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Creating a Customer-Driven Company
At Performable, we love working with our customers.
From day one, whether you’re an intern (which we’re looking for) or the CEO, everyone takes part in customer support. In fact, the ability to empathize and empower a customer is one of the most common skills among our small but tight-knit team.
Here are 4 customer-driven principles we follow:
1. Every Customer is Your Best Customer
The first rule of Performable customer service is to truly believe that every customer is your best customer. David, our CEO, and the rest of our team have done a great job of making “WOW” part of our every day vocabulary. A majority of the meetings here always revert back to ways to “WOW” our customers with new features, better insights or faster service. Customers can tell when you’re being genuine and when you’re taking shortcuts, so always deliver your best.
2. Understand Your Customers’s Goals
We’ve found it’s impossible to empower our customers without properly understanding their goals. That’s why we routinely check in with them and confirm that we’re trying to solve the same problems they are. When this alignment is off, we serve them less than ideally. When we pay close attention to this and align them correctly, our customers are much more happy.
3. Start Your Customers Off on the Right Foot
Getting started with new software is a daunting process for many people. At Performable, that means our onboarding process needs to be exhaustive so we find out exactly what people need before we start. We also recognize that driving continuous improvement is an ongoing challenge and so we know that it will always be a big part of our focus.
4. Be Proactive
Rather than waiting until a customer contacts you, be predictive and reach out to them in advance. Elias and the rest of the development team invest a huge amount of time building a rock-solid platform and are always proactive about fixing customer issues. Being able to proactively help customers fix issues really helps to create happy customers.
5. Don’t Be Afraid of Relationships
Connect with your customers on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. If their company has a newsletter that you don’t mind getting, sign up for it. Try out their products/services and recommend them to people you think could use them. I subscribed to a few customer newsletters and always make a point to email them about untagged URLs or ways to optimize a landing page. Be your customers’ biggest fan.
There are a ton of other things that have come along with this approach. To me, the most important part of being a customer-facing company is that you must remain open to feedback. If there’s any way you think Performable can be even better at customer service, let us know by calling (888) 268-6035.
