On Saving Customers from Churning…
To continue the theme from yesterday: to what extent does a software vendor need to fix or improve their customer’s internal issues, just to keep their business?
When I was at Optimizely, we’d see a pattern: a customer would implement the software themselves or use an inexperienced partner, and the result would be a mess. Our software wasn’t any more difficult to use than any of our competitors, but it was enterprise software, and it required some skill and experience.
These customers would have a bad experience and often churn, and we could always step back and say, “Well, it wasn’t OUR fault…” And that might have been objectively true, but we still lost a customer.
We’re more insulated from that at Staffbase since there’s no technical implementation (no “Blank Slate Syndrome”), but we’re still dependent on our customers having at least a minimal internal comms process. If their process is bad, then our software sometimes looks bad by proxy. Either they actively deflect undeserved blame onto us, or they come to the conclusion that they’re “just not ready” for a platform like ours and they need to work some things out internally (which they rarely do).
What responsibility do we have to help here? What opportunity do we have?
When you’re a software vendor, do you drift into consulting as a business development (preservation?) tool? Optimizely very much tried to say out of implementation work and defer to their partner network, but when we saw how some inexperienced or reckless shops would absolutely butcher our software, it was really tempting to try and wedge our way into that part of the project.
Most vendors have “Customer Success,” but that’s usually centered around how the customers use the software and how they interact with the vendor. What if the customer knows how to use the software just fine, but their issues are way, way deeper than that? If they have some internal civil war which is leading to a bad experience – however many levels removed – they’re still at risk of churning, no matter how good your software might be.
When a customer is flailing, and they represent a churn risk because of their own issues, do you step in to help them? Do you recommend (or even subsidize) a partner engagement to try to get them turned around? Do you just hope and pray that they work their stuff out?
Like yesterday, no easy answers. I suppose sometimes you try to help, sometimes you lick your wounds. But the helpless feeling never goes away and can be really frustrating.
Reminds me of the opening line from Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”