3 ways to sabotage your growth with short-sighted savings ?? ??

Hey folks,?

What's the worst?CXM (Customer Experience Management)?fail you've experienced??

I thought I'd?seen it all until our Airbnb host didn't show up to give us keys to the property and went MIA recently. (If you wondered how my holiday was - the short answer is 'eventful' ??.)?

7 calls, 4 hours, and 3 closed tickets later ("I'm sorry but my shift is about to end. I am forwarding your query to a member of our team that can assist you further.") - it was 5 a.m., and my problem was all?but?resolved.?

...still alive, kicking and summarizing this newsletter for you in my Video Rant?though!?

At that point, I had a throwback to my first job in a customer-facing role at PayPal.

My first manager was a great guy.

We'd often go against the terms and conditions to help the customer out. One day, my manager?actually took out his own credit card, and paid off a customer who got scammed, but technically - was not covered by the fraud protection policy.?

"What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" -?Don't sabotage your growth with short-sighted savings.?

Yeah, he lost 360 euros. But his company won a lifelong fan. (Who, these days, would probably wax lyrical about PayPal's customer experience.)?

Conversely, one bad customer experience can cost you thousands of $ in lost business after the disgruntled customer has gone ballistic on social media (coincidentally, Airbnb became *really* interested in solving our problem only?after?my partners' post on LinkedIn about their poor customer experience vent viral...but by that time, we already had solved it ourselves ?? )?

But it's easier to think about the immediate savings/ income from upgrades and create some dark patterns both in the customer success/support and in product. They may backfire massively later though...?

I often see examples of how SaaS companies try to "save" - and shoot themselves in the knee as a result:?

?

1. Cutting access off too soon

We recently had a panicked customer message us frantically before a long weekend, pleading us not to "switch the in-app experiences off for them". Turned out they were nearing their Monthly Active Users limit, the person who had the authority to upgrade the plan was on holiday, and they?were worried all the onboarding experiences they'd?created would just stop running.?

And for a complex tool with a high self-serve trial signup velocity, this could be lethal to their trial-to-paid conversion rate??? ??

Could we do it to push them to upgrade faster??

Yes.?

Did we do it??

No.

Look, not all?Delinquent Churn was created equal.?

Once or twice, our credit card payment just failed (always before some bank holiday of course) and having access cut off to the tools we were using was always a lot of hassle.?

The amount of resentment this creates when the customer really?wants?to upgrade, but?physically can't do it at that moment?- is just not worth it.?

If the payment failed, email them first to check what happened.?

2. Not baking Product Adoption?into the sprints?

I had a super-interesting conversation with one of you (hi Gus???) yesterday - a growth PM who's working on improving the whole Product Experience in his new company. While we chatted, I realized that even in Userpilot, we've been approaching Product Adoption?the?wrong?way?for a very long time.?

Enter Product Adoption debt???

I will be sharing the most insightful?fragments of our call recording next week, but in the meantime - here's some food for thought:?

Nobody has the time to work on Product Adoption experiences for features that have already been launched.?Ever. Period.?

I often hear:?

"We don't have time to do this"?

or:?

"We can't afford to hire a Growth PM right now".?

What?if creating a reactive in-app experience for a new feature was an integral part of your release??

And I think it should be. That way, you could think of the right place the feature fits into in the user journey (for a particular segment, or role) and when your users are most likely to need it, and when they are most likely to...trip themselves up while using it. You could prevent these "stumbling blocks" from happening by planting the right reactive tooltip:?

That way, you could also reduce your support ticket volume substantially (our record-breaking customer, Growth Mentor,?reduced theirs by a whooping 83!???)?

Just think what your Customer Support agents could do if they had all this extra time. They could actually go the extra mile????

3. Over-fixation on numbers and KPIs?

If you reward your customer success agents for the number of tickets closed, they will be focusing on closing tickets, not solving problems.?

Yes, "problems solved" is nebulous and quantitative. So what if you focused on CSAT *after* the ticket has been closed rather than whether or not it has been closed??

P.S. You can learn more about?measuring Customer Experience from Harshal Patil's talk on Product Drive!??

Your CS people (now hopefully well-rested, after you've automated the responses to the most annoying FAQs in app???) would actually be incentivized to really help your customers, creating raving fans.?

Empathy both in customer support + product design is the winning formula.?

For customer support, success and product teams.?

On that note: I absolutely loved?this recent post by our Head of Product?on "the most important Product Management Skills".

Read?it as a dessert ?? ???

And that's it for today!?

Hope I inspired you to improve your customer experience, if only a tiny bit ;)?