvious, it can be difficult to get right. In the words of Sadhana Balaji, Product Marketer at Chargebee:

“Unless you have a thorough understanding of what your customer needs, your onboarding process will only be a half-baked endeavor.”

SADHANA BALAJI Product Marketer, Chargebee

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Tailoring the Onboarding Experience to Suit Your Best Customers What is it, then, that makes aligning your onboarding experience with customers’ goals so difficult? As the team at Zapier explains, the challenge is that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution:

“Helping users get up to speed with a horizontal product is hard. Zapier lets people set up connections between more than 900 apps, and there’s a nearly endless number of workflows you can create. Since everyone comes to Zapier with a slightly different problem, it’s hard to zero in on one solution that fits each customer’s needs.

That said, we’re experimenting with using a mix of personas and the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to help us better focus our marketing and product efforts.”

JOE STYCH Product Marketing, EILEEN RUBERTO UX Researcher WESTON THAYER Product Designer

In a nutshell, personas are a way to classify who a customer is and are typically comprised of demographic data. On the other hand, Jobs To Be Done is the theory that people hire (buy) products to overcome a specific struggle they have. Ultimately, your customer’s struggle lies outside of your product, meaning the value that you help users feel during onboarding must go beyond exploring features just for the sake of exploring them.

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By combining these two frameworks, Zapier can segment users based on their particular persona and struggle. They can then customize the onboarding experience accordingly, connecting a new user to the features most likely to help that user overcome their struggle:

“

Earlier this year, we got to work with Facebook on the launch of their ad tool, Facebook Lead Ads. We knew anyone signing up from Facebook Lead Ads likely had a pretty specific set of needs. So we invested the time to create a custom onboarding email flow that speaks directly to how you can use Zapier with Facebook Lead Ads. The emails offer guides, templates, and ideas for getting started. Sure, it would’ve been easier to reuse our generic onboarding flow. But by offering content that speaks directly to this specific segment of readers’ needs, we saw that people were able to set up Zaps that work, faster.”

JOE STYCH Product Marketing, EILEEN RUBERTO UX Researcher WESTON THAYER Product Designer

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The team at Chargebee employs a slightly different method to define their customer segments and create tailored experiences. They first review how current ideal customers behave within their product, to shed light on which activities indicate a new user is a strong potential fit.

Chargebee calls these activities “Common Conversion Activities” (CCAs), and they can score a new trial user based on how many CCAs that user performs— as well as guide new trial users toward those CCAs as quickly as possible:

“To nudge the trial users to perform the CCAs, we created an interactive ‘Explore Chargebee’ tab within the app, which introduces them to the different activities.

Additionally, during the signup process, along with a new user’s email address, we also get the user’s industry. We can then tailor the entire app’s demo data based on that industry, with little help snippets that explain each section in plain English. This way, the user doesn’t get overwhelmed with complex billing terms and jargon.

Testing and tweaking this tailored experience over time has boosted our trial-to-paid conversion rate from 8% to 15%.”

SADHANA BALAJI Product Marketer, Chargebee

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Given that a CCA-focused onboarding experience can double conversion rates (and, therefore, net-new revenue) as Chargebee saw, it’s important to think carefully about your own CCAs. They’re not necessarily usage of features you have that your competitors don’t, nor are they usage of the most common features available in the market.

Rather, your CCAs are the activities your most successful customers complete along the path to feeling value from your product.

It can be extremely difficult for an internal team to “get out of the building,” and to put themselves back on the path a new trial user embarks on. As Shanelle Mullin (member of the Growth team at Shopify) explains:

“The longer you work on something, the harder it becomes to ignore your hopes in favour of what’s best for the customer. I think that’s a problem every team encounters and has to fight against consistently—and many teams never find the self-awareness to know this is even at play.”

SHANELLE MULLIN Growth Team Member, Shopify

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Whether it’s through customer interviews, customer surveys, monitoring usage metrics, or other forms of user research, the most effective onboarding experiences are built by teams willing to put their customers’ needs at the foundation of their efforts and acknowledge that there will probably be differences between their favorite features versus the features most important to customers.

Takeaways Your customer doesn’t need to see a parade of all your features to feel value from your product. Instead, they need to see only the features that help them achieve their external goal.

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As Grey Garner can attest from his experiences at Kindful, the result of this effort is well worth the upfront investment of research, time, and energy:

“Kindful is a CRM for nonprofits, and at one point point, we developed a GARNER donationGREY plugin that was slick, easy to implement, and well-received with our Former Chief Strategy Officer, Kindful

beta customers - all good! Except it was totally buried in a wall of CRM/Database features. Not good.

We realized there was a lot of work to be done to help customers find and use this valuable new plugin. So we formed a cross functional team of marketing, sales, product, and support folks tasked with creating an experience to guide users from marketing landing page to installed plugin in as few steps as possible.

As a result, we built a marketing campaign, refactored our in-app onboarding, and crafted a sales promotion into an experience that delivered value to customers in a fraction of the time it historically took to onboard a new customer to the core CRM product.

Takeaways By abstracting that one piece of our product and building a dedicated experience around it, we were able to simultaneously open up new marketing opportunities in a historically adjacent category, improve our product adoption/activation, and decrease our time-to-value KPI by about 80%.

Huge customer win!�

GREY GARNER Former Chief Strategy Officer, Kindful

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C HA P TER 3

Fostering Long-Term Usage: A Customer-Driven Engagement Strategy

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Up to this point, we’ve focused on the pre-sale stages of product adoption.

Just as crucial, however, is your customer’s experience with your product and company after they’ve entered their credit card details. Let’s dive into the process of maintaining a customer-driven experience once the initial purchase is complete, when the post-sale teams (support and success) become key influencers in whether customers stay or churn.

You’re at the movies with friends. You’ve paid for your tickets, loaded up on popcorn, and grabbed the perfect seats. And since a few minutes remain before the show starts, you decide to make a quick restroom stop.

But to your unpleasant surprise, you open the restroom door to find the floor completely flooded in water.

You flag down a theater employee to explain the situation, hoping they can point you toward another restroom before you miss the beginning of your show.

“Oh, sorry about that!” they say. “Yeah, we noticed a few hours ago. But it’s been so busy today, we’ve been waiting for a guest to complain before taking the time to fix the problem. I’ll go find someone to clean it up.”

The absurdity of this scene is clear. No establishment would knowingly avoid resolving a glaring issue, especially one that causes a poor customer experience. Those that would do this, of course, aren’t likely to stay in business long.

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However, it’s surprisingly easy for software companies to adopt this same reactive-only approach—be it due to budgetary constraints, internal misunderstanding of what creates a great customer experience, or lack of proactive strategy.

The solution requires a collaborative relationship between the product and customer-facing teams—because while your support and success teams already have processes in place for resolving issues (e.g., a responding to tickets), customer-driven support begins before a user feels the need to send a ticket in the first place.

Customer-driven service entails a strong sense of empathy and understanding.

At a movie theater, the obvious version of customer-driven service is attending to a restroom issue before customers notice it existed in the first place.

At a software company, it could look more like: Catching bugs or clunky areas of your product’s UI while they’re still in QA Creating help docs and sending in-app messages that point people toward success from the get-go, before they ever need to ask for help Reaching out to a user who hasn’t taken the appropriate steps toward success and offering assistance Providing something of value to to a user who hasn’t logged in for several weeks, motivating that person to sign in again

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Proactive measures like these do more than simply help customer success teams meet a usage metric or avoid an unwanted churn percentage; they cater to the customer’s greater goal and promote the customer’s success from step one.

While there’s business value in every aspect of a customer-driven onboarding process, driving long-term usage with a customer-driven mentality is probably the most valuable of them all.

According to Bain & Company (creator of Net Promoter Score), Increasing customer retention by 5% increases profit by 25%-95%.

So, what’s the best way to increase retention?

Paradoxical as it may sound, the answer is not to focus on retention metrics (e.g., churn and upsells) in isolation, as metrics act merely as symptoms of good or bad customer-driven practices.

In our movie theater example, the theater manager may have noticed an unusually high number of patrons leaving the building that day before showtimes ended—possibly with looks of disgust on their faces. But without asking employees whether anything out of the ordinary had occurred to prompt this and without asking customers directly about their experience, the manager will have no idea why show attendance was poor, even though ticket sales were high.

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Similarly, increasing retention within your product requires collecting qualitative data (customer feedback, visibility into user sessions, etc) in addition to quantitative (number of logins, clicks, and other countable interactions).

Let’s unpack a few real-life examples of combining qualitative data with quantitative, so you can leverage these two data streams to build a customer-driven long-term usage strategy.

Helping Your Customer Achieve Helps Your Team Achieve Counterintuitive as it sounds, many customer success teams’ top-priority metrics and goals revolve around what the team is doing—not on factors that truly determine whether customers are achieving success with a product. Take the all-too-common “just checking in” email, for example.

When plotting out how your customer success department can drive long-term usage through customer-driven pursuits, it’s important to keep the customer’s larger goals top-of-mind—and use achievement of those goals, or lack thereof, as the measurement of the department’s success. Brooke Goodbary, Customer Success Consultant and previously Customer Success Manager at Intercom, sums this up well:

“Companies will always have limited resources, so it’s important to agree with the customer on what their most pressing needs are and how the company is able to address them.”

BROOKE GOODBARY Customer Success Consultant, Intercom

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Like any department, a customer success team operates around and optimizes for what it’s measured on. Ultimately, a customer success team needs to optimize for your customer’s goals to if the team is to make any meaningful impact on retention.

This requires a conversation—either between a customer and a team member (during a high-touch onboarding process) or by a more scalable form of communication (during a low-touch onboarding process) to ensure both sides are aligned on the other’s needs and responsibilities. In Brooke’s words:

“I have seen companies get trapped under unreasonable customer expectations. By not agreeing on appropriate expectations from the start, these companies end up under-delivering, despite expending huge amounts of effort to put the customers’ needs first.”

BROOKE GOODBARY Customer Success Consultant, Intercom

Measuring the customer success department’s performance based on customer goals—and balancing this with communication on how the department will help the customer achieve those goals—is the key to getting this right.

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Brooke shares this example of acting in the interest of the customer’s true goals versus in the interest of meeting a metric, which, in this case, would have been keeping a customer on a high-tier pricing plan:

“During my time at Intercom, I had a customer reach out with concerns that their bill seemed to be increasing nearly every month. After a quick exchange, I realized that the customer didn’t realize our pricing was tied to the number of end users in their account.

We dug into which end users were being tracked in Intercom and determined that almost 50% were users who downloaded their app but never logged in within the first 30 days. The customer stopped messaging these users after 60 days and tracking them in Intercom after that time didn’t provide any value. Automatically deleting inactive users after 60 days allowed the customer to manage costs moving forward.”

BROOKE GOODBARY Customer Success Consultant, Intercom

While this exchange didn’t keep the customer on a higher pricing plan, it did help the customer reach their greater goal—ultimately retaining the customer long-term at a price point more appropriate for their needs.

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Customer-Driven Communications Save Time & Boost Success As referenced above, Intercom describes the “just checking in” email as “the business equivalent of getting a ‘sup?’ text from an acquaintance you barely know and haven’t seen in ages. It feels lazy, looks spammy, and it more than likely isn’t going to elicit a response because—guess what—everyone else is doing it too.”

Rather than waste customers’ time (and damage their experience) with lazy, untargeted emails, a customer-driven communication strategy helps you connect with customers personally, deliver value at the right time, and cut through the endless noise of transactional messages.

While customer-driven communication requires more time and thoughtfulness up front, it prevents unnecessary work in the long run. For example, if customer help docs are planned and written in such a way that your customers can actually read, understand, and act on them (e.g., they’re clear, concise, and include screenshots/video/other helpful elements), your customer support team faces fewer tickets to resolve over time.

As a result, more of your customers can accomplish what they’ve signed up for your software to do, and your support team can focus on critical high-involvement support cases, as opposed to relatively low value questions like “where is the button that does X?” The same goes for email communications, like product updates, company announcements, etc. Before hitting “send” on that next campaign, ask yourself, “will this help my customers do what they bought my product to do?

If so, how?”

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Sometimes, even seemingly meaningful communication risks damaging the customer experience when viewed through the customer’s lens. For example, consider the idea of sending an email announcing downtime as part of an update to squash a few bugs. Let’s assume everything has been staged and tested, and there is zero risk of data loss or any other negative impacts to your users. Downtime will last an hour at most, and you’ve scheduled it at a time when the fewest possible users will be in your product, anyway.

With this context established, does that hour of downtime warrant an email to your entire user base? Probably not. For the majority of your users—who wouldn’t have been affected anyway—that’s one more email taking up precious space in their inbox, alerting them of a minor inconvenience they were unlikely to notice in the first place.

But what about users in a different time zone, for which this planned outage is prime working hours? Does that warrant an email? Almost definitely. For this smaller segment of users, the experience of running into an outage issue without warning would probably be more concerning and—ultimately— damaging.

This short thought-exercise is a low-effort but very actionable way to begin placing customers’ needs at the forefront of your communications, rather than hastily blasting out every update—or focusing on “delight” before “success.”

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Sue Duris, CX Consultant and M4 Communications’ Director of Marketing and Customer Experience, shares a common pitfall companies face when designing their communications strategies:

“The first obstacle I see is that companies place delighting the customer above meeting their needs. We all want to reach the mountaintop of creating loyalty, building advocates, and increasing CLV. But, first things first. We need to ensure customers renew and we need to ensure satisfaction—ie. meeting needs first. Then, companies can focus on delight.”

SUE DURIS CX Consultant Director of Marketing, M4 Communications

To some, the concept of delight as a secondary priority may seem counterintuitive. Don’t we all enjoy delightful experiences? Don’t we want our customers to feel delighted?

Keep in mind, however, that customers came to your product to solve a problem, as compared to—say—the reason they buy ice cream. Ice cream is a delight; software has a job to do.

You certainly can—and should—make an effort to delight customers, but only after you are certain their needs are being met and they’re successful.

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Let’s extend the downtime example above. It’s admirable that you want to delight customers with proactive communication and transparency about downtime and bug fixes, but do all customers need that? Do they need another email from a software vendor, if it doesn’t directly affect their workflow?

A Customer-Driven Approach Requires Customer Success & Product to Work Together Your customer success team members may be doing everything in their power to anticipate issues ahead of time, offer assistance to users who haven’t reached the “aha” moment, and write help docs that empower customers to solve problems independently.

But if they lack a direct, open line of communication with the product department, your customer success team will never be able to provide a truly customer-driven experience.

As Intercom outlines in their post “Giving Customer Support a Seat at the Product Table,” putting the customer success and product departments in the same room ensures new features and product improvements align with customers’ real needs.

When it comes to new feature development, customer-facing teams and product teams are sometimes stigmatized as having a cat-and-dog relationship. The customer-facing departments may be big on empathy, wanting to cure whatever ails the customer. But in doing so, they might favor building little thing a customer wishes for in a support ticket.

Product, on the other hand, gets accused of being “overprotective” of the software and being too careful about what they build.

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Both are “right” from their own perspectives. Thankfully, both can be right when these competing interests are combined. Jennifer Aldrich, UX Designer at InVision, describes it this way:

“Feature bloat is always a risk. User research is incredibly important, but instead of creating every feature that’s requested, teams need to dig deep to uncover the underlying problem that leads customers to ask for those features. You may just be able to rework the UX of a key workflow to solve the core problem. Oftentimes, feature requests are just UX issues in disguise.”

JENNIFER ALDRICH UX Designer, InVision

Talented engineers can make even the most complicated problems seem easy, and working with someone who can elegantly design solutions makes it seem like your engineering team can build anything. This is true, within reason. But sometimes, customer success can underestimate just how complicated it is to design and build something simple.

On the other hand, a product team can equally underestimate just how painful an existing problem is for customers—hence the aforementioned cat-and-dog relationship.

When both teams can hear and empathize with each other’s perspectives, great things happen. Customer success begins to understand what it really takes to engineer a product, and the product team begins to understand why customer success keeps adamantly asking for this or that feature.

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As a result, customers’ needs are more often met, either by new features or as Jennifer mentioned, by resolving UX issues.

Takeaways A long-term strategy that’s customer driven involves much more than a reactive “So sorry about this experience!” emaily reply. Instead, customer needs must be understood deeply by both support and product, which retains customers long term.

Being thoughtful with customer-facing communications is one of the most actionable ways to get started. By thinking through what your customers really need to be successful with your product, you can determine what kinds of communication they really require and how often they require those forms of communication. In Jennifer’s words:

“Maintaining a trusting relationship with existing customers is a delicate balance. You need to make sure you make them aware of new features, but you need to do it without bombarding them with communication. In-product messaging can be a great option if executed correctly in an elegant, unobtrusive way. Communication fatigue can cost you customers if you aren’t careful. You really need to manage your direct contact channels closely and make sure customers aren’t getting messages and emails from multiple departments in a short time frame.”

JENNIFER ALDRICH UX Designer, InVision

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One team should be the final gatekeeper for deciding what kinds of communications get put in front of customers. Ideally, this will be the team that understands customers the best—typically your customer success team.

Product may need to warn about an outage, but it should be up to customer-facing team members to decide who gets notified, when, and how.

That being said, it’s important for the customer success and product teams to have a strong feedback loop between each other—and with the customer.

While you might not opt to put your teams in the same physical room as Intercom did, you should at least push to get them thinking and acting like they’re in the same room.

Product should have some hand in helping resolve support tickets (more than just, technical support tickets), and customer success should play a role in approving requirements and acceptance criteria for new features and releases.

Defining a collaborative relationship between these two teams helps ensure your customers have direct line to the creation of features meant to help them, and it ensures the creators of new features have empathy for customers.

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C O NCLU S ION

Bringing it All Together: How to Turn this Into Action

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As the champion of product adoption within your company, your job is to ensure your customers’ needs drive the decisions that affect the customer experience—across your website, during your product’s signup and onboarding process, and throughout the long-term customer lifecycle.

In reality, all kinds of roadblocks exist along the journey to creating a customer-driven experience and operating as a customer-driven company.

But being customer-driven is no longer just a nice idea. It’s necessary if a company is going to survive.

In the words of Hiten Shah:

“Servicing your customer better than anyone in the market is how you win.

And no other way.”

HITEN SHAH Owner, 2520 Consulting

Over the past 45 pages, it’s been our goal to demonstrate how you can overcome typical roadblocks that obstruct the customer-driven path. In the same way...

• Georgiana’s team had to course-correct at Unbounce after mistakenly ignoring website visitors’ needs (and paying the price in lost conversions).

• Fio’s team at Hotjar learned through customer research that they’d been making incorrect assumptions about activity on their pricing page.

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• Grey’s team at Kindful had to rework their entire onboarding process to shift away from favorite features and refocus on highest-value features.

You, too, can improve the current states of website experience, onboarding, and long-term usage at your company to create a more customer-driven experience.

Let’s wrap up with a quick reminder of the key points that will help you get started.

Product Adoption Is a Team Sport Developing a thoughtful, customer-driven adoption process requires input and effort from all departments at of your company. Without connecting the work of different departments—from product to sales to customer happiness —your first-run user experience will fail to surround the user in the value of your product.

To ensure representatives from each department play a hand in improving adoption: Find the people who share your passion for the customer.

Find the people from each team or department at your company who share a true commitment to creating a top-notch customer experience. Then, bring them into the fold. Ask them to share their input on projects related to adoption.

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“Sit” Together Your customers, your business, and your scenario may be different, but ultimately, team members focused on adoption should strive for the level of closeness that Intercom demonstrated when they put CS and Product in the same room.

If this means a separate Slack channel just for the product adoption crew, great. If you need to schedule a separate weekly stand-up for the team building the adoption strategy, find the time for that. If sitting in the same room works for your group, then by all means, push those desks together.

Apply some of the same skills you would use to gather data from your customers to learn what works best for different employees, in order to create the strong feedback loops needed to stay on the same page regarding customer experience and needs.

Metrics Are a Symptom It’s important that we refer back to what Grey said about not letting metrics rule your business or your strategy without context:

“Avoid chasing a metric like traffic, leads, or MQLs in a vacuum. Unless you’re producing great customers, those aren’t necessarily true success metrics at a business level. Happy customers almost always are.”

GREY GARNER Owner, 2520 Consulting

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Churn and MRR maybe holy metrics on a pitch deck and they certainly suggest the overall health of your business, but they don’t necessarily reflect the health of your customers. Just as a fever is a merely a symptom that indicates an underlying disease, churn is a metric that suggests underlying problems for your customers.

When determining which metrics to use to measure your progress as a customer-driven company, consider what each metric is really showing you and what the most customer-centric response may be when the numbers are bad.

If churn is high, for example, it’s unlikely that you simply need more or better features. After all, in order for a user to churn, they must at one time have been a paying customer.

If your team’s first instinct when addressing churn is “we need more features,” consider Jennifer Aldrich’s observation: “Oftentimes, feature requests are just UX issues in disguise.”

As you observe the metrics you’ve chosen to evaluate whether customers’ needs are being met, ask yourself whether the data you’re seeing is a symptom of something deeper.

Starting Small Is Better Than Burnout If you’re equipped with a tight-knit, cross-functional team and access to data about what matters to customers and why, you’re poised to develop a killer customer-driven experience.

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But if you’re still working your way up to all of the above...congratulations!

You have room to improve, and you’re not alone.

And in that case, it’s in your best interest, as well as your customers’, to focus on making a few improvements extremely well, versus trying to overhaul the entire customer experience at once and only achieving a “meh” result at best.

None of the lessons and success stories we’ve shared here were examples of instant success. Instead, each one was a learning opportunity that arose from an existing gap in the customer experience.

By putting customers’ needs and goals at the center of their strategies, each team we’ve learned from in this book found a way to turn short-term slip ups into long-term wins—for their customers first—and ultimately for their companies.

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Make Your Product More Customer Driven

With Appcues, add an experience layer to your product that enables you to drive feature adoption, increase free-to-paid conversion, and improve customer satisfaction.

T E ST IT O U T

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