As someone who used to work in this industry, building and organizing customer success and implementation teams, and being on the front line of an organization having to answer to and appease legitimate customer concerns and requests for help, communicate as politically and diplomatically as possible the on-going issues that the Product and Dev/Eng Teams are âworking as quickly and diligently as they canâ on, as well as advocate these customer needs to the executive leadership as priorities around which resources should rally, I understand all too well the underlying dynamics at play in this very conversation. Let me get Meta for a moment, putting aside my own frustrations and terrifying situation having committed to this SaaS platform (that seems to be without a QA engineer/team at the moment, given the state of bugs prevalent in a platform that absolutely needs to be reliable and consistent for it to be effective and sellable at these prices.
PixelGeek, Dave and Waldo, youâre under the gun and undoubtably at some level stressed, and youâve likely normalized that level of stress with deep breathing or whatever (hopefully healthy) coping mechanisms as you receive bug report after customer plea after bug report. Youâre understaffed, and even if you doubled your team over night with a flux of hires, itâll take 2-3 months for the full effect of their presence to be effective - youâll have to take time out of your daily schedule (no, youâll have to quit your schedule and dedicate yourself fully) to ramping them up, training them on product and CS processes, get them familiar with all your canned responses to customer complaints, and youâll limp along as your Dev team works on pushing new product, and your nascent sales and growth teams tout your âAmazing Customer service and supportâ as a selling point to future disillusioned customers. It will be hard.
Sure, youâll have the undying support of your community experts and mouthpieces who will jump in on the forum here and shame/guilt/cow passionate customers such as Aimanisms, Uzzer, Matty, etc who have every right to ask for better customer support in line with whatâs necessary to use your product. YOU SELL A PRODUCT THAT IS BUGGY AND UNRELIABLE, you better offer customer service, or youâre dead in the water as yet another cautionary tale of Silicon Valley SaaS companies who geeked out on engineering hires and office keg purchases but failed to see your own flaws because vanity metrics and pretty end products blinded you to & trumped diligent QA and end user support. Classic.
As such, your Engineering, Dev and Product teams, along with the Slim âExecutiveâ team, are likely mostly insulated and blind to whatâs going on here, and youâre left doing your best to maintain confidence in your customer base, doing your best to support everyone and keep calm in the community of paying customers, and youâre left powerless and with likely no meaningful seat/voice at the table when it comes to how to prioritize hiring at Webflow. I am not surprised that you have to resort to soliciting sympathy and having mouthpieces bemoan your situation with, âoh, be nice, theyâre doing the best they can, thereâs only three of those sweet humans, they can only do so muchâ. No. Yes, you may be sweet and super kind and caring and conscientious beings, but this is a SaaS business selling to professionals who have ACTUAL clients they need to service, and youâre lack of planning to support a buggy platform is ABSOLUTELY our problem, AND YOURS. We will not be guilted into silence in asking for better customer support. Either take that off the table in your marketing, or scale your team. Iâm not a black& white absolutist, but I know what iâm talking about, and really thatâs all thereâs to it. SCALE.
Anyhow, the dynamic here as everyone tries to play nice and be polite and not step on toes or hurt feelings just clouds the undercurrent of confusion and concern over the product. Iâm not privy to your numbers (growth/attrition), nor your business strategy (looking beyond your product), but your leadership needs to take a long hard look at how they are going to secure their next round of funding, and if there isnât a strategy in place now to grow the customer success side of the house, youâll start bleeding customers fast, and all the new product features in the world wonât win over the lack of confidence or faith thatâs lost by your board as they ask the real and hard questions about where your priorities lie.
The issues are real, the lack of transparency is alarming, and the only thing you have going for yourselves is that your customer base are likely individuals and small teams, many who can rely on deeper skills in web development to get them over the humps of your product deficiencies. Weâre not organized and donât see/explore bugs all the same way, nor communicate about them in the same manner. So, you have an unorganized and decentralized user base, but you can only exploit that for so long. And you can only use pity as a means of guilting our legitimate requests of your business for our money for so long. Renewals will fail, over time.
Deal with it. If you need help in scaling your customer success processes, hire someone (AN ACTUAL HUMAN) whoâs been there and knows the dangers and dilemmas and knows how to speak truth to leadership. Donât invest in technology to solve this problem, invest in humans.
Good day, everyone.
(Soon to be former customer),
PS. Tagging in @callmevlad here, as he really needs to tune in to this thread, as well, I feel. I invite him to reach out to me directly if heâs seeking professional consulting on how to grow a successful Customer Experience org.