Seeing In from the Outside: Inferring Company Culture - Part 1: The Customer Onboarding Experience

Today I was thinking about the next step in my career and what kind of company I want to be a part of. I want to be a missionary, not a mercenary. Missionaries are completely devoted to the mission, hence the name. 

According to Nine Lies about Work, it is a myth that people care about the company they work for -- the truth is that they care about the team they are on. I disagree. The team is important, but not if they are executing a poor strategy. A team of Olympic swimmers will cover less distance swimming against the current than a child in an inner tube floating with the current. As a team member, if the leaders of the company are executing a strategy that I believe is doomed to fail, then why the hell would I put in the extra hours? I wouldn't! I would clock-in at 9, clock-out at 5, and silently look for my next position in typical mercenary fashion.

The question then becomes, how do I find out if I am likely to become a missionary or a mercenary at this next company? The job description might help a bit, but you never know who wrote that. Maybe you would be an excellent culture fit, but the company hasn't put much thought into their recruiting process. What else can we quickly ascertain about a company's culture without having insider information? (i.e. having discussions with current and past employees)

Seeing In from the Outside:

In this series, I will attempt to persuade you that the way a company presents itself to external stakeholders can be used to infer some of the company's values.

What you choose to analyze is entirely up to you. I believe that the Customer Onboarding experience is a crucial part of the overall strategy and I wouldn't place my confidence in a company that fails my analysis. Therefore, I will outline two customer onboarding experiences - one that is well designed, and one that isn't.

Poor Customer Onboarding Experience - Wherescape

Around 2 years ago I saw a webinar for Wherescape which piqued my curiosity. I'm on their email list, and I've sent these guys emails saying I want to try the product, but I never get a response back (And I'm sure I've sent this to actual email inboxes, not responding to a no-reply mail). So today I decide to write an article about this customer onboarding concept, I wanted to give WhereScape another chance to avoid being my "bad" example, but unfortunately, they failed. 

Let's start with the positive - I open up Chrome, navigate to Wherescape.com... and the site is aesthetically pleasing - the spacing, typography, color palette, images, everything looks nice.

If we think about this in terms of AIDA, it's going well. The customer is already on your site, so you have Attention and possibly Interest. The site has plenty of material such as case studies which can be used to increase Desire. There is a big red button in the header - "Request a Demo" - a nice call to Action.

Now it's time to get tough.

"Request a Demo" isn't the best word choice because it implies additional steps you must take before you can begin evaluating the product. I'm expecting the "fill out this form then one of our sales reps will call you and schedule a demo" bullshit... Like why?? Why do I need to speak to a sales rep just to try the product? I mean this is software we are talking about, not flying a plane! I want to download a free trial or start using a web-app. Something as simple as "Try it Now" would be much better. 

...But all of that is irrelevant because when I go to the page... there is no form to fill out!!

So then how do I request a demo??? There is literally no way for me to take action.

Update: A few months later I decided to finish this article. They had fixed the form, but it has waaay too many required fields, and they still want to use this 1940's approach of having a sales rep call me.

My worst fears confirmed -

Some people may argue that this is just a more personalized sales process, but it is also an inferior distribution model. You should remove as much friction from the customer onboarding experience as possible. They are requiring way too many steps, for me - the customer, to get started. WhereScape's products might be of use, but I will never know.

All of this adds up to either careless or incompetent management. Let's contrast that with MongoDB.

Excellent Customer Onboarding Experience - MongoDB

A clean landing page. Nothing more than is necessary. Two call to action buttons "Get Started" and "Try Free". A chat popup. So far a bit better than WhereScape, but not by leaps and bounds. So I click on "Try Free". 

MongoDB Atlas -- "Deploy a MongoDB database in the cloud with just a few clicks".. well let's see if that promise is lived up to.

They want me to choose the Single-Region Cluster XD... nah I'll choose free.

 ...and that's it, my cluster is up and running in the cloud and I can begin using MongoDB. I have so much less to say because the process is clear and simple. They are even using Google's re-captcha to prevent automation attacks.

Well done MongoDB, you may be schemaless, but you are a model for customer onboarding!

In the Long Term, Usage Matters Most:

Even if your target customers are big corporations, ultimately your end users are people. If your product meets their needs, they will use it on a regular basis. They will develop a relationship with your brand and they may even become an evangelist -- telling all their colleagues about it and introducing your software to every company they proceed to work at.

If you give your potential customers a free-tier or sandbox you are enabling them to discover your product and what it can do for them. Even if you consider some leads to be "low value" (aka - someone in an unrelated industry just playing around with it on a Saturday), that doesn't mean they won't turn into high value leads later on. 

How many high school kids torrented Photoshop, and 10 - 15 years later are now professionals paying for a cloud subscription?  I think this image says it all:

In the long term, product usage matters most. Customer onboarding is the first step to customer retention. If your customer onboarding experience is poor, then you are swimming against the current and more often than not you will lose the opportunity to create customers for life.

The Takeaway: 

So what have we learned?

I believe the customer onboarding experience is a crucial part of a company/product strategy. Therefore, I would like to obtain a sense of a company's customer onboarding approach, and their strategy, before I invest time communicating with them. I don't want to be an Olympic swimmer losing a race to a child because I am swimming against the current.

 That said, some of my initial inferences may be incorrect. If I found issues such as these with companies I am actually applying to, then I would ask them why things are designed the way they are. It's possible that what I see is just an MVP implementation, and they are working on something better.  

What bits of company culture have you inferred from your experiences as a customer?