Do’s And Don’ts Of A Customer Success Pro — Jeff Vincent from Wistia
As part of our Customer Success Series, jeff vincent from Wistia shared with us tips on how to handle Customer Success and delight customers.
Read the first and second episode, featuring Gregory Lefort CEO Azendoo and Chase Clemons Support Pro at Basecamp .
Jeff is currently Direct of Product Management, after 4 years of being in charge of the Customer Success at Wistia a very cool startup that provides smart video hosting for B2Bs.
Since the very beginning, the company has always been 120% dedicated to providing the best experience and value to its customers. Wistia’s CEO Chris Savage instilled a customer-centric culture in the whole company, by implementing “all-hand support”: everyone had to deal with customer support. As the company scaled up, Customer Success operations passed into the fold of Jeff Vincent, without losing sights of driving value to the customers.
Do: Put yourself in your customers’ shoes
First things first, to really understand our customers and their pain points: we use our own product. We love making videos to share our company culture. Videos are part of who we are.
Don’t: Throw Tech Jargon at Your Customers
To be really efficient, a customer success team needs to fully understand the product and its tricks, and communicate it to the users based on his or her level of understanding. Our product is rather techie, thus our customer success team is composed of tech-minded people, who are able to to connect to the tech level of the customer and to answer his or her questions directly, or figure out when to escalate.
Do: Show that you care
Your users are human beings just like you and me. Either a paying customer or a “free trialer”, they are still using your product and deserve to do it right.
However, caring takes time, hence the following corollary.
Don’t: Answer to everyone, anytime and anywhere
We figured out that most of our support happens during office hours EST. Yes, we could offer 24×7 support to everyone, but it would imply either harsh constraints on our customer success team or outsourcing it for nights and weekends. And that doesn’t fit with our culture.
We settled in for a compromise: we do have a 24×7 emergency email address, but for all demands that don’t fall under this category, we will reply by the next business day. And actually, we get less than 2% of our emails through this emergency channel, which is very reasonable.
