Innovation doesn't always come from product. Push from all corners for your customer.

A customer buys your software solution and is excited to implement it. Their goals, among other things are to make the end user experience easier, more impactful and the information gleamed from that software to be more actionable/dynamic.

Software solutions are as varied as the day is long. Companies all believe their product is the best thing since sliced bread. And it might be. But sometimes, oftentimes, the product doesn’t quite have all the bells and whistles needed in it that a customer needs for their use case.

Sure, a company’s developers can put a feature request on the roadmap for future development. But sometimes that takes time. Often there is not a clear-cut solution that the development team can create a new feature off of.

But no one wants to go back to a customer and tell them that there must have functionality will be in the product a year from now….if the product team can even narrow down the timeline at all.

This is where CS team, their knowledge of the product and their determination to help solve problems for their customers many times comes into play. These are the people that live and breathe the product with their customers. Learning how they use them, how they break them, and ultimately how they accomplish the goals set out when buying the solution.

CS teams have most likely seen it all before. One customer’s problem today is another one’s a year from now. Having good—no great—work arounds when product enhancement is not a possibility is key. And this is exactly what happened last week at our company…

We have a forms technology that is native to salesforce. Customers create digital form templates with all types of questions with functionality that is really incredible. But you can go to our website for the sales pitch. Here, now for arguments sake….we can all understand that there are form that users fill out on a device.

But a problem that came up with some use cases was that our one or two column set up for questions and answers was too limiting.?Think of an engine that needs to be routinely tested over time for compression, load, rpms, temperature, blah, blah, blah.?And seeing the answers to those questions over time in a table would help the technician see patterns that might help them with next steps. The problem is that our product does not currently have a table view for questions. And asking those repetitive questions in a one or two column format make interpreting the data out in the field extremely hard.

What time did you take measurements: 9:45 am

What was the compression: 89 psi

What was the load: 33%

What was the temp: 145 degrees

What were the RPM’s: 1001

What time did you take measurements: 11:00 am

What was the compression: 91 psi

What was the load: 35%

What was the temp: 150 degrees

What were the RPM’s: 1200

Etc

Etc.

The problem is easy to see. The product team was very sympathetic to this issue. The solution is very straight forward and solvable. The problem: There are fifty other pain points for customers that are good candidates for product enhancement. The message to the customer had to be: sorry but you will have to wait for this functionality.

But the story does not end there. One of our team members, did not take this verdict lying down. He played with our app using what is called CSS. This is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML. CSS is a cornerstone technology of the World Wide Web.

And within a few days had a working demo of our customer’s forms so that a user could fill out the questions needed in a table view.

The field technician pin pointed that the engine temperature was increasing over time. And then figured out that there was something wrong with the cooling system. BAM – actionable data presented in a dynamic and useful way.

The take away for our team has been to never give up being an advocate for our customers. And look at blockers to issues as rocks to be moved aside or traveled around. Being on the front lines with customers gives CSM’s the unique ability to really understand a customer’s use case and what it will take for them to succeed with their mission. Pairing that with living and breathing problems and their solutions or work arounds over time helps customers not have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to solutions.

And now other customers are lining up to solve for similar use case now that this table view functionality is now available due to the diligence, tenacity and entrepreneurial spirit of a member of the CS team.