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Who Knows Customer Pain Points? Customer Success Knows.

12/10/2019

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As a product leader, you need customer intelligence to plan your strategy. But the customer data you collect from sales is biased. The data you get from market analysts is indirect. Even the data you collect yourself from customer interviews can be artificial, as customers are all too willing to be positive and tell you what you want to hear.

But there is one undeniable source of raw unfiltered customer intelligence that is too often overlooked - the Customer Success team. The Customer Success team gets customers when they are at their most passionate, emotional, even angry. Where there's emotion, there's usually a real pain point. It's rare to find that sort of honesty elsewhere.
Insanely Great Experience?

In Do Things That Don't Scale, Paul Graham advises startups to take extraordinary measures to not to just acquire users but to make them happy. You must provide an "insanely great experience". This is what drives product success, word of mouth, and ultimately growth.

"Over-engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. For most successful startups it's a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes the product good."

I would add that this is not just limited to startups, but necessary for any size company.

Yet somehow as companies grow, they don't keep this mentality. Product strategy gets disconnected from Customer Success. Product focuses on more and more features and supporting sales wins. Customer Success is seen as bubbling up insights but simply putting out customer fires. This is a mistake. Product leadership and Customer Success need to be connected at the hip.

Where There's Pain, There's Opportunity

The Customer Success team - including help-desk, support, customer success managers, account managers - talk to customers every day. They have insight into;
  • what customers are most excited, emotional, frustrated, and even angry about. As we explore in "How Would You Feel If You Couldn't Use the Product Anymore?", this is customer passion and needs to be captured and prioritized 
  • problems, not solutions. Too often other forms of customer intelligence focus on feature ideas, but product leaders need to be focus on problems. 
  • patterns of problems and opportunities. A single customer's problem should of course be addressed, but a pattern of problems across a key customer base represents a key opportunity. 

Yet product managers and executives usually don't look at customer success as a source of raw market intel, or if they do, it's only via a rolled up dashboard of metrics. Talk to the Customer Success team, listen to the pain points they describe qualitatively. Even sit in on some calls with them. What you learn will be eye opening.

Become a Consultant to 1 Customer


​Customer Success is a gold mine when it comes to finding patterns of problems and prioritizing them. Once you have found a high-priority problem to solve, it can also be a way to connect you to a beta customer who will shape and test the feature with you.

Do Things That Don't Scale suggests taking over-engagement to an extreme by "picking a single customer and act as if you are a consultant building something just for that one user. The initial user serves as the form for your mold; keep tweaking till you fit their needs perfectly, and you'll usually find you've made something other users want too." 
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Do You Even Know The Real Value You Provide?

Beyond product and features, go up a level to company-wide strategy. Many companies that don’t realize the real value that they provide to their customers. They get wrapped up in internal mission statements, marketing stories and company lore. Even the CEO may not really get why customers really buy and need them.

"We are the #1 in the next-generation router market segment."  Doesn't tell me anything about why the customer buys. 

"We provide customers with end-to-end router services."  That's a description of your services (and a generic one at that), but it doesn't tell me why customers buy.

"Customers love us because of our always-on always-on-time strategy."  I don't buy it. It sounds like internally you developed something called an "always-on always-on-time strategy", and are now applying that to customers. 

Marketing taglines and mission statements play a critical role. But it's easy to hear a tagline enough that eventually you think of that as the actual reason customers stick around, rather than listening to why customers stick around.

Dig deeper in the trenches and you may realize that it might not even about your product or features at all. Customers might:
  • value your staff's advice, or the relationship they have built with your staff
  • value your flexibility and willingness to do custom work, compared to larger companies
  • value the integration you have with other vendors in their ecosystem
  • buy because you are local to them geographically and it's really important to customers that they can see you face-to-face if anything goes wrong
  • buy because you provide reliable maintenance
  • renew because your product is the only thing that helps them stay in compliance with a regulation
  • renew because you offer one critical feature that's just a little bit more user-friendly than the competition
  • renew because you support legacy technology that other competitors don't

These are the less glamorous but often real reasons customers stick around and keep buying. Your company may not even be investing in these things directly, or monetizing them, because the organization simply doesn't realize that this is the real value they are providing in the eyes of the customer! 

​But Customer Success  knows. They are in the trenches and they see when customers' eyes light up. Often it is because of something small, and far less sexy than what you would want to put in a marketing tagline. But it's not small to customers. And the more you can connect your strategy to it, the more you provide real value to fuel growth.

Further reading:
  • 10 Ways To Predict Customer Demand
  • Complete Guide to Customer Interviews That Drive Product-Market Fit
  • How To Not Flatline (And Achieve Continuous Organic Growth)
  • Generate MQLs That Turn Into Real Sales Opportunities
1 Comment
MckinneyVia link
5/23/2022 03:50:08 am

Thanks for sharing this useful information! Hope that you will continue with the kind of stuff you are doing.

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