Law 6: Product Is Your Only Scalable Differentiator

Author: Kirsten Maas Helvey, Senior Vice President of Client Success, Cornerstone

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Executive Summary

The key to customer retention, client satisfaction, and scaling the support and service organizations is a well-designed product that's combined with a best-in-class customer experience. Consumer technology has changed the way we work, as well as our customers' expectations. To ensure you have created a product that meets the needs and expectations of your customers, create a client experience team that focuses on building out programs in a client engagement framework—one that drives community among clients, encourages engagement at all levels and roles of the customer base, and provides clear feedback loops that inform product improvements.

Product advisory councils (PACs) and communities of practice (COPs) for functional business process areas are useful programs a client experience team can utilize to drive continuous improvement in all functions, improve the customer experience, and influence product design directly. Both PACs and COPs provide input into the software life cycle development process by communicating business value for product features, which is critical for building a best-in-class offering. A product that is easy to use and that becomes essential to the way people do business will create happy and loyal customers.

CSMs often work 12-hour days, fielding every question under the sun from clients as well as internal colleagues even when it has nothing to do with the CSM's responsibilities. They are the one-stop shop for dealing with customer challenges and questions all day, every day. Even when CSMs are talking to happy customers, it is usually about driving value by getting them to try out a new feature, encouraging more people to use the product, measuring the ROI, and more. A CSM's priorities typically focus on:

• Driving adoption and value of your products
• Fixing root causes of dissatisfaction, such as addressing problems across the client life cycle and support functions
• Making sure your product is best in its class

Ultimately, the key to customer retention, client satisfaction, and scaling the support and service organizations is a well-designed product or solution married with a best-in-class customer experience.

To ensure you have created a product that meets the needs of your customers, create a client experience team that focuses on building out programs in a client engagement framework. This framework is designed to drive community among clients, encouraging engagement at all levels and roles of the customer base, and providing clear feedback loops to drive the CSM's priorities. The framework also allows clients to know that you have an organized way to approach client success management. Each program should have a set objective and key metrics for determining success (see Figure 10.1).

Metrics and analytics derive actionable insights that help drive CSM priorities or tech-touch customer success practices. You will be able to clearly identify drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction if you have a defined measurement process and focus on key metrics such as customer satisfaction, NPS, and customer effort–level score (see Figure 10.2).

Typically, the main root of customer dissatisfaction is the product. Simply put, the harder your product is to use, the harder it will be to make your client successful. We develop products that address business problems, but the goal of a customer success–centric company is to help our customers derive value from those products. Creating a great product that puts design front and center will allow everything else in the customer's experience to flow more easily, making it easier to provide service and support and easier for you to help customers deliver value.

Focus on making the product intuitive. If your customer discussions are constantly about functionality and how to use existing features, you're missing out on the opportunity to drive value-added activities. If a person has to spend a lot of time to figure out the product, it will be less sticky and people will not want to use it. To start, take cues from how people are used to interacting with their favorite apps in their everyday lives. Put yourself in their shoes.

For example, there are norms about how people search for things and what search results look like. We take for granted that we can easily look anything up and do not have to work hard to do so. Give your search information-rich functionality, so users can find what they're looking for when and where they need it and in the way they are accustomed to.

In addition, people want the ability to figure out and fix issues should they arise. Build in self-diagnostic tools to help users find answers themselves and guide them to what they need to be doing. Understand that consumer technology has changed the way we work. We are no longer tied to a desk using a single PC; we use a variety of devices to get work done. Your product's design must support quick access to information and easily executable activities on a mobile device, be it a smartphone, tablet, or even a watch.

The best way to ensure that feedback is getting back to product and other teams, such as sales, services, and customer support, is to have clearly defined feedback loops for the voice of the client. PACs and COPs for functional business process areas are useful ways to drive continuous improvement in all functions, improve the customer experience, and influence product design directly.

PACs provide a structured, interactive platform for clients to engage with your company's product management team by providing feedback and influencing future product direction. The focus of the PACs should be

• To help you define the vision and strategy for your products, understanding the actual business problems your clients face now and into the future
• To discuss how your clients view your products' approach to those problems
• To take into consideration the market and technology trends that your clients see and what their effects might be
• To help you with functional prioritization at a strategic level

The PACs should be led by the product management team (see Figure 10.3).

The roles and responsibilities of a PAC member should be described clearly, with membership criteria determined as the members are representing the larger client base. For example, customer responsibilities might include:

• Actively engaging in PAC meetings and discussions, focusing on strategic business drivers
• Engaging and acting on behalf of peers and the broader client base
• Maintaining a high level of knowledge about current and future product road maps
• Engaging in project-specific design discovery and previews
• Participating in a reference program and speaking positively with clients or prospects on request

Example PAC membership criteria could include:

• Senior leader– or executive-level participation to drive strategic product vision
• PAC members to complete an application for PAC
• Members to commit to active participation in the PAC for one calendar year
• Members to commit to attending five meetings per calendar year:
  • Three quarterly road map review and prioritization meetings
  • Two feature request prioritization meetings (by PAC member or delegate)
• Member may not delegate responsibility for quarterly road map review and prioritization meetings
• Member to participate in a reference program, speaking positively with clients or prospects on request

A clear structure and cadence are critical to ensure the value of a PAC for your organization as well as for your clients. It is critical that you continuously highlight to the PAC and the larger client base their influence on product design and road map, to give credence to the voice of the client. A good practice is to send a quarterly communication that shares the product changes requested by clients, as well as organizational and process improvements that you have made in response to client feedback.

COPs operate much like PACs but really serve as a forum to discuss business processes, practices, and challenges relating to specific products. COPs provide a collaborative forum in which clients are connected with other peers across a variety of business sectors. They tend to be larger groups than PACs.

Both PACs and COPs provide input into the software life cycle development process by communicating the business value of features for the product. The development team should have a defined business value model, based on your business, for use in assessing new features. Partnership with product management and product development in client programs is critical to building a best-in-class product (see Figure 10.4).

Client programs are great ways to ensure that product is the priority and that your product is meeting the needs of clients and the market. Just as critical as client feedback is an organizational focus on client success. Company culture must be ingrained with customer success at its core. It must start from the top and move down, originating with the CEO and senior leadership. Every person in the company has a job because of two things: the product and the customers. The company culture must strive to make each of those a priority. You must turn your customers into raving fans. Create a common set of beliefs that describe your client focus. Ensure that one of your company's goals is a focus on customers. Every department in the company should then have goals aligned with customers. The company should define a customer success framework that clearly outlines the customer journey and what that journey looks like. Employees need the forums to funnel feedback to all departments, especially product management (see Figure 10.5).

Just like clients, employees who are on the front line, especially if they are real-life users of your product, need a way to deliver feedback on all aspects of the product. The best way to obtain the feedback is to use a similar framework to that used for clients and to define clear channels for employees to submit and discuss product and process enhancements. Employees are a key input that make your product best in its class. Sales, implementation, and customer support input provide a holistic view on what works and what doesn't.

A great way to obtain a fresh perspective is to collect feedback from new employees on the product and the processes that surround the product. Make this a key part of onboarding. Provide new employees with the opportunity to learn the product and to provide feedback to product and process owners, including sales, implementation, and customer support. Always try to have employees walk in the client's shoes. Your best reference is using your own product.

Customer success focuses on helping people deliver results and ROI through products; good design enables that focus to be on value-added activities and not on functionality. Products that become onerous to manage, administer, and use will risk abandonment because customers will not value them. Customer success teams interact with customers every day and are intimate with how your product is being used. A feedback loop between them and your product team is essential.

Switching costs now are much lower than they used to be. As a vendor, all you have is the quality and function of your product combined with the value of the services and support offerings you put around your product. And that support manifests from having a great product that's easy to use. Many vendors get hung up on building in “nice to have,” forward-looking features, but often the customer's internal processes are not mature enough to take advantage of such features. The product itself must offer a runway that enables processes to change to accommodate advanced functionality. An easy-to-use product is the basis for getting customers ready for advanced functionality. Bridging that disconnect is critical.

If you've got a product that becomes essential to the way people are doing business and it's easy to use, your customers will be happy and loyal; they'll get the value. If not, they will look elsewhere.

A well-designed product that enables self-sufficiency and delivers value is crucial to customer success. It will not only build loyalty but also enable your team to have more meaningful discussions with your customers and drive further growth.

Additional Commentary

The only really scalable part of your entire company is your product. To be sure, every part of every company can get more efficient and more scalable, but, for every product you create, you have the chance to make it once and have it used millions of times by millions of users. “Make once, ship many” is a recipe for profit if you can get there. Think about it this way. If you made a perfect product (and I mean truly perfect in every way), how many people in your company would be unnecessary? In a typical company, you'd be able to eliminate all of the teams that do any of the following:

• Provisioning
• Implementation
• Training
• Customer support
• Customer success
• Operations
• Professional services (most of, at least)
• Renewals

In other words, you wouldn't even have a concept of post-sales because the only thing that would happen post-sales is millions of customers using and loving your product and looking for a way to tell the rest of the world about it.

The B2C world operates with this reality at all times, especially when their applications go to mobile. Look at Google and Facebook as perfect examples. Nobody is assigned to help you install and start using Facebook or to hold your hand while you do your first Google search. It's not necessary because the products are elegant, simple, intuitive, and compelling because they provide tremendous value. For Google and Facebook, the move to mobile definitely raised the ease-of-use bar (not that anything could get much easier than a blank search box), but they benefited from most users having first used their product on a computer. But for companies whose first, or only, product channel is a mobile device, the challenge goes up significantly. Hundreds have figured it out, and thousands more will, too.

The primary reason for making your product priority one across all parts of your company is that it is the only path to the wild success you want to enjoy. Mature and successful companies usually create an identity beyond just their culture. Apple's identity is in building beautiful and elegant products. Zappos's identity is in providing the ultimate customer support/customer experience. Walmart's identity is value and convenience. But each of these company's success is tied to creating the best product in their market. One could argue that this is a chicken-and-egg debate. Is Zappos the dominant vendor in the online shoe market because of their customer support? Or is their customer support actually part of their product? Ultimately, for the purpose of this discussion, that doesn't really matter. The bottom line is this: the dominant vendor in virtually every market is the vendor who builds the best product. If a vendor convinces the world (or their market) that the best product isn't just what you touch and use but also the services and support that surround it, more power to them. Great companies do this really well. But, without exception, great companies, above all else, build great products. Any attempt to join the customer success movement without making your product your top priority will be fruitless in the long run.

High Touch

For companies whose primary customer success model is high touch or who have a tier of high-touch customers, the key to becoming product focused is communication. In particular, communication between your customer success team and your product team. CSMs are on the front lines in this situation and know more about how your product is being used or is wishing to be used than anyone else in your company. It's healthy to think of them as field product managers to embrace this truth. The value of all that knowledge is realized only if it transfers from the CSMs to the Product Managers (PM). As a company, you need to design processes to ensure this is happening. If I'm managing 40 CSMs and telling them that product is their first priority, even while they spend 12 hours a day helping solve customer challenges, I better create a communication process that makes it easy for them to share the experiences of their customers with the PM team. Of course, there should also be a way for customers to communicate this directly, but the CSM filter will be vital. It could start simply with a monthly meeting between customer success and product in which the customer stories are shared. This isn't particularly scalable, but it's a good way to start. Part of the purpose of this team could be to figure out a scalable process. It's important, within this process, to capture the business problems, not just the request for features. Perhaps most important will be understanding what problems they'd like your product to be solving for them in the future. This will help drive some step-function improvements, not just incremental change.

Low Touch

As you move down the touch model you obviously need to create even more scalable processes. In particular, you'll probably want to make it easier for customers to communicate their needs and frustrations with your product, directly to the PM team. You can use communities, forums, surveys, and user groups to accomplish this at scale. A community, or forum, using the social media construct of voting or like/dislike can work really well if you have enough participation and can ensure that the product elements being voted on are clear. As mentioned earlier, a handpicked PAC or customer advisory board (CAB) can be extremely valuable if they are a good cross section of your customer base. Don't invite only enterprise customers to your CAB if 70 percent of your business is SMB. You might think about having two different CABs in a situation where the markets and use of your product are very different in each segment. The lower touch your model is, the more important it is to get your product right so you absolutely need to find a way to do this with your customer's involvement. You certainly won't have armies of services and customer success people to work around product deficiencies.

Tech Touch

In a B2C or volume B2B market, everything needs to be driven through technology, as we've stated many times. However, that doesn't mean you can't still talk to customers and get some direct feedback. It's useful to do this whether it's through a user group or a focus group. But your primary vehicles will be the one-to-many ones, such as communities, forums, and surveys. Because of the volumes involved here, the most useful feedback probably comes directly from your product. The parts used most often are telling. The places where more time is spent could be important, either positively or negatively. You can build some limited feedback mechanisms into your product to collect data as the customer is experiencing it. It's no stretch to think that the best direction on where to go with your product lies in how it's being used today. Volumes of users also make experimentation pretty easy and very valuable. You can add a feature for a day and see what the results are. This is certainly happening every day on sites like Amazon, eBay, and Match.com.

Okay, the drum has been beaten loudly enough. Prioritize your product or customer success will be elusive at best and you will fail as a company. And, if you have people touching your customers in any way, shape, or form, make sure that they realize that the quality and value of your product is their top priority, too.