In the simplest terms, it’s nearly impossible to have company success without first ensuring customer success. As obvious as it sounds, happy customers keep buying your products and recommending them to new potential customers. Unhappy customers cancel contracts, write bad reviews, and generally detract from your business. If that’s the case, how do you make sure you’re delivering results to customers and keeping them satisfied?
Anjoo Rai-Marchant, serial entrepreneur and current Chief Customer and Technology Officer at HighGround, explained her approach to driving results for customers. Ultimately, her years of experience focusing on customer success can be distilled down to three core ideas: experimentation, knowing who to listen to, and designing your business around the right customer.
Hear what Anjoo has to say in this video and read a few of her thoughts below in the post.
How to Ensure Your Startup Delivers Customer Success from Hyde Park Angels on Vimeo.
According to Anjoo, building the infrastructure for repeatable customer success begins at the very first stage of your business. Namely, “you need to know that whatever your product is, it’s solving a real pain point for [target customers] versus something that is nice to have.” This means taking special care to go out into the field and test your idea against a customer base. This experimentation process can validate your idea or product, but it’ll also service new nuances and complexities that help you better understand the true need in the market.
Who you test is just as important as important as what you test. Getting objective results is the main goal, and there’s a very specific group of people who can’t be objective: your friends. As Anjoo put it, “your friends are not good at delivering bad news. They’re going to have a hard time delivering some of that negative feedback which you need to hear as entrepreneur.”
While designing a product to solve a target customers pain in the market is a critical step, so is the way you manage that customer. If you are selling a B2B product to a company, for example, it’s important to focus on more than whether the product is an immediate fit overall. How will you make the actual person buying your product look good? You have to communicate how you’re solving that need and then deliver on what you promise.
The same goes for B2C businesses. You have to make your early-adopters look good. Namely,
“once you have that core group of early-adopters and evangelists they need to know that when they’re giving their word and they’ve told their friends about it, their friends are going to have equally wonderful experiences.” Building that trust and then maintaining it, both with your power users and your larger audience, will dramatically impact your customer satisfaction levels.
About Hyde Park Angels
Hyde Park Angels is transforming early-stage investing by taking a people first approach. By matching our members’ expertise with entrepreneurs’ needs, we help develop top-performing companies that are delivering extraordinary results. Our approach has led us to become the largest and most active angel group in the Midwest.
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