“Ideas are horseshit. Execution is the game”
If you don’t know who Gary Vaynerchuk is, you’re probably not that tapped into the pulse of the Internet business. ‘garyvee’ as he is sometimes known is a serial entrepreneur, investor, public speaker, & author whose sole goal is to get people ‘into the game’ & get them to recognise that executing on ideas, & making it happen for yourself is the best damned thing you can do. If you’re in the software service space, & believe that your competition’s weakness is the ‘soft service’ side of things, why aren’t you executing on it to win?
People (yes even businesses are people) want, nay — ‘demand’ value. I believe we’re past the race to the bottom when it comes to online services. Same as I believe the idea of ‘free’ is also coming near its end as a business goal. Free is a great way to build up your business & get traction, but you’ve gotta have something to keep them there, & ultimately get you paid. Businesses (which most internet services are) have bills to pay, staff to pay & need a way to get investment, which requires a demonstrable ability to provide a return on investment, which is only truly achievable with revenue.
Whether that’s monetising user’s data through intelligence to serve ads, or freemium type services (which is its own bag), what will ultimately prove to be the stickiness factor is soft service. And no, you can’t quote facebook as an example against this — social networks are their own thing. You need to create value, and usefulness is only a part of your value proposition.
I’ve always said, acquisition of customers is easy, keeping them is another. When you watch the above video, you’ll realise this is the killer part of your business in online service delivery. We’ve become used to the increasing availability of services we can swap in & out. And that’s great if you’re a customer. But, if you’re a business providing services, for every customer you lose, you’ve to hope you get two signed up to keep growth going.And if only it was that easy; lose one, gain two. Anyone who looks at the user analytics around churn knows this often is not the pattern.
The video above is five years old. And if you think about where we’ve come in five years since that, much of his abstracts on how we do things have come to pass not because Gary is a savant of Nostradamic proportions. No, this has come to pass as the progression was so transparent. And as Internet based businesses, we’ve somehow drawn a line in the sand that ‘it’s the internet’, & we stopped treating the customers like people. They’ve become ones & zeros, numbers in our analytics around MRR, churn, CPA etc..
To get ahead, we’ve to step up our service game. Get back to some core values around customer service that is the stalwart of part of the majority of even our own transactions out in the world (I refuse to call it the real world, as that somehow implies a devaluation of the Internet’s place in the landscape of our lives).
The amount of online service businesses who still today do not have a status page is staggering despite the number of prolific brands and start-ups that do operate them. Even thick in the reality that service is going to be the real differentiator no matter how good your app is, or how pretty you think your pixels are, or how clever your videos are. Service matters.
Let me repeat that. Service matters. When you’re building your app stack, sure you need to get it adopted. And you want to know the best way to achieve that? Give the best level of service you can. BE proactive. BE transparent. BE out there. And for each of these things, when you’re creating a service portal, make it as ‘everyman’ as you can. Making your service as straight forward and easy as possible to engage with for help is how you’ll win.
Still don’t believe this is true? In the midst of the triple-threat-match of Internet infrastructure as a service between AWS, Microsoft Azure & Google Compute, all the other IaaS providers were continuing to win because they provided great soft service. They knew they couldn’t join the race to the bottom, so they focused on the race the bigger ones avoided (because at their scale, they lose); customer service. Great fucking customer service.
And when we talk to people who operate solid status page services (whether they’re ours or our competitors), every single one of them will tell you the benefits of how having one has helped with their customer service stack & the values to them of retaining customer trust as well as loyalty. People who take a hosted status page service rarely if ever give it up to ‘use twitter or facebook’ instead. No, they double down on them. Do even more with them. Find more ways of increasing the value proposition of them to the people using their services, even in ways beyond the status page’s intent.
We’ve a University who use one of our statushubs to present TA availability to their campus. I’m not kidding. We had a charity use one to let people know the availability of things they were auctioning off (whether something sold or not). It’s pretty damned incredible.
Doubling down on your customer service strategy is the surefire way to win & be able to execute on your ideas for your online business. It’s an amazing way to be better at retention, & also grow word-of-mouth new customers, which is absolutely crucial. Be awesome to your customers. Be awesome at customer service. By all means, keep using your analytics to measure your business — they’re great tools. They’ll help you with understanding the metrics. But, what’s the ROI of ‘giving a crap’?
