What Being a Startup CEO Taught Me About the Strategic Importance of Customer Service

At my last startup, I experienced first-hand the pain of a customer support issue costing us one of our early customers. Now as the CEO of Salesforce Service Cloud, I have vowed to help other organizations avoid these same mistakes, especially as customer service has shifted during the pandemic to become one of the most strategic areas of every organization. Last week I shared some of these lessons with other tech leaders at SaaStr Enterprise.

I’ll never forget the day my company lost one of our early customers. We were on fire– doubling every year and sailing past $50M in ARR. This customer— let’s call them Customer X— had been one of the earliest users and believers of our product, a compliant digital sales engagement platform for Fortune 500 financial firms. 

By all traditional SaaS metrics, Customer X was happy and healthy. Their C-level executives spoke at our customer summits and in testimonial videos. Across their organization, team members engaged with our nurture emails, webinars, and field events. They had one of the highest weekly active usage rates across our install base, were 95 percent deployed in seats purchased, and net retention was well over 120% every year.  

So I was completely blindsided one day when Customer X decided to call it quits. It turned out that a single individual at the organization — let’s call him "Bob" — had driven the decision. Three years earlier, Bob had logged a support ticket, and in that time, the issue had never been addressed. As we dug deeper, we learned, painfully, that Bob had shared and resurfaced his issue on multiple occasions– first with our customer support team, then his customer success manager, the original account executive, subsequent account executives, and in customer advisory council meetings.

Bob's issue was well-documented in emails, Google Docs, Slack messages, Jira feature requests, and CRM. But amid these siloed systems and routine territory realignments in our go-to-market team, his request had gotten lost in the shuffle. After waiting patiently, Bob had gotten sick of raising the same issue and decided to move on. The worst part about this situation was that it had been entirely self-inflicted.

The Strategic Importance of Customer Service 

Early on as a founder, I was incredibly connected to customer support. My co-founder and I personally answered every support call and email, and used these customer conversations to learn and iterate quickly to achieve product-market fit. But as we grew, we hired individual contributors, then functional leaders, to help us scale. Over time, I shifted to spending virtually all of my time laser-focused in four areas: formulating product strategy, meeting with customer executives, hiring engineers, and building out our executive team. I mistakenly viewed customer service as a tactical operation and assumed that it was "handled."

It took experiencing this painful moment for me to realize how strategically important it is to get customer service right. I learned the hard way that service goes far beyond the traditional customer service org structure of customer success, professional services, and support — that excellent service requires these teams to work in lockstep with sales, marketing, product, engineering, design, data science, legal, finance, HR, and partners. I also realized that the decentralized "GSD" ethos of so many startups, including Hearsay, actually works against the 360-degree customer "single source of truth" view required to break organizational silos and address issues such as Bob's. 

In the wake of the pandemic, customer service has only gotten more important and challenging. According to Salesforce research, a majority of service professionals saw higher case volumes in 2020, and three-fourths reported seeing more complex issues. Meanwhile, customers have gotten more demanding, with more than 80 percent now expecting to solve their issue through speaking to just one person at the same time that most B2B customer service teams have transitioned to working from home and can no longer simply walk over to the engineering team to collaboratively problem-solve.

Three Lessons Learned for Strategic Service

In my current role leading Service Cloud at Salesforce, my goal is to help other leaders avoid these same mistakes. Here are three lessons learned and areas we're investing in to ensure customer service issues don't slip through the cracks:

1. Pivot to a new model of Account-Based Support

Most B2B companies have heard of account-based marketing (ABM), which involves targeting high-value customers and prospects with customized touch points and campaigns. Hearsay is a big adopter of ABM, but ironically ABM only aggravated Bob. Every time we tried to nurture him with thought leadership or educate him on a new feature, he was reminded that we weren’t working on the one ask that mattered to him. 

In the normal course of customer support, the types of cases that generally get resolved are a) the easy ones (which your front-line agents can handle with first-call resolution), b) SEV-1s and SEV-2s (where it's all-hands-on-deck and all-nighters), and c) issues affecting lots of customers (what product management 101 teaches us to focus on).

For strategic enterprise customers, however, I believe we need a new model, something I call account-based support (ABS). Otherwise, issues like Bob's never get addressed. In order to "personalize" and prioritize across a myriad of support requests, companies need ABS to factor in account-specific circumstances. Is it a strategic tier-one customer? Is there an active sales opportunity? Did the customer issue an RFP? How long has the case been open? Every person the customer talks to– from the account team to product to engineering– needs to have this context. An account-based view allows important-but-not-urgent requests from your most important customers to remain front-and-center.

But this is easier said than done. Like many startups, Hearsay has embraced a culture of empowerment where decision-making happens at the edges by team members closest to the work. This decentralized decision-making ethos works great 99% of the time, but for customer issues which require collaboration across teams, can result in local maxima rather than global maxima. In other words, balls get dropped. In retrospect, rather than allowing our support team, sales team, and engineering/product teams to each create their own siloed systems, we should have centralized sooner on a single CRM and ensured data was synced between our CRM (where our account teams live) and Jira/Slack (where our engineering, product, data, and design teams live). In order to deliver seamless, personalized service, companies need a single source of truth that affords everyone in the organization a comprehensive view of the customer, their issues, and their opportunities. 

2. Deliver CSAT and efficiency with Account-Based Self-Service and Automation

Once organizations have a 360-degree account-based view, this can inform all customer interaction channels from sales and customer success to product specialists and self-service. The biggest development I've seen during the pandemic has been B2B organizations' adoption of self-service and bots, which traditionally had been more widely deployed in B2C service. For example, Service Cloud Einstein Bot usage has skyrocketed 700%, addressing routine, high-volume questions and requested actions like upgrading a service plan, resetting a password, or assigning a new administrator.

With account-based context awareness (including what issues and opportunities may be outstanding with a customer, what additional products and services the customer has expressed interest in, etc.), self-service alerts, search results, and bots can deliver a highly accurate, personalized set of interactions and allow customers to get answers and resolutions fast. Self-service and automation also free up customer success managers and support reps to address more complex, strategic issues, up-leveling them to play the role of trusted advisor partner rather than reactive tactical fixer. 

3. “Case Swarm” across teams to resolve complex incidents

When complex issues arise, such as a service outage or security breach, front-line agents usually can’t resolve them on their own. It takes close collaboration across multiple teams to resolve major incidents quickly and proactively update customers.

At Service Cloud, we're investing heavily to enable intelligent “case swarming” to enable exactly this kind of collaboration– across support, engineering, dev ops, product management, design, legal, finance, and more– which facilitates proactive service, timely communication, and rapid resolution. Once the Salesforce acquisition of Slack closes, swarming will get even more powerful and integrated across traditional organization silos.

In Summary

My experience with Bob at Customer X taught me a lot about customer service. Even a non-SEV-1 issue can hurt — a lot. Without a single source of truth, important requests can get lost in the mix, especially in large-enterprise models where multiple people at your company are dealing with numerous stakeholders at the customer organization. The pandemic has only made it harder to collaborate across teams and siloed systems, yet in the large enterprise segment, a single unhappy stakeholder can mean losing a multi-million dollar customer. In this regard, B2B organizations can learn a lot from B2C organizations about personalizing customer requests and harnessing self-service, bots, and process automation.

In my new role as CEO of Service Cloud, I’m committed to helping other leaders deliver excellent service through a 360-degree view of the customer. I believe no other platform can enable this single source of truth foundational to account-based support and which can give everyone in the organization the context they need to prioritize requests and deliver seamless, personalized journeys across every touch point. With a few clicks and no code necessary, any organization from the largest 50,000-person contact center to a small business can spin up a context-aware support bot, self-service portal, and process automation as well as enable collaborative problem-solving across teams so that no balls drop. No longer will anyone have to wonder, “What about Bob?” (inside joke for any Bill Murray fans out there ??).