Framework for Customer Success — Product Complexity and User Complexity
Every product is different and every product’s users are different. As the customer success industry expands and becomes more socialized within all companies — big or small, old or just started yesterday -, there is a need to better understand how customer success can help a business like yours.
There are two main factors that play into how a customer success function would operate in a company: Product Complexity and User Complexity.
Everything has its nuances, but what customer success ultimately boils down to is the relationship between the company and the customer. Product Complexity represents the intricacies behind the company, while User Complexity represents the idiosyncrasies behind whom you serve. Some are simpler than others are, so as you develop your customer success function and strategy, you should keep these two factors in mind.
What is Product Complexity?
Simply put, Product Complexity is how complex your product is for your customer to use. Here, we want to understand how your users derive value from your product and how much effort it takes to get there. This also includes how intuitive your product is to use.
Having a simpler product doesn’t mean that the customer success role is easy, and similarly, having a very intricate product doesn’t mean that the customer success role is impossible. It just means that the customer success strategy for these two products will look very different. A simple example is that to onboard a new user, simpler products may use in-app tool tips to get the customer started, whereas more complex products may connect the customer with a professional services team.
For example, Salesforce is a clear example of a complex product. It has many functions and features, from allocating leads to your sales team, to generating data reports to check on sales metrics, to hosting a community page where your customers can interact with you. Furthermore, working with Salesforce requires a lot of engineering to properly set up within an organization. After all, that’s why the job market now lists specifically for dedicated “Salesforce Engineers”, “Salesforce Product Managers”, and “Salesforce Administrators.” Lastly, it takes months before the end user can even start to get to know the product, and even more months, if not years, after that for the teams to be fully ramped up and see the value from the initial investment.
On the flip side, UberEats is a good example of a less complex product. Note that this does not mean that the product isn’t complex behind the scenes, but rather that the user-facing functionality is not as complex. On UberEats, customers choose the restaurant they want to order from, what they want to eat, click a button and their order arrives at their doorsteps within an hour (and sometimes less!). To use UberEats, the customer just needs to download the app and voila — they can start browsing all of their meal options. Not long after, the customer will have freshly made food at their doorstep ready to be consumed; the value is derived!
What is User Complexity?
User Complexity here refers to how deeply or emotionally your product impacts your customers. Here, we want to understand how your product integrates into the end users’ lives and the impact that it has on those lives. Companies often forget how emotional (or apathetic) customers can be when deciding to purchase a new product or service, but it is nevertheless a critical component to how customer success teams should approach their role and build out their strategy.
With this reflection, we also want to wean out user expectations of the product. For example, it may be a simple product, but if the user has high expectations for the product versus “if it does the bare minimum that’s fine,” you would want to treat each of these the customer’s experiences differently because they see you differently.
Products in industries that are very personal or close to home tend to have more complex users. For example, Rover, the online marketplace where people can get dog sitters and dog walkers, may not be a very complex product, but is an emotional one. People love their pets and want to make sure that they are getting services from a reputable source that treats their dogs well. If the dog comes back hurt or unhappy in anyway, the owners will become extremely sensitive.
On the other hand, products with very specific use cases, particularly at the workplace, have relatively lower User Complexity. For example, DocSend is a service that provides document tracking functionalities so that you can see how often a document that you send out is opened, viewed, or downloaded by users. While it may dissolve some regular frustrating inconveniences, if a document link failed momentarily, there would not be as much panic as there would be for a disappointed Rover customer. Customers purchase DocSend as a solution to a business need to learn more about their customers’ document habits and the business’ document effectiveness; but it will not elicit as much of an emotional roller coaster as Rover.
How does this fit together?
By understanding your company’s Product Complexity and User Complexity, you can better understand how to focus your customer success team — how the team defines success and how they can bring success to your customers.
When you plot Product Complexity and User Complexity on a two by two matrix, it charts out four customer success team focuses — revolutionize, delight, automate, and simplify.
Let’s break this down a bit more and delve deeper into what each of these mean.
Revolutionize: For companies that are high in both Product and User Complexity, the customer success team’s focus is to “revolutionize” — revolutionize the way that think about the problem that your product will help them solve and help guide them throughout that journey. Your user will have to make significant changes to their day-to-day life to either better understand how their product works with yours or to even use your product properly. By doing so and if it all goes successfully, they will feel the impact at their core and be incredibly triumphant and thankful.
However, because these users are also very emotionally invested, if something goes wrong, they will feel defeated. They will have invested a lot of effort in something that isn’t providing them the value that they wanted to see and they will need heavy support from the customer success team to get them to become product evangelists.
Customer success teams that are focused on “revolutionizing” should focus heavily on the onboarding experience. Not only may they have to introduce something rather radical and perhaps face some opposition from stakeholders, but also they need to cradle the users’ expectations and emotional investments to make sure that the users — both key stakeholders and end users — are indeed set up for success. If things go awry, Customer Success Managers (CSMs) here will need to employ a highly empathetic and helpful attitude to hear out the customer and help them address the issue at hand.
Delight: For companies that are not high in Product Complexity but have high User Complexity, the customer success team’s focus is to “delight” — delight your customers so that they feel valued and taken care of. Your users are trusting you with something dear to them — for example, a pet, their email, or their finances — and so while your product is easy to use and doesn’t need a lot of hand holding, customers here will be extremely sensitive if anything goes awry. On the flip side, users here will also be very receptive and enthusiastic when things go well — for example, a new feature was released, a new product was added to the service, or even that your startup raised another round of funding!
Here, Customer Success Managers will be more focused on the engagement phase of the customer’s journey. It is imperative that you hear out the customers and each of their stories and feedback and demonstrate to them that they are indeed heard. You are dealing with something that is important to them, so they will have suggestions and thoughts (sometimes to the point where you can’t please everyone!).
Automate: For companies that are high in Product Complexity but have low User Complexity, the customer success team’s focus is to “automate” — automate processes that had been headaches for your customer so that they can be more efficient. The user has clearly indicated that there is a significant need for your services and is therefore willing to put in the effort. Your service is most likely going to help free up a lot of time for your customers to do more high priority tasks.
Here, Customer Success Managers will be focused on the onboarding phase of the customer journey. We want to make sure that the customer is all set up and ready to go. Once they are all set and things are in motion, the customer will not need to manage the service as closely as long as it works as planned. They appreciate new updates and functionalities, but primarily want to solve a specific business issue. Customer success managers here will also want to focus on making the renewals process as straightforward and easy as possible for these customers.
Simplify: For companies that have low Product Complexity and low User Complexity, the customer success team’s focus is to “simplify” — simplify your customer’s lives by making things easy to understand and process. Demonstrate value early and then “get out of the way.” Because your product isn’t that complex, you won’t need a lot of upfront effort to get started. However, because you also most likely aren’t the most important vendor of theirs, they won’t spend nor do they want to spend too many brain cycles on your company and your product. While that can be a good thing at times, it also presents a challenge to maintain engagement.
Here, Customer Success Managers will be focused initially on onboarding to ensure clean adoption, but eventually shifting the primary focus to engagement. At times, this will seem more similar to a customer experience focused team where you focus more on product flow enhancements to guide the user instead of working directly with the customer one by one. Customers here tend to use products in this area for a specific purpose, which means that once they’ve derived the first value; if the pain point doesn’t come up again or has mostly been resolved, customer success will have the challenge of maintaining engagement, keeping customers educated on underutilized features, and exciting customers to become advocates for their company.
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The above was an excerpt from my book The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success, available now on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Startups-Guide-Customer-Success-Champion/dp/1641371889
I hope to help push the conversation around what customer centricity means for our businesses. No more talk — we need action!
If you’d like to get in contact with me on social media and learn more, feel free to message me on LinkedIn. Always down to nerd out about customer success :)
