Why We Chose to Make Customer Success our Priority

Here at Piktochart, we not only need to focus on our customers; we want to focus on our customers. Without our users, there would be no Piktochart. There’s be no more awesome infographics, no more Pikto-Geeks, and no more inspiring visuals! That’s not a world we want to live in.

Finding the best way for our customers to get the most value out of their Piktochart subscription has been an adventure. From day zero, the wheels in our collective head have been constantly turning, thinking of methods and guidelines to help make our customers successful. The questions that we have been asking ourselves over and over are:

• How do we define success?
• How do we know that people who sign up for Piktochart are satisfied with their decision and gain value from their experience?
• How do we convince them to stay with Piktochart?
• How can we give customers a channel to voice their opinions and ask for support?

Our fantastic product and traditional outreach avenues like blog posts and user messaging are par for the course. It’s the “above and beyond” that we’re aiming for. That’s what led us to creating a team role that focuses entirely on customer success.

What Exactly Is Customer Success?

A couple of years ago, customer success wasn’t even on the radar of SaaS companies. But these days, you can’t mention sales, engineering, or product management without thinking about customer success as well.

In theory, it’s a timeless practice, but it’s super important to SaaS businesses, including Piktochart. Its emergence was the result of the need for high retention rates from the beginning for these fast-growing companies.

Customers pay monthly (or yearly) subscription fees to use products and services. They look at the recurring credit card charges and wonder, “Should I be paying for this?”

This is where our focus on customer success comes in. We want our customers to say, “Yes, I want and need this service. Using it helps me complete my tasks and complete them efficiently. ”

That’s why we’ve tried to stay in touch with users during their onboarding and daily use, listening and taking their feedback to heart. By keeping a finger on customer pulse, we’ve been able to determine their “engagement moments” or milestones.

Engagement, in our opinion, is when our users become invested and are truly getting value out of using Piktochart. Whether they are creating their first infographic or sharing their 100th poster, it means they’ll be nurtured every step of the way to becoming Pikto-pros.

What We Know

The journey from having no experience to becoming a Pikto-pro requires absolute buy-in and focus from our team. Yes, it’s hard work, but from initial introduction to signup and onboarding, we want to encourage our users whenever we can.

We feel like cheerleaders on the sidelines, watching the magic unfold, and we love it! We know that Piktochart is a tool that delivers massive value to our users. Whether they’re creating a newsletter, a social media visual, or a timeline for a history project, it’s clear. We see this on a daily basis.

But we also know that being proactive (rather than reactive) with our users from the moment they sign-up impacts their continued use.

Create Opportunities For Learning

It’s critical to be a part of customer interaction in the early stages because it’s when customers develop their first impressions of the product. We make the most of this crucial moment by coaching our customers and illuminating the value of the tool.

In a sense, we’re laying the foundation for that particular user to have a great experience within the tool. If we don’t, we’ll start to see a drop-off where customers leave forever. That’s not good.

We want to give our customers the guidance they need to use Piktochart and use it well. We understand that there is a bit of a learning curve when using software for the first time. But providing the proper education up front allows a user to take the bull by the horns and ignore the “new technology” intimidation factor.

We’ve started by hosting regular training webinars, offering 1:1 training, and introducing on-screen walkthroughs. All these actions, paired with our ebooks and guides, are creating feature awareness and helping our users “get” how Piktochart works. Ultimately, these actions will help them achieve their goal of creating awesome infographics!

Engage The Customer Early And Often

We’ve tried to determine what Piktochart success means to our customers and how that’s related to why they’re using the tool. In our minds, a successful outcome is when a user creates their first visual story and starts using Piktochart to tackle a wide range of projects. We keep track of where our users are in relation using Intercom (a tool we cannot live without!).

We also use Intercom’s personalized auto-messaging feature to nudge customers towards success milestones like creating their first infographic or downloading, publishing, and sharing their work.

We offer real-time answers to questions (via text or video chat) about features or best practices that users may have about Piktochart. These exercises have been useful to us in understanding where and why some of our customers are dropping off after sign-up.

Another tool we’re using is Wootric, an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey program. This tool asks our users, on a scale of 1–10, how likely they are to recommend Piktochart to friends and colleagues.

Just like the boutique eyewear team at Warby Parker, our goal is to set up a quantitative benchmark around our customer loyalty and Piktochart editor sentiment. This will also establish a feedback loop about what customers like and dislike the most. With this essential feedback, we can hopefully shape our product roadmap and improve our user experience at all phases.

Lessons Learned

You’d may be surprised at how much you might miss with so much to think about in the customer success realm.

If you don’t talk to customers and listen to what they need to achieve their goals, you’ll never be able to discern why exactly they chose your service over the competition. In turn, you’ll never find out what’s preventing them from achieving their goals, and you might miss out on the rollout of a feature that could keep the majority of them coming back again and again.

All in all, we’ve determined that the best way to grow Piktochart is to help our customers grow. If they’re creating graphics that put their stories to paper, we’ll have happy customers. And their success is our success.

For more insight into how we do things at Piktochart (along with a healthy dose of infographic, design, and marketing advice), check out our blog at http://piktochart.com/blog.

Originally published at piktochart.com on November 23, 2015.