What does customer success practically mean for a startup like Upscope? Below are key lessons learned when applying customer success practices.
Upscope is a co-browsing service (think screen sharing but instant, one way and without downloads) and is used by customer support and sales teams who support customers using live chat and phone.
Identify bad-fit customers early
What is a bad-fit customer?
See Lincoln Murphy’s definition below.
A customer should be considered a Bad Fit when you cannot deliver immediate value, nor can you — based on where you’re at today, your available resources, etc. — realistically deliver future value in the required timeframe for these customers.
Bad-fit customers cost you money, time and even product vision
For Upscope, bad-fit customers are people who signed up to trial the product, they might even pay for it for a couple of months but inevitably they’ll unsubscribe because they did not really need it for the long term.
It’s time badly spent for both sides
We educate them on how to install and use the product but they don’t really need it. They may find that out quickly or they might find out in a few months but inevitably they’ll cancel.
They distort our conversion stats because they’re false positives
They’re harmful because they mess up our analytics and conversion stats.
They suggest that we have a market in an area but we don’t.
For example, if someone signs up for Upscope to use on a website with just a simple landing page and one input box for someone’s email, we know they’ll churn. They have no need for a co-browsing product that is made to guide customers through a web app.
They’re a temptation
Bad-fit customers are a short term temptation that always sours. They’re immediate and identifiable revenue. It’s very easy to sign them up and say ‘Hey, look, we are closer to our target’ but when they cancel it’s just depressing.
The root of all evil
It’s also possible, if we fool ourselves about the real long term truth and value of a customer, that it will impact every decision and lead to ups and downs that have nothing to do with the core product.
In fact, it will suck time away from good clients.
Yes, not being honest about who uses your product, why and whether they achieve the success they came for, is the root of all evil in a startup like ours.
Email them and call them because they’re not doing what you think
We actively call people to specifically talk about their problem after they sign up. No sales bullshit, just an absolute focus on their problem so that we can document it and understand it further.
We add that to a spreadsheet and review it every once in a while at meetings.
Why did this become so important?
People don’t use the product for what we thought they would.
We based Upscope on our own initial needs of basic customer problem solving e.g. ‘Which field should I select to upload this file’ or ‘why is my search not working’. It takes far too long to ask 5 questions to get to the root of the problem when a quick look at their screen solves the problem.
However, it turned out that after we spoke to customers, many were using it for onboarding their customers which is one part problem fixing and one part actual guidance. In fact, some customers had full time support staff guiding all new users through the site.
It helped identify bad-fit customers. When a customer is not sure why they’ve taken it up it’s not a great sign. While some of them do learn how to use it effectively and did have a need for it, many simply did not need it.
People like talking about their problems, they don’t like sales calls
Companies vary. Some people at some companies are OK with receiving a call.
The Brits differ from the Americans on this. Brits don’t like to talk as much on the phone and Americans are more likely to say ‘Lets jump on a call’. That’s not universally true but certainly in relative terms it is.
What is quite universally true is that, once they realise it’s not a call to push a sale, everyone is happy to talk about their own problems and give guidance about what they want.
Most will ignore the call
I get calls several times a day from numbers I don’t recognise and I know from experience that they’re nonsense. 9/10 people will ignore any phone call they get but that 1 in 10 is gold when they have time to talk.
NPS surveys work
Personally, while I understood the value of NPS surveys, I thought we might get false positives from the few that do like the product.
Instead, we got feedback from important customers and they were honest about how they felt.
They gave us a rating out of 10 and when someone put 7/10 and explained why it was not a 9 or 10, they were damn right. Upscope was not working properly on their site. We did not know or were not fully aware that it was a technical problem that we had not considered.
Related: See all of Upscope’s onboarding emails.
Also see: Why our customer success manager removed a discount that worked.
